I started doing "Zone 2 cardio" recently, and it seems too good to be true. I can walk uphill on a treadmill, with almost zero exertion or discomfort, while reading papers or watching netflix, and it will improve my stamina more than a grueling run? It's a little hard to believe

This is a really interesting and provocative paper. Down with brain areas!

New Perspective from myself, Sarah Heilbronner and @myoo.bsky.social . “Rethinking the centrality of brain areas in understanding functional organization” in Nature Neuroscience. 🧵 rdcu.be/eVZ1A

Sequences are everywhere! In every brain region. And are written in stone. Invariant Activity Sequences Across the Mouse Brain. Out today, by Célian Bimbard, with @kenneth-harris.bsky.social. Based on data by Célian and by @intlbrainlab.bsky.social. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

An interesting article from The Atlantic about what's going on at the NIH (gift link below): www.theatlantic.com/health/2025/...

It’s horrifying that the NIH director’s collaborators are publishing opinions as uninformed and flat out stupid as this. Let’s save American science by removing incentives for foreign researchers to come here! Science isn’t competitive enough! Underreliance on standardized testing is the problem!

Bichan Wu (@bichanw.bsky.social) & I wrote a tutorial paper on Reduced Rank Regression (RRR) — the statistical method underlying "communication subspaces" from Semedo et al 2019 — aimed at neuroscientists. arxiv.org/abs/2512.12467

happy holidays

New preprint from the lab! A frontal motor circuit for economic decisions and actions: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... We use a novel task in mice, cortex-wide imaging and optogenetics, NPX recording and modelling to reveal a circuit mechanism that transforms abstract decisions to spatial actions.

Dimensionality reduction may be the wrong approach to understanding neural representations. Our new paper shows that across human visual cortex, dimensionality is unbounded and scales with dataset size—we show this across nearly four orders of magnitude. journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...

immigrants score the lowest on tests, but they also take all our jobs, while at the same time taking all the welfare and buying all the homes

Completely agree. And if I can make a self-promoting plug here, we have a nice table in this paper trying to separate some of these ideas out. The brain is very information-efficient (bits/ATP), while still being very expensive in energy consumption (ATP/sec). www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Soapbox time: the problem with metabolic efficiency arguments in neuroscience is that they often confuse energy efficiency with energy expenditure. Biological systems are optimized for energy efficiency, but that does NOT imply they are optimized for low energy expenditure 🧵 1/

Watching children’s Xmas movies has prompted me to consider the similarities between The Polar Express and Bioshock

First paper from the lab is now online @natneuro.nature.com ! We mapped injury induced enhancers in the mouse CNS and decoded their sequence architecture. Little 🧵 rdcu.be/eSQi1

Brilliant

"I say we take off and nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."

Y’all are reading this paper in the wrong way. We love to trash dominant hypothesis, but we need to look for evidence against the manifold hypothesis elsewhere: This elegant work doesn't show neural dynamics are high D, nor that we should stop using PCA It’s quite the opposite! (thread)

Re: recent studies about neural coding being high-dimensional, and I thought I'd contribute our recent preprint: www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-1... @eliezyer.bsky.social and I will do a full thread on this when the paper comes out, but his work shows it's (as usual) a little more complicated 🧵

Our lab is looking for a postdoc! We have interesting projects and cutting-edge techniques such as Neuropixels Opto, Light Beads Microscopy and more. We would be delighted to receive your application. Deadline is 25 November 2025. More info here: www.ucl.ac.uk/cortexlab/po...

On the event of James Watson's death, I highly recommend this 2023 commentary from @matthewcobb.bsky.social and Nathaniel Comfort with crucial new insights into the discovery of the double helix. (And also check out Cobb's brand new biography of Francis Crick) www.nature.com/articles/d41...

I watched this a bunch of times, trying to figure out wtf could be going through RFK Jr’s head. As much as I detest the guy, the only logical conclusion I can reach is that he was going to get help

The NIH institute director firing last Friday is very bad. I made a video explainer about why. Stay for last post, w link to @science.org story from @jocelynkaiser.bsky.social 1/4 🧪

I made a video about the shutdown, and why this government worker won’t be a pawn. When the president and Supreme Court are both acting lawlessly, Congress must stand up and stop it. US science is collapsing and Congress needs to act. 🧪 Full video here: www.instagram.com/reel/DP1tXXE...

Nolan was the developer of the SNT TMS protocol, the most promising new treatment for depression there is. It’s a real tragedy

A thought-provoking piece in Nature Neuroscience by many neuroscience colleagues: "Science must break its silence to rebuild public trust". Lots to think about here. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

So I get that a Neuroscientist Couldn’t Understand a Microprocessor, and TBH I’m ok with that. But could a neuroscientist understand a deep RNN? Because that seems like a more pressing issue. *assuming you think the brain operates through the parallel activity of many connected input/output units

Anyone interested in optics needs to check out this wild story of how those gigantic photomultiplier tubes were made: www.hamamatsu.com/jp/en/why-ha...

It can be very easy for people who have never professionally sat with people (and their families) who experience the devastation of mental illness to pontificate about its existence and treatment from an armchair.

Look at the size of this photomultiplier tube in the Nobel Prize museum. Imagine doing two photon imaging with one of those!

It makes me sad there is an entire generation that has not seen Office Space

Language is how other people convey their thoughts to us, so we are naturally prone to take language as evidence of thought. But evolutionarily, thought is much older and deeper than language

I’m pleased to share our new paper, “Hippocampal ripple diversity organizes neuronal reactivation dynamics in the offline brain”, out in @cp-neuron.bsky.social ! With @vitorlds.bsky.social and David Dupret, we show that diversity in ripple current profiles shapes reactivation dynamics

I’m super excited to finally put my recent work with @behrenstimb.bsky.social on bioRxiv, where we develop a new mechanistic theory of how PFC structures adaptive behaviour using attractor dynamics in space and time! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Too late, Batman. Once this Tylenol floods the city's water supply, my wiki won't run out of editors ever again

🛑 Attention researchers who train freely-moving rodents! Jess Breda and I developed a protocol for training center-port nose fixation 61% faster than a previous curriculum while keeping violation rates low. Preprint here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

I was texting someone about the Tylenol/autism announcement, and for the first time, I accidentally typed “ducking” and my phone successfully autocorrected it to “fucking”

Some good news, which seems rare lately: I was promoted to Associate Professor!

Thrilled to share that our work is now published in Science! ✨ We found a preference for visual objects in the mouse spatial navigation system where they dynamically refine head-direction coding. In short, objects boost our inner compass! 🧭 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... 🧵1/

::slowly stands while clapping::

I’ve always found this type of snobbery weird. “I’m better than you because I’m a superior consumer of other people’s greatness”

This is easily the most hilarious yet devastatingly accurate scientific takedown I have ever read

My postdoc Hung’s main PhD paper is out in Neuron! Keep an eye on this guy; there will be many great things to come

This is why I object to the addiction field’s push to replace “relapse” with the allegedly-less-stigmatizing euphemism “resuming use.” It conflates controlled and uncontrolled use, implicitly promoting lifelong abstinence as the only road to recovery www.nytimes.com/2025/08/14/o...

A summary of NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya's comments during his visit to UAB today for a town hall style presentation: -Important for scientific work addressing our nation's health problems to be done in the same communities where those problems are concentrated

This is going to be Windows 8 all over again

Related to our previous post- if you had a grant terminated, Pro Publica wants to hear from you. Your work was funded because it was good, important science meant to help Americans. Reach out, and make your voice heard. www.propublica.org/getinvolved/...

Excited to announce that my first postdoc paper is now online! Links: www.nature.com/articles/s41... rdcu.be/eAcN7 In it, we examine the perennial question: what changes in the brain when learning a new motor skill? Read more below to find out 👇

I still get chills Meet Mike *30+ years severe depression *first hospitalized @ 13y *20 meds *3 rounds of ECT *2 near-fatal suicide attempts Mike felt joy for the first time in decades after we turned on his new brain pacemaker or PACE see videos, read paper, follow thread doi.org/10.31234/osf...