Hello world! 👋 We’re Minds, Machines, and Brains (MMB) 👤🤖🧠 a new open access journal from @mitpress.bsky.social exploring the principles of intelligence and cognition across natural and artificial minds. Submissions open this Fall! 🔗 direct.mit.edu/mmb

How do you "see" with electric eyes? How does collective behavior emerge from individual interactions? Nocturnal weakly electric fish evolved to do this, but studying naturalistic social behavior is very hard. Our solution? Virtual 'fish' 🤖🐟⚡ 📄 arxiv.org/abs/2511.08436

If an action results in error, each neuron requires an individualized teaching signal that guides change in its output. This is the credit assignment problem of learning. Are there neurons in the brain that can compute such a sophisticated teaching signal? Yes. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Climbing fibers encode the gradient of a loss function for the cerebellum

Neurons in the brain are often many synapses away from motoneurons, yet if a movement results in error, each distant neuron needs a teacher that considers its specific contribution to production of th...

biorxiv.org

Happy Monday! Come learn how jellyfish swim. In a review led by fluid dynamics maestro Alex Hoover, we outline how neuromechanical modeling will help us understand how modulation of neural activity allows jellyfish to jet and pirouette through fluids www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

🚨We’re moving! 🚨 Starting this fall, my lab will be moving to the Center for Neural Science at NYU and the Center for Computational Neuroscience at the @flatironinstitute.org. 1/

FERAL 1.0 is out! Just to remind you: FERAL is an open-source toolkit for supervised animal behaviour segmentation directly from videos with no pose estimation needed. We made it much easier to install and run FERAL First, to install FERAL: pip install feral www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 🧵

FERAL: A Supervised Video-Understanding System for Direct Video-to-Behavior Mapping

Quantifying animal behavior often requires segmenting continuous actions into discrete, interpretable states, yet most automated pipelines infer actions from keypoint dynamics and are limited by keypo...

biorxiv.org

"I still love what I do,” she said. “But it’s time to step aside and make resources available for the up-and-coming junior people who want to do what I do, especially right now" news.harvard.edu/gazette/stor...

Award-winning biologist Connie Cepko set to retire  — Harvard Gazette

After decades of advancing work on vision-threatening disease, she passes the torch to scientific successors.

news.harvard.edu

Our paper "Rarely categorical, highly separable representations along the cortical hierarchy" is now out in Nature! www.nature.com/articles/s41... In this paper, we studied whether the brain is well-organized and interpretable, both globally and locally. (See thread below.)

Our new preprint is out!! The human brain runs on ~20 watts. Computers and modern AI systems require vastly higher energy. This gap raises a fundamental question: how does the brain compute so efficiently? In our new study, we take a critical step toward measuring and understanding this directly 1/3

bioRxiv Neuroscience@biorxiv-neursci.bsky.social · last mo.

Learning Shapes the Energy Cost of Neural Tasks https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.07.01.735889v1

New paper: We recast automated scientific model discovery with LLMs as Bayesian inference! LLMs write code and carry domain knowledge, great for proposing models. The key idea: discovery is inference, not just generation. What distribution of models explains the data? 🧵 arxiv.org/abs/2602.18266

"Neuroscience is looked to for informing policy before the science is ready" www.newscientist.com/article/mg27...

Neuroscience can't tell us the way to govern people's brains

From the age of legal adulthood to the concept of "profound autism", policy-makers are turning to neuroscience to help shape laws and policies, but the science simply isn't ready

newscientist.com

Finally putting this work out as a preprint :) Thanks to Emery Brown and @earlkmiller.bsky.social for helping conceptualize this work! Code: github.com/Bowen-Zheng-... and a tutorial notebook on the key ideas: github.com/Bowen-Zheng-... A 3-min overview below: (1/)

Earl K. Miller@earlkmiller.bsky.social · 2mo ago

New results! A new method that analyzes brain waves and spike timing together. This lets us pinpoint exactly which rhythms neurons are locking to. BAYESIAN STATE-SPACE MODEL FOR JOINT INFERENCE OF OSCILLATORY DYNAMICS AND POINT-PROCESS COUPLING doi.org/10.64898/202... #neuroscience

New results! A new method that analyzes brain waves and spike timing together. This lets us pinpoint exactly which rhythms neurons are locking to. BAYESIAN STATE-SPACE MODEL FOR JOINT INFERENCE OF OSCILLATORY DYNAMICS AND POINT-PROCESS COUPLING doi.org/10.64898/202... #neuroscience

BAYESIAN STATE-SPACE MODEL FOR JOINT INFERENCE OF OSCILLATORY DYNAMICS AND POINT-PROCESS COUPLING

Under a range of behavioral and physiological conditions, spike times and local field potential (LFP) oscillations exhibit phase coupling within specific frequency bands. Classical measures such as sp...

doi.org

BAYESIAN STATE-SPACE MODEL FOR JOINT INFERENCE OF OSCILLATORY DYNAMICS AND POINT-PROCESS COUPLING https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.06.15.732402v1

How can AI change theoretical neuroscience? Technologies separate us from the mechanics of computation. Are we liberated to focus on the big picture or abandoning the substrate of thought? Born from an ongoing experiment in my lab about balancing these technologies for research and training

The Transmitter @thetransmitter.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Agentic coding makes it possible to specify a neuroscience model in hours instead of months, writes @briandepasquale.bsky.social. The field risks becoming prolific but shallow—generating models faster than we can generate insights. #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/the-big-pict...

One of the world's leading brain research centers is shifting away from fruit flies and toward a tiny, transparent fish. The goal: to understand how brains control the behavior of an animal or human. n.pr/4vV8dYM

Is a transparent fish the future of brain science? This center is betting on it

One of the world's leading brain research centers is shifting away from fruit flies and toward a tiny, transparent fish. The goal: to understand how brains control the behavior of an animal or human.

n.pr

Agentic coding makes it possible to specify a neuroscience model in hours instead of months, writes @briandepasquale.bsky.social. The field risks becoming prolific but shallow—generating models faster than we can generate insights. #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/the-big-pict...

How AI coding is reshaping theoretical neuroscience

Agentic coding makes it possible to specify a neuroscience model in hours instead of months. Neuroscientists weigh in on that tectonic change.

thetransmitter.org

New paper with @rebeccasaxe.bsky.social "Expectations of reciprocal generosity are specific to equal relationships," in @openmindjournal.bsky.social. Thread below! Article: doi.org/10.1162/opmi... MIT News: news.mit.edu/2026/would-y...

Would you return a favor? Scientists say it depends on the relationship

People generally only engage in reciprocal generosity with others of equal or unknown status, MIT researchers experimentally demonstrated. During repeated interactions between people of different soci...

news.mit.edu

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:

Human learning of noninvasive brain–computer interfaces via manifold geometry - Nature Neuroscience

Busch et al. use nonlinear neural manifolds to help humans gain rapid control over a noninvasive brain–computer interface, allowing them to learn how to play a video game with real-time fMRI neurofeed...

nature.com

🚨 New preprint from the lab! 🚨 We introduce BiXformer, a bidirectional cross-attention transformer for disentangling inter-regional neural dynamics. Recordings from multiple regions superimpose feedforward & feedback signals 🔁, offset in time, making it difficult to tease these signals apart. 🧠 🔁

bioRxiv Neuroscience@biorxiv-neursci.bsky.social · 2mo ago

BiXformer: A Bidirectional Cross Attention Transformer for Disentangling Inter-Regional Neural Dynamics https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.06.05.730511v1

How do brains integrate sensory evidence over minutes to generate adaptive behaviors? A new Flavell lab preprint identifies C. elegans circuits that integrate aversive smells during foraging to control specific behavioral responses. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... #neuroscience @mitbcs.bsky.social

I love basketball

BiXformer: A Bidirectional Cross Attention Transformer for Disentangling Inter-Regional Neural Dynamics https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.06.05.730511v1

Computational Behaviour launches July 2027! A fully remote two-week course, open to participants worldwide. ➡️ Learn more and get involved: neuromatch.io/computationa... #ComputationalScience #ComputationalBehaviour #Neuroscience #OpenScience #Neuromatch #ConnectedMinds @connectedminds.bsky.social

I could not be more excited for this!

Neuromatch@neuromatch.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Computational Behaviour launches July 2027! A fully remote two-week course, open to participants worldwide. ➡️ Learn more and get involved: neuromatch.io/computationa... #ComputationalScience #ComputationalBehaviour #Neuroscience #OpenScience #Neuromatch #ConnectedMinds @connectedminds.bsky.social

Computational models are a key part of science but discovering new ones is hard! DataDIVER discovers concise models from data, which surface new mechanistic ideas and clear predictions for future experiments From Google Deepmind Neuroscience Lab + collaborators www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

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/...

Neuropixels + Optogenetics = Neuropixels Opto Combining high-resolution electrophysiology and optogenetics. 960 sites, 28 emitters, 2 colors. Today in @natmethods.nature.com doi.org/10.1038/s415... Thanks to @wellcometrust.bsky.social, @alleninstitute.org, @hhmijanelia.bsky.social & team.

🚨New Preprint🚨 from amazing PhD student @ryguy.io! We augmented the classic DDM to account for state-dependent changes in decision strategy and found a clear improvement. Applied to a novel 24 hour dataset we found support for circadian influence on decisions and more! Check out thread and paper!

Ryan Senne (he/him)@ryguy.io · 2mo ago

Move over, GLM-HMM—there’s a new hidden Markov model in town. In our new preprint, we introduce the DDM-HMM: a model that jointly infers latent decision states from reaction times and choices. Using 24-hour behavioral data from rats, we found that evidence accumulation changes with time of day!