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David Robbe

@davidrobbe.bsky.social

Neuroscientist at Institut de Neurobiologie de la Méditerannée (Marseille). Basal ganglia, time, effort, foraging, vigor, motor control. Leaning toward philosophy (obsessed with Henri Bergson)

78 Posts459 Follower 464 Folgt

Ahmed El Hady @zamakany.bsky.social · 5d ago

New Study! @cbehav.bsky.social @mpi-animalbehav.bsky.social Often foraging models assume that the forager knows the environment and proceed to predict decision strategies but how does the foraging learn the structure of the environment ? A new preprint delves into this question

David Robbe @davidrobbe.bsky.social · 4w ago

Zelda Timmel and Maud Schaffhauser @maudschaffh.bsky.social, 2 outstanding PhD students I am lucky to work with, had a blast yesterday at #FENS presenting their poster on the role of the striatum in decision making and motor control during foraging.

Ahmed El Hady @zamakany.bsky.social · last mo.

Check this exciting new foraging paper. Very excited that we are currently collaborating with @davidrobbe.bsky.social group to model behavioral mechanisms underlying foraging startegies in the The Tower Foraging Park.

David Robbe@davidrobbe.bsky.social · last mo.

Excited to share our new paper: "The Tower Foraging Park: A paradigm for studying cognitive and motor processes underlying behavioral flexibility in freely moving mice,". Out now in @cp-iscience.bsky.social 🧵1/9 www.cell.com/iscience/ful...

David Robbe @davidrobbe.bsky.social · last mo.

The Tower Foraging Park: A paradigm for studying cognitive and motor processes underlying behavioral flexibility in freely moving mice

Biological sciences; Behavioral neuroscience; Laboratory animal science

cell.com

Matteo Carandini @carandinilab.net · 2mo ago

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.

David Robbe @davidrobbe.bsky.social · 7mo ago

This will never cease to astonish me. Not only the nonsense of the request, but also the time pressure. Does this strategy work? Do people really send preprints to these journals?

Drew Schreiner @schreinerdrew.bsky.social · 8mo ago

Cool basal ganglia preprints today! 2 on DA/ACh 1. @paulkramer.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 2. @arifahamid.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Motor learning @juangallego.bsky.social and @clopathlab.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Excitatory nicotinic signaling drives action potential bursting in dopaminergic axons

Axons of dopamine (DA) neurons express nicotinic receptors (nAChRs) that have been shown to both facilitate and suppress striatal DA release, but the mechanisms underlying these opposing actions are u...

biorxiv.org

Current Biology @currentbiology.bsky.social · 8mo ago

HAPPY HOLIDAYS TO ALL OF YOU!🎄✨

Andrew Pruszynski @andpru.bsky.social · 8mo ago

Peer review is important and useful but we should focus our efforts on a small number of papers that matter (making big claims, using new approaches) and let the vast majority of work live on a preprint server to be judged by their utility over time to domain experts.

Carl T. Bergstrom@carlbergstrom.com · 8mo ago

Springer-Nature statement “Whilst the details of peer review are confidential, we can confirm that the article underwent two rounds of review from two independent peer reviewers, supporting an accept decision.” How am I now expected to believe that two people looked at the paper twice and DGAF?

Iris van Rooij 💭@irisvanrooij.bsky.social · 8mo ago

“Women who think critically are always labeled difficult because it saves the world from admitting they’re right” — bell hooks Repost of Charmaine Simpson, on LinkendIN: www.linkedin.com/posts/blackh...

Picture accompanying a post from Linked in by Charmaine Simpson

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/blackhistorystudies_bell-hooks-understood-a-pattern-that-repeats-activity-7403886502771888128-CJiy?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAAFk0BcBSukv5EZ8IStyE-ugz6Io2JLp0iQ

"bell hooks understood a pattern that repeats across generations. When a woman thinks
critically, people often label her difficult before they ever engage with her ideas.
The label is a shortcut.
A way to dismiss her without confronting what she is actually saying.
Critical thinking is powerful because it interrupts comfort. It asks why things are the way they
are. It exposes contradictions that many would rather leave unspoken.
So instead of addressing her insight, the world questions her tone.
It reframes her clarity as attitude.
It turns her precision into a flaw.
But women who think critically are not difficult. They are necessary.
They hold up mirrors that others avoid.
They name truths that would otherwise stay buried.
To think for yourself is not an invitation for conflict. It is an act of presence.
It is choosing awareness over silence.
And every time a woman refuses to apologize for her mind, she shifts the world a little closer to
honesty.

From Her Archives
"

Kevin Mitchell @wiringthebrain.bsky.social · 8mo ago

Direct Fit to Nature: An Evolutionary Perspective on Biological and Artificial Neural Networks www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... - thought-provoking (2019) paper from @urihasson.bsky.social and colleagues

Direct Fit to Nature: An Evolutionary Perspective on Biological and Artificial Neural Networks

Evolution is a blind fitting process by which organisms become adapted to their environment. Does the brain use similar brute-force fitting processes …

sciencedirect.com

Luke Sjulson @lukesjulson.bsky.social · 8mo ago

Soapbox time: the problem with metabolic efficiency arguments in neuroscience is that they often confuse energy efficiency with energy expenditure. Biological systems are optimized for energy efficiency, but that does NOT imply they are optimized for low energy expenditure 🧵 1/

Plot showing metabolic rate and brain size vs. body mass. Warm-blooded animals expend an order of magnitude more energy and have brain sizes an order of magnitude larger

David Robbe @davidrobbe.bsky.social · 8mo ago

This review below by Herz and Brown, about effort, bradykinesia in Parkinson disease is really such an excellent read. If you are interested in dopamine, basal ganglia, motor control and motivation, this is really a must read 👌 doi.org/10.1093/brai...

Moving, fast and slow: behavioural insights into bradykinesia in Parkinson’s disease

Herz and Brown review observations of movement slowness in Parkinson’s disease and discuss these findings in a behavioural framework borrowing principles f

doi.org

Romain Brette @romainbrette.bsky.social · 9mo ago

My book "The Brain, in Theory" on the publisher's website (out in April 2026): press.princeton.edu/books/paperb...

The Brain, In Theory

Why engineering and computational analogies are poorly suited to the study of biological cognition

press.princeton.edu

Matthew Apps @brainapps.bsky.social · 9mo ago

Super pleased with this one, led by the amazing PhD student and foraging expert @emmavscholey.bsky.social!

Mark D Humphries@markdhumphries.bsky.social · 9mo ago

🧪Preprint! How foragers depart from optimal models can tell us a lot about how they compute their decisions. A strong but underexplored departure is that foragers widely vary when they leave identical patches. A 🧵 doi.org/10.1101/2025... With @emmavscholey.bsky.social @brainapps.bsky.social

Russ Poldrack @russpoldrack.org · 9mo ago

Project structure for scientific coding projects - the latest in my Better Code, Better Science series open.substack.com/pub/russpold...

Project structure for scientific coding projects

Better Code, Better Science: Chapter 6, Part 3

open.substack.com

Jay Van Bavel, PhD @jayvanbavel.bsky.social · 9mo ago

The race to churn out papers is a systemic problem. Early career scholars are desperate to get more papers to compete in the academic job market. This can make it hard for faculty mentors hard to reduce their output unless they shrink their lab (which removes opportunities from next generation).

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/...

A table showing profit margins of major publishers. A snippet of text related to this table is below.

1. The four-fold drain
1.1 Money
Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for
whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who
created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis,
which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024
alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit
margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher
(Elsevier) always over 37%.
Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most
consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial
difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor &
Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American
researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The
Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3
billion in that year.

A figure detailing the drain on researcher time.

1. The four-fold drain

1.2 Time
The number of papers published each year is growing faster than the scientific workforce,
with the number of papers per researcher almost doubling between 1996 and 2022 (Figure
1A). This reflects the fact that publishers’ commercial desire to publish (sell) more material
has aligned well with the competitive prestige culture in which publications help secure jobs,
grants, promotions, and awards. To the extent that this growth is driven by a pressure for
profit, rather than scholarly imperatives, it distorts the way researchers spend their time.
The publishing system depends on unpaid reviewer labour, estimated to be over 130 million
unpaid hours annually in 2020 alone (9). Researchers have complained about the demands of
peer-review for decades, but the scale of the problem is now worse, with editors reporting
widespread difficulties recruiting reviewers. The growth in publications involves not only the
authors’ time, but that of academic editors and reviewers who are dealing with so many
review demands.
Even more seriously, the imperative to produce ever more articles reshapes the nature of
scientific inquiry. Evidence across multiple fields shows that more papers result in
‘ossification’, not new ideas (10). It may seem paradoxical that more papers can slow
progress until one considers how it affects researchers’ time. While rewards remain tied to
volume, prestige, and impact of publications, researchers will be nudged away from riskier,
local, interdisciplinary, and long-term work. The result is a treadmill of constant activity with
limited progress whereas core scholarly practices – such as reading, reflecting and engaging
with others’ contributions – is de-prioritized. What looks like productivity often masks
intellectual exhaustion built on a demoralizing, narrowing scientific vision.

A table of profit margins across industries. The section of text related to this table is below:

1. The four-fold drain
1.1 Money
Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for
whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who
created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis,
which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024
alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit
margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher
(Elsevier) always over 37%.
Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most
consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial
difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor &
Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American
researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The
Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3
billion in that year.

The costs of inaction are plain: wasted public funds, lost researcher time, compromised
scientific integrity and eroded public trust. Today, the system rewards commercial publishers
first, and science second. Without bold action from the funders we risk continuing to pour
resources into a system that prioritizes profit over the advancement of scientific knowledge.

Rune W. Berg @runewberg.bsky.social · 9mo ago

New preprint: Neural manifolds that orchestrate walking and stopping Here we develop a new theory for neural generation of walking and how it can stop- Next we test the theory using Neuropixels probes in the lumber spinal cord of freely moving rats. See more: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

David Robbe @davidrobbe.bsky.social · 9mo ago

A yr ago, I wrote a piece about what is becoming a quasi-obsession in neuroscience: internal models/representations. I’m kind of stuck and not sure what to do with it. Meanwhile, I came across 2 excellent "critical" papers on the same topic by @olivia.science and @smellosopher.bsky.social 🙏💪 :

David Robbe @davidrobbe.bsky.social · 9mo ago

I haven’t posted much here since leaving Twitter/X, but I feel a growing need to share again papers and thoughts about science, the brain, and our too often absurd academic life . My feed hasn’t been very exciting so far, so let’s see if posting and interacting more helps

Hugo Spiers @hugospiers.bsky.social · 10mo ago

New preprint from Satoshi Kuroki & Sébastien Royer Grid cells encode reward distance during path integration in cue-rich environments www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-7...

Adrian Haith @adrianhaith.bsky.social · 10mo ago

New Pre-Print: www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/... We’re all familiar with having to practice a new skill to get better at it, but what really happens during practice? The answer, I propose, is reinforcement learning - specifically policy-gradient reinforcement learning. Overview 🧵 below...

Policy-Gradient Reinforcement Learning as a General Theory of Practice-Based Motor Skill Learning

Mastering any new skill requires extensive practice, but the computational principles underlying this learning are not clearly understood. Existing theories of motor learning can explain short-term ad...

biorxiv.org

Mark D Humphries @markdhumphries.bsky.social · 10mo ago

🚨Registration for Mechanistic Basis of Foraging 2025 closes October 20th 🚨 Speakers @mkflugge.bsky.social @aaronbornstein.bsky.social @benhayden.bsky.social @ellileadbeater.bsky.social @davidrobbe.bsky.social @dlbarack.bsky.social @becketebs.bsky.social uobevents.eventsair.com/the-mechanis...

Home - The Mechanistic Basis of Foraging

uobevents.eventsair.com

Ahmed El Hady @zamakany.bsky.social · 11mo ago

Can one bring together Reinforcement learning and Drift Diffusion models to understand collective foraging ? Congrads to Jonathan Marienhagen , Lisa Blum Moyse and Dominik Deffner on this new study. Very happy that I was part of this collaboration. Preprint here: osf.io/preprints/ps...

Samuel Moore @samuelmoore.org · 11mo ago

I have an op-ed out today in @resprofnews.bsky.social introducing my new book on the commercialisation of open access publishing.

Make academic publishing a commons, not a market - Research Professional News

Commercialisation has thwarted the promise of openness—it’s time for new priorities, says Samuel Moore

researchprofessionalnews.com

Kevin Mitchell @wiringthebrain.bsky.social · 11mo ago

Here's a link to the paper: Beyond Mechanism—Extending Our Concepts of Causation in Neuroscience onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Beyond Mechanism—Extending Our Concepts of Causation in Neuroscience

The search for neural mechanisms of behaviour often relies on a synchronic, driving view of causation, where neural activity drives more neural activity, which eventually drives behaviour. The real c...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

David Robbe @davidrobbe.bsky.social · 11mo ago

It is simply amazing how Djokovic can so often anticipate where Alcaraz, one of the most creative players, will direct his next shot. Perception intertwined with action. This match is just incredible...

Mark D Humphries @markdhumphries.bsky.social · 12mo ago

Closing soon! Abstract submission for The Mechanistic Basis of Foraging 2025 A multidisciplinary meeting on the neural, behavioural and computational foundations of foraging across species: uobevents.eventsair.com/the-mechanis... Deadline: August 29

uobevents.eventsair.com

Serge Ahmed @sergeahmed.bsky.social · last yr.

Status, humiliation, and expert knowledge A must-read for my fellow experts who want to better understand why so many people proudly reject what we have to offer in favor of common sense. Get ready to look in the mirror! www.conspicuouscognition.com/p/status-cla...

Status, class, and the crisis of expertise

By celebrating "common sense" over expert authority, populism performs a dramatic status inversion. It gifts uneducated voters the power of knowledge and deflates those who look down on them.

conspicuouscognition.com