🚨Our NeurIPS 2025 competition Mouse vs. AI is LIVE! We combine a visual navigation task + large-scale mouse neural data to test what makes visual RL agents robust and brain-like. Top teams: featured at NeurIPS + co-author our summary paper. Join the challenge! Whitepaper: arxiv.org/abs/2509.14446

What drives behavior in living organisms? And how can we design artificial agents that learn interactively? 📢 To address these, the Sensorimotor AI Journal Club is launching the "RL Debate Series"👇 w/ @elisennesh.bsky.social, @noreward4u.bsky.social, @tommasosalvatori.bsky.social 🧵[1/5] 🧠🤖🧠📈

Finding correlates of the same signal in different brain areas is not evidence against specialisation, it is evidence for interconnection. When I flush my toilet, the level in the tank and the flow rate in the supply pipe become perfectly correlated. Yet these toilet areas have distinct functions.

Very happy to announce that our paper “Sensory Horizons and the Functions of Conscious Vision” is now out as a target article in BBS!! @smfleming.bsky.social and I present a new theory of the evolution and functions of visual consciousness. Article here: doi.org/10.1017/S014.... A (long) thread 🧵

• When: 📅 First Thursday of every month, 9:00-11:00 AM Pacific Time (starting August 7, 2025) • Where: 📍 BWW, Berkeley (breakfast provided!) + 💻🌎 Also on Zoom (Here's the sign up form again: forms.gle/o5DXD4WMdhTg...) 🧵[4/5]

Announcing the new "Sensorimotor AI" Journal Club — please share/repost! w/ Kaylene Stocking, Tommaso Salvatori, and @elisennesh.bsky.social Sign up link: forms.gle/o5DXD4WMdhTg... More details below 🧵[1/5] 🧠🤖🧠📈

Any good neuroscience/NeuroAI discord servers I should know about? I feel like the neuroscience town square on bsky is a bit of a ghost town

I agree with @hakwan.bsky.social that it's great for trainees to hear critical questions at meetings. These have disappeared, especially in the US. Maybe it's the drop in NIH funding rates in the 2000s. People don't want enemies. The worst are the meetings hosted by funders: people just nod & smile.

A sobering assessment of consciousness studies from Hakwan Lau: "the label ’consciousness’ may eventually serve little other function but to signal that the associated studies are subpar and overinterpreted compared to mainstream cognitive neuroscience research"

This paper is the result of >20 yrs of hard work by talented students, postdocs and collaborators, but none more than my co-author Ren Ng and his team in EECS. 1/n Novel color via stimulation of individual photoreceptors at population scale | Science Advances www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

In the United States of America.

Academic Skyers: I am compiling a list of policies and statements from various universities about how they are handling the "pause" in terms of stopping expenditures (or not). Please respond to this post with your institution and materials. THANK YOU!

Per an NIH source: “Discussions with colleagues have suggested that if the universities all come together and raise hell about the delays to funding caused by not holding meetings, that might move the needle. From every state. There are well-funded universities in red states that will be impacted.”

Wikipedia is one of the last major bastions of verified information. Which, of course, is why the oligarchs want to destroy it. You can donate to them here. donate.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?...

12 years in the making! I remember having long chats with Michael Oliver about this paper in 2012. Those are still some of the most comprehensive V4 recordings out there. So happy this is finally out.

This is largely due to NIH funding. And when you look even further back than that, it is stunning for much improvement there has been in treatment and surviveability.

Recent studies found pronounced neuromodulation in the early visual cortex due to locomotion and spontaneous body movements in mice but not in non-human primates. We reconciled this dichotomy in this new open-access feature review @cp-trendsneuro.bsky.social www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Eero Simoncelli on the geometry of the distribution of natural images

Horace Barlow, by all accounts, was thinking about 30 years ahead of his time. Here is a transcript of the opening keynote I gave at a symposium honoring Horace's scientific legacy: markusmeister.com/2024/12/14/h....

It is sad to see authors not being able to present their work at #NeurIPS2024 because of visa issues. But some authors went above and beyond. Here is @hadivafaii.bsky.social tele-presenting his work with an impressive setup (ipad, mic, speaker, holder, battery). Well done sir!

I think we need to stop asking about the next generation of scientists and figure out how to retain the current generation of scientists. It take a long time to gain expertise and, in the current system, most of that expertise leaves academic research.

If you are a Julia user you should be aware of this: yuri.is/not-julia/