New preprint! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Nearly a decade after starting the project, the first major results from our comparative connectomics work is online! Comparing the head direction circuits of the central complex in bees, ants and flies, recapitulating >300million years of evolution.

BOOK CRIME

Ida Momennejad@neuroai.bsky.social · last wk.

“It was a pleasure to burn.” - Fahrenheit 451 futurism.com/artificial-i...

The Ott-Antonsen ansatz revolutionized our understanding of coupled oscillator systems with heterogeneous oscillators. We developed a multi-ensemble method that increases the applicability of the OA ansatz to empirical data substantially arxiv.org/abs/2607.09516, as we demonstrate on neural data.

A multi-ensemble mean-field reduction method for networks of globally coupled phase oscillators with arbitrary parameter distributions

Understanding the dynamical properties of coupled phase oscillator systems with heterogeneous oscillator frequencies has been a long-standing challenge of complex systems theory. While the seminal wor...

arxiv.org

Updated preprint and code from my lab. If you want to explore more realistic neural dynamics in models that can still perform visual tasks, check it out! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Modeling Dynamical Vision with Biologically Plausible Recurrent Convolutional Networks

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) trained for image recognition have demonstrated remarkable conceptual similarities to the primate ventral visual pathway, but their standard feedforward architectu...

biorxiv.org

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

🎉 Excited to share our new work: “Adhesion-driven tissue rigidification triggers epithelial cell polarity”, now on @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social ! A huge thank you to @nicolettapetridou.bsky.social, Bernat, @crisp-c.bsky.social, Adrián, and everyone involved! 🙌 🧵⤵️

How do brains plan actions towards goals? To get at this question we studied mice navigating complex mazes as goals changed on every trial 🧵 Work with @thomasakam.bsky.social @behrenstimb.bsky.social @kristorpjensen.bsky.social now on BioRxiv: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Our new paper is out in Current Biology! We learn many things in parallel, and brain circuits are constantly rewiring across brain areas. It is notoriously difficult to understand which rewiring events are responsible for which type of learning. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Local plasticity underlies the reorganization of cortical circuit dynamics during motor learning

During learning, neural circuits reorganize to encode new information and adapt behavioral responses. Ca2+/calmodulin-dependent protein kinase II (CaM…

sciencedirect.com

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

A synaptic locus of song learning - Nature

Combining a computational framework and optogenetic and chemogenetic manipulations within and downstream of the cortico-basal ganglia circuit identifies the specific cortico-basal ganglia synapse...

nature.com

Is spatial navigation innate 🧠? Using #NeuroPixels we show that the #torus 🍩 underlying the #GridCell map exists already on day 10 in rats — before pups open eyes and ears and before they start upright walking. 🧵1:4 👇 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Preprint alert! We've done the first ever brain recording simultaneously from IT & PMv in two monkeys interacting socially in natural setting! Dynamic tracking of social variables in simultaneous brain recordings of socially interacting monkeys www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Wait… localized norepinephrine transients in the awake visual cortex?! Who would have guessed this neuromodulatory signal is that spatially precise, right where visual processing is happening. Brain state control just got a lot more local. @ruedigersarah.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...

New preprint: our lab’s first Alzheimer’s paper! “Loss of neuronal population organization links pathology to behavior in a model of Alzheimer's disease” www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 🧪🧵1/

Bots have made their way to Prolific experiments. Our lab has stopped online testing of adults entirely now for this reason - we want to know if what we study is real. Probably data collected 2-3 years ago are ok, but moving forward we just can't know. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Our new paper is now out showing how time perception in animals is linked to their ecology. Using data from 237 species we show temporal perception is faster in species that fly and pursuit predators www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🌐

Pace of ecology drives the tempo of visual perception across the animal kingdom

Nature Ecology & Evolution - Using phylogenetic comparative methods across 237 species from disparate phyla, the authors show that species with fast-paced ecologies have higher temporal...

nature.com

Beautiful - recommended! Here, @sasolla.bsky.social recaps her decades-long journey from physics to neural networks (working with LeCun & Hopfield) to motor cortex, & and from industry (including Bell Labs) to academia, all driven by curiosity and awe (which flows from her voice). Inspiring!

Gaute Einevoll@gauteeinevoll.bsky.social · 7mo ago

Episode #36 in #TheoreticalNeurosciencePodcast: On low-dimensional manifolds in motor cortex – with Sara Solla @sasolla.bsky.social theoreticalneuroscience.no/thn36 Manifold analysis has changed our thinking on how cortex works. One of the pioneers of this modelling approach explains.

Toy models, just in time for Christmas! Excited to share my first article for @thetransmitter.bsky.social #neuroskyence

The Transmitter @thetransmitter.bsky.social · 8mo ago

Amid the rise of billion-parameter models, I argue that toy models, with just a few neurons, remain essential—and may be all neuroscience needs, writes @marcusghosh.bsky.social. #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/theoretical-...

Human speech is continuous, and many meaning spaces (like color) are continuous too. Yet we use discrete words like “blue” and “green” that carve these spaces into categories. In our new paper, we ask: How do people turn continuous spaces into structured, word-like systems for communication? (1/8)

Discrete and systematic communication in a continuous signal-meaning space

Abstract. Human spoken language uses a continuous stream of acoustic signals to communicate about continuous features of the world, by using discrete forms

academic.oup.com

What does it mean to understand language? We argue that the brain’s core language system is limited, and that *deeply* understanding language requires EXPORTING info to other brain regions. w/ @neuranna.bsky.social @evfedorenko.bsky.social @nancykanwisher.bsky.social arxiv.org/abs/2511.19757 1/n🧵👇

What does it mean to understand language?

Language understanding entails not just extracting the surface-level meaning of the linguistic input, but constructing rich mental models of the situation it describes. Here we propose that because pr...

arxiv.org

"Spiking Networks Hate It! Find Out the One Plasticity Trick They Don’t Want You to Know! Never stabilise models by hand again." - I woke up thinking we missed an opportunity with the title of this one. :/ www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... Also: It snowed in Vienna, 10cm white fluffies! Happy Sunday!

Inhibitory Plasticity Balances Excitation and Inhibition in Sensory Pathways and Memory Networks

Plasticity at inhibitory synapses maintains balanced excitatory and inhibitory synaptic inputs at cortical neurons.

science.org

This raises what I like to call the "AI test for tasks". If many people use AI to do task X, then that tells you that task X is actually just a brainless administrative exercise. Any such task should probably be eliminated, and if that's not an option, modified to make automation even easier.

Blake Richards@tyrellturing.bsky.social · 9mo ago

There was never any point to having reference letters. That's why we've all started using AI to do this nonesense task. References should only be used for short-listed candidates for important positions/awards, and ideally, be done via a call to get the most honest opinion possible.

What is the most profitable industry in the world, this side of the law? Not oil, not IT, not pharma. It's *scientific publishing*. We call this the Drain of Scientific Publishing. Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820 Background: doi.org/10.1162/qss_... Thread @markhanson.fediscience.org.ap.brid.gy 👇

Mark A. Hanson@hansonmark.bsky.social · 9mo ago

We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing: a 🧵 1/n Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820 Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/... Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...

The way Sutton himself interprets the “bitter lesson” in this interview definitely caught a lot of bitter lesson enthusiasts off guard. LLMs not actually being an example of the bitter lesson was quite a nuance no one saw coming. youtu.be/21EYKqUsPfg?...

Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end

YouTube video by Dwarkesh Patel

youtu.be

So far, learning traps seem robust to social learning in our cases. Surprisingly, despite many manipulations that have tried to reduce this learning trap, the most effective has been simply being a child (see @emilyliquin.bsky.social's work on traps in children) osf.io/preprints/ps...

Interesting new data on BTSP mechanisms from my old Janelia colleague @hiallen72.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Ca2+ Plateau Potentials Reflect Cross-Theta Cortico-Hippocampal Input Dynamics and Acetylcholine for Rapid Formation of Efficient Place-Cell Code

A central tenet of Systems Neuroscience lies in an understanding of memory and behavior through learning rules, but synaptic plasticity has rarely been shown to create functional single-neuron code in...

biorxiv.org

New preprint! How can you remember an image you saw once, even after seeing thousands of them? We find a role for humble mid-level visual cortex in high-capacity, one-shot learning. doi.org/10.1101/2025.09.22.677855 🧵🧪1/

Neuronal signatures of successful one-shot memory in mid-level visual cortex

High-capacity, one-shot visual recognition memory challenges theories of learning and neural coding because it requires rapid, robust, and durable representations. Most studies have focused on the hip...

doi.org

The New York Times piece today about US science is terrible and wrong—in many ways. I could write a whole article about this, but as one example: “To close observers, the original crisis began well before any of this…” No. I’m a close observer of science, and this is incorrect.

Can a single cell learn? Even without a brain, some microbes show simple forms of cognition. Can this basal cognition be engineered? Check our new paper with @jordiplam.bsky.social on the minimal synthetic circuits & their cognitive limits. @drmichaellevin.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

LLRX republished the blogpost www.llrx.com/2025/08/ai-s...

AI slop and the destruction of knowledge – LLRX

llrx.com

Iris van Rooij 💭@irisvanrooij.bsky.social · 12mo ago

AI slop and the destruction of knowledge irisvanrooijcogsci.com/2025/08/12/a...

I wrote a Comment on neurotheory, and now you can read it! Some thoughts on where neurotheory has and has not taken root within the neuroscience community, how it has shaped those subfields, and where we theorists might look next for fresh adventures. www.nature.com/articles/s41...