Wow this is so cool!

How your email finds me

Is space & time coding in entorhinal cortex interchangeable? Cells switching between space & time as needed by task? For some cells yes, and other no: Spatial and temporal representations are organized along a stable coding gradient in the medial entorhinal cortex www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Astrocytes again asking us to pay them more attention 👇🧠

Diversity of neural responses enables high-dimensional representations #neuroskyence www.nature.com/articles/s41...

This is really cool 👇 "for Einstein, the attempt to grasp the world consists in the search not for the right words but for the right picture, a picture that would order other pictures, thereby becoming a dominant ‘concept’ capable of providing shape and structure" www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

In some circles I'm not sure much has changed 🤣

Out today on @nature.com! Connecting neural specialization, population geometry, and their functional implications across the cortical hierarchy. So grateful for this beautiful and fun collaboration with @shuqiw.bsky.social, S Muscinelli, L Paninski, and @stefanofusi.bsky.social!

New paper in Imaging Neuroscience by Alessandra Pizzuti, Omer Faruk Gulban, et al: Multimodal laminar characterization of visual areas along the cortical hierarchy doi.org/10.1162/IMAG...

First keynote on the opening day of #AS4SAN2026 with the wonderful Lena Oestrich presenting The Brain on Psychedelics honestly this is my 3rd conference in two weeks so feeling like I don't need LSD to hallucinate right now 🤣

The default network is often thought to interfere with the selective deployment of attention—but our new @pnas.org paper shows a different story… 👉 Find the paper here: doi.org/10.1073/pnas... 1/🧵

Excited to share this work, led by Andrew Zimnik and Sherry An, from @mchurchland.bsky.social and my labs! www.cell.com/neuron/fullt... 1/2

Stunning evening last night at the @isreorg.bsky.social conference dinner at Brisbane's Customs House. (Lucky me sitting with the wonderful @arvidkappas.bsky.social & @nicolenelson.bsky.social - together with our table friends we managed 2nd prize for the after-dinner trivia 🤗) #ISRE2026

Preprint alert! 🚀 Spontaneous eye blinks are often treated as EEG artefacts. We show they can serve as temporal markers of internal attention, aligning with moments of attentional focusing in working memory. Check it out:

Noooooooooo not Sam Neil!!!! ☹️

Super pleased to present my research into the multidimensional representations of naturalistic facial attributes today at #ISRE2026 @isreorg.bsky.social 🤩 paper coming sooooooon

Function is not tied to specific brain structures or time scales. The brain is not just a set of parts that each “do their own job”. Instead, networks are multifunctional and active across different speeds simultaneously. doi.org/10.1073/pnas... #neuroscience

Proud to have organised & hosted the ECR Social for #ISRE3026 last night! Great turn out from our passionate emerging trainees. Huge thanks to the committee for supporting our event 😍 @isreorg.bsky.social

Technology and Emotions Pre-Conference at #ISRE2026 was huge fun - led by @arvidkappas.bsky.social & @socialneuro.bsky.social we discussed research priorities for a world shaped increasingly by AI @isreorg.bsky.social

Super excited to share new preprint from our amazing PhD student @ale-dabr.bsky.social, showing that people’s social network properties are embodied in low-level social interaction dynamics, modulating who leads, who follows, & who encodes another’s movements more! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

AI would have us all behaving like badly trained pantomime actors with only a pre-defined number of expressions and emotion states which are only ever about ourselves 🙄

So who's in town for #ISRE2026? If so, welcome to Brisbane!! I'm on the local committee so come find me on Whova or DM me as I'd love to connect with other Bluesky friends. And if you're an ECR, come along to our social on Sunday night! 🤗 @isreorg.bsky.social

My reply to @liadmudrik.bsky.social et al.'s proposal that we should reengineer @neddo.bsky.social's famous phenomenal/access distinction.

Hate to say it but the performing arts depends on the same kinds of people too Useful to remember that the reason we gravitate to such fields is the promise of independent intellectual & creative freedom to study people at a safe distance 🫣

For tractability, we spend more time on our experiments than we do testing the assumptions upon which they are built. Yet probing these assumptions can take us to interesting & provocatively useful places. Tightly abstracting intelligence may have made it easier to study, but harder to understand

Excited to read this. I'm currently working on a number of projects where this approach could be very useful - the idea that experts make more efficient use of latent representations makes perfect sense. #neuroskyence

Post-conference recovery hotpot.

are there illusionists (re: philosophy of consciousness) in New Zealand / Australia ?

You love teaching psychology and London? Then we have the perfect position for you: Associate Professor (Teaching), Experimental Psychology, @uclpals.bsky.social. Your role: Develop a flexible portfolio of psychology undergraduate modules for Non-Psychology students www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DSB720/a...

Now out in PNAS with @jaeyoungson.bsky.social, Alice Xia, @apaxon.bsky.social & @orielf.bsky.social. Medial temporal lobe encodes predictive representations of people's real-world social networks which afford them key advantages in social navigation. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... 🧵

The massive 7T-fMRI Natural Scenes Dataset (NSD) has been extended to Neuropixels recordings in macaques! Exciting resource for inter-species comparisons by Li et al. @natneuro.nature.com. www.nature.com/articles/s41... Also nice News & Views by Kay and colleagues! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Humans and other animals, including other primates, birds, fish, and insects, share flexible preferences for curvature, visual structure, biological motion, and color. They help orient behavior toward relevant aspects of the world: food sources, social partners, and places. doi.org/10.1016/J.CO...

Past experiences shape current selection. But when and how strong are past and present targets represented in the brain? In our newest paper, we show that past and present search targets are concurrently represented in the brain. Out now in @plosbiology.org doi.org/10.1371/jour... #neuroscience

Indicators -- especially theory-derived ones -- of consciousness simply aren't enough. Signatures aren't enough either. We need a whole new evidential and inferential framework. My group is building one. Sneak peak roadmap paper, currently in revision so stay tuned for v2: osf.io/preprints/ps...

I have always believed that ideas from basic systems neuroscience could eventually help people. But for years that felt more like hope than reality. But look! This is one of the most personally satisfying papers my lab has produced because we’re getting there. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 🧪🧵 1/

Sharing before I make coffee so make sure you've all finished arguing by the time I get back? #neuroskyence

The most interesting part here is not that bees 'have inner lives' but that their behaviour is contextually dependent. It's important to remember that facial information flexibly tracks both inner & outer interactions in ways we still can't describe in humans, let alone bees

Internal state dynamically gates task-specific attractor dynamics in prefrontal cortex www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... #neuroscience

Omg!!! I won an award for best presentation at @expsyanz.bsky.social for my research "robust categorical organisation of face space in ageing using naturalistic faces"! #neuroskyence #apcvepc36

New open dataset out in Scientific Data 🚨 We are releasing BBBD: the Brain, Body, and Behavior Dataset. Paper: www.nature.com/articles/s41... Work with @parralab.org

Looking forward to the conference welcome!!! @expsyanz.bsky.social #APCVEPC26

While this essay is centred on mathematics, the gist is the same for any human conceptual thought facing AI Intelligence is process, path-walking, culture, collective, accretive #neuroskyence davidbessis.substack.com/p/the-fall-o...

We've used paper and pen to assess Neuro for Psychology tutorials for a year now. Students complete a worksheet at the end of every class based on what we've taught them in that class. No digital devices allowed for taking notes. Just old school brains... It works!! plus it's a pleasure to mark

"This was environmental collapse writing itself directly into human biological systems." www.earthisland.org/journal/inde...

Did the evolution of consciousness begin with smell? I have a piece arguing it might well have done (in response to @smfleming.bsky.social and @matthiasmichel.bsky.social's recent vision-centric picture). Free to read here: drive.google.com/file/d/1ZhrI...

I'm saying it, again: facial gestures are not direct read outs of hidden emotion states. Sure, you might agree that a chair is "something you sit on" but that doesn't mean 'sitting' is the only thing a chair represents.

Lovely to see the full range of excellent commentaries on our BBS article with @matthiasmichel.bsky.social, together with our response, now out: Target article: www.cambridge.org/core/journal... Commentaries: www.cambridge.org/core/journal... Our response: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Really excited about this work with the awesome Will de Cothi & Sarah Shipley, just 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

as usual, maslow was wrong. people create art when they're dying, starving, freezing, not only when they're comfy and have all their needs met. because creating art is a fundamental human function. it's a way to say "i was here" and "i saw, thought, felt something" llms cannot see, think, or feel

This paper is cool. The conclusion seems a little obvious (that learning makes individuals different), but at the same time, lovely to see it quantified so clearly: elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre... 🧪