How does the human brain extract abstract structure from experience? We show that sensory-independent relational representations emerge in mPFC over several days. Work with @mgarvert.bsky.social and @behrenstimb.bsky.social now out in @currentbiology.bsky.social: www.cell.com/current-biol...

This paper is an absolutely beautiful combination of a deep set of cognitive ideas, a super creative task, a surprisingly impressive behaviour, and an elegant modelling framework. One of my favourite things in the last year.

Dimensionality reduction is how the brain acquires knowledge. Cool new paper from the late, great, Mark Stokes. www.nature.com/articles/s41... #neuroscience

Really excited about this work with the awesome Will de Cothi & @shipleysj.bsky.social, out in Nature Reviews Neuroscience. We propose acetylcholine is an analogue of dopamine — tracking not reward prediction errors but state-transition prediction errors. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41583-026-01058-w

Our new paper is out this week in Nature Neuroscience! www.nature.com/articles/s41... We built a BCI that works with the brain's natural geometry — and we found that people could learn to play a video game with their brains in <1 hr of training. This efficiency is groundbreaking & here's why:

Really enjoyed reading this paper by Pereira et al. Very smart design and optimization of a complex maze that tests the use of 'cognitive maps' during planning. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Two brain circuits. Same learning problem. Shared learning outcomes. Different dynamical implementations. Our work shows that learning is not a single canonical solution but can emerge through distinct population dynamics shaped by circuit architecture. Excited to share our latest preprint! 🧵1/12

Ever wonder how your brain navigates the real world? 🧠 Most spatial navigation studies use flat, 2D mazes. But the real world is hilly, irregular, and bumpy! ⛰️ Our new paper in #ScienceAdvances asked a simple question: How does the brain map uneven terrain? 📄 doi.org/10.1126/scia... 🧵👇️️️ 1/

Hillscape cells: Hippocampal place cells map terrain geometry independently of behavior #neuroskyence @roddy-grieves.bsky.social Eleonore Duvelle and Jeff Taube: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Spontaneous problem-solving in bumble bees. Amazing work by the bees who were put in these puzzling situations by @akshayebhambore.bsky.social in the lab of @olliloukola.bsky.social www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

A hackathon reveals that disagreement in neuroscience runs deeper than most researchers suspect—even in electrophysiology, a field that prides itself on hard data, write @mattiachini.bsky.social and Gaelle Chapuis. #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/reproducibil...

New review with Cheng Xue at U Chicago @cxue.bsky.social in Trends [email protected]! We discuss the neural geometry of task-dependent computation: disentangled encoding, RNN modeling, switch cost, etc. www.cell.com/trends/neuro...

🚨 New paper in @nature.com We asked why two hippocampal areas with very different anatomy, CA3 and CA1, often seem to code space so similarly? By recording bats flying up to 200m, we found that the difference was hidden by scale! www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🧵 1/11

Our new paper is out in Neuron! www.cell.com/neuron/fullt... How does the brain decide how much of the past to use when making decisions? In rapidly changing environments, recent experiences matter more; in stable environments, longer histories are useful.

🚨🧠 Our paper is out! We introduce a simple computational model that generates macroscopic, long-timescale dynamics as seen in large-scale neural recordings. #neuroscience #dynamics @marius10p.bsky.social @zhong-lin.bsky.social @hhmijanelia.bsky.social Link: go.nature.com/4tRNjIu

Researchers have long searched for the neural circuit underlying locomotion. Now they’ve found it in flies. By @natmesanash.bsky.social #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/systems-neur...

New paper from the lab. Using longitudinal ca imaging, activity-dependent tagging and optogenetics, we show that newly allocated fear engram neurons in amygdala undergo a brief period of coordinated “offline reverberation” immediately after learning. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Where, exactly, does learning happen in the brain? Out today in @nature.com, we identify a synaptic locus of birdsong learning and show that the circuit can be tuned to make birds learn faster - but at a cost. Read on👇 #neuroskyence 🧪 #prattle 💬 #bioacoustics Shareable link: rdcu.be/fiyrS

Really pleased that this work with @dudman.bsky.social is now out in Neuron: A global dopaminergic learning rate enables adaptive foraging across many options

Really excited to see this in print!

Prediction without understanding sustained astronomy through a thousand years of epicycles, writes @tonyzador.bsky.social. AI is now offering neuroscience the same deal. #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/machine-lear...

Huge congrats to @snierwetberg.bsky.social , David (not on BSky), and @maxwellxchen.bsky.social for their paper! They developed a mouse task in which relational structure can be isolated from cue identity and reward statistics. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 🧠📈🧪 #neuroskyence @uclnpp.bsky.social

Our work on how neural circuits in the cerebellum encode prior probabilities led by Julius Koppen is out now in Nature Neuroscience www.nature.com/articles/s41... Big thanks to Julius Koppen & the whole team! And dedicated to all of us who found inspiration in Bayesian theories of the brain!

When it comes to sensory processing, cortex should not get all the credit... In olfaction, a key challenge is identifying odors regardless of concentration. Our new paper in @natneuro.nature.com shows how the olfactory bulb performs this crucial computation before signals even reach the cortex.

How do social netowrks form and evolve? We looked at a bunch of bats to explore this! doi.org/10.1111/nyas...

Want a dataset to test ideas on neural basis of decision making or how areas interact as we make choices? Check out our data published today @rudebecklab.bsky.social. >16,000 single neurons from 22 anatomically confirmed areas in macaques performing a decision task. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Excited to share our recent review, which highlights algorithmic and implementational degeneracy in studies of cognition: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Thrilled to share our new paper, which shows that the relative timing of cholinergic and dopamine release dynamically gates whether dopamine acts as an RPE for in vivo plasticity and reinforcement learning. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Really bummed that my student Abhishek and I can't attend #Cosyne26. He was going to present a poster today on a new kind of place-value mapping in the orbitofrontal cortex (poster # 2-153). If you are curious (and were planning to visit the poster), please feel free to reach out.

How does the brain build a memory? A common assumption is that the neurons activated during an experience collectively form the memory engram. In our new Nature Neuroscience paper (finally out!), we show that this is not the case. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I tracked every keyword in 22 years of Cosyne abstracts to map how computational neuroscience evolved — from Bayesian brains to neural manifolds to LLMs — and where it's heading next.

We’re looking for a new Research Tech! Our research tech is heading to graduate school (very exciting!), which means we’re recruiting someone new to join our team. The position involves hands-on neuroscience research in a collaborative environment. brandeis.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/Jobs/job/Bra...

Striatum-wide dopamine encodes trajectory errors separated from value www.nature.com/articles/s41... #neuroscience

Orbitofrontal cortex drives predictive filtering of sensory responses www.nature.com/articles/s41... #neuroskyence

As body-augmenting technologies become more common, it is important to understand how the brain decides what counts as "the body", and how that changes over time. My first postdoc paper 🦾 now out in @elife.bsky.social 👇

Human hippocampal theta–gamma coupling coordinates sequential planning during navigation Impressive study from Dan Bush's Lab at UCL: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

A half-century old question may have its final answer. Using high-resolution #Mini2P microscopes, we find no evidence of local topography in #PlaceCells. Place fields of neighbouring cells are no more similar than those of randomly selected cells. 🧠🗺️ Out now in @pnas.org www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

With this one in print, I think I finally earned that PhD... 😅 Presented for the first time at the cosyne when the world ended (March 2020). I'll bring over a summary thread from twitter when it was still twitter... www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Very excited to post our paper led by @daburke.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41... where we uncover a simple mathematical rule underlying how brains learn that a cue predicts a reward. 1/26

Our paper is out in @natneuro.nature.com! www.nature.com/articles/s41... We develop a geometric theory of how neural populations support generalization across many tasks. @zuckermanbrain.bsky.social @flatironinstitute.org @kempnerinstitute.bsky.social 1/14

I made a map of 3.4 million Bluesky users - see if you can find yourself! bluesky-map.theo.io I've seen some similar projects, but IMO this seems to better capture some of the fine-grained detail

"..hippocampal-prefrontal systems represent emotion concepts in a map-like way at multiple levels of abstraction.." Map-like representations of emotion knowledge in hippocampal-prefrontal systems by @yumengma.bsky.social and @pkragel.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Hybrid neural–cognitive models reveal how memory shapes human reward learning www.nature.com/articles/s41...

An updated version of the following paper is now available on bioRxiv: Early spatial and contextual coding deficits in hippocampal CA1 precede performance decline in an Alzheimer's disease model. Yimei Li, Mary Ann Go, Hualong Zhang, Simon R Schultz. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

The hippocampal map has its own attentional control signal! Our new study reveals that theta #sweeps can be instantly biased towards behaviourally relevant locations. See 📹 in post 4/6 and preprint here 👉 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 🧵(1/6)

With some trepidation, I'm putting this out into the world: gershmanlab.com/textbook.html It's a textbook called Computational Foundations of Cognitive Neuroscience, which I wrote for my class. My hope is that this will be a living document, continuously improved as I get feedback.

I love papers that summarize what we know versus don't about a thing (most often via a model) and lead to clarity about what's unknown. Three cheers to @fabienvinckier.bsky.social et al for this paper that does exactly in a space with much too little clarity: mood! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Our new paper (with @biotay.bsky.social) is out and on the cover story of @currentbiology.bsky.social !!!! Veronika, a Carinthian mountain cow flexibly uses a “multi-purpose tool” to scratch herself. A video and more information will follow in the comments. www.cell.com/current-biol...

Please spread the word🔊My lab is looking to hire two international postdocs. If you want to do comp neuro, combine machine learning and awesome math to understand neural circuit activity, then come work with us! Bonn is such a cool place for neuroscience now, you don't want to miss out.