👁️🧠🧪 Vision takes time. But how does visual information flow through the human brain? Our new PLOS Computational Biology paper uses population receptive field (pRF) modelling to bring the spatial precision of fMRI to MEG, revealing the temporal dynamics of visual areas. 📖 doi.org/10.1371/jour...

Non-invasive mapping of the temporal processing hierarchy in the human visual cortex

Author summary Vision doesn’t happen instantaneously, but unfolds over time. While we understand a lot about how the brain processes visual space, understanding how the brain processes information ove...

doi.org

every time there's a new video model I try some basic physics on it. So, here's the recent Google Omni tasked with continuining an image of a man throwing a mug at a tower of skulls. will the mug hit the skulls? see for yourself.

Thousands of highly qualified students in Gaza who have received admission to universities in other countries are not being allowed out of Gaza to pursue their studies. Unacceptable! www.instagram.com/p/Da5g0YqNueo/

well on time for my bi-yearly post I'm sharing the final version of this very cool work we started with @cjungerius.bsky.social @smfleming.bsky.social @svangaal.bsky.social @fahrenfort.bsky.social in 2021, when I was young and full of hope. Now out in @natcomms.nature.com 1/11

The act of detecting a stimulus contaminates measures of conscious experience with decision biases - Nature Communications

A central challenge in consciousness research is determining whether people truly experience a stimulus. Here, the authors show that context biases traditional detection measures, whereas continuous r...

nature.com

This recent post by @earlkmiller.bsky.social got my attention. It shows how abstraction could emerge in the primate PFC. The paper is hard, but the main idea can be simplified to low-dims, so I made fun a little animation. A🧵with my toy model and notes: #neuroskyence #compneuro #NeuroAI

❗📝 New paper alert 📝❗ Hierarchical priors enable neural prediction of perceived biological motion 💃 With @predictivebrain.bsky.social and @moritzwurm.bsky.social Reviewed preprint available in eLife: @elife.bsky.social doi.org/10.7554/eLif...

Cortical area remixes macaques’ knowledge blocks to solve new problems www.thetransmitter.org/cognitive-ne... #neuroscience

Macaque brains remix learned actions to solve new problems

When monkeys draw novel complex shapes, neural activity representing a previously learned repertoire appears in a single brain area.

thetransmitter.org

I am recruiting a postdoctoral researcher and a PhD student, funded by a new ERC grant. The grant focuses on the role of the hippocampus in visual perception, using 7T fMRI (hippocampal subfields, cortical layers) and MEG+iEEG. The intended start dates for both positions are in early 2027. 🧠🟦 1/3

new paper, #NeuroAI 📣📜 Can measured cortical organization be used as an inductive bias for artificial recurrent neural networks? In this work, we ask whether cortical geometry, wiring, and function can push RNNs learn. Not as metaphor, but as measurable structure! 1/n🧵👇 arxiv.org/abs/2606.14975

Harnessing cortical geometry, wiring, and function as inductive biases for recurrent neural networks

How the wiring and functional organization of cortex shape recurrent computation remains a central question in both neuroscience and machine learning. Here, we leverage data released through the Machi...

arxiv.org

New paper out in JEP:HPP! psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/... Can we learn from things we're not paying attention to? We used a contextual cueing paradigm to pit selective attention against spatial prediction during visual search in 2 high-powered (N=104) experiments — and found they actively compete.

⚫️ NeuroAI Symposium 2026 - it was a blast! ⚫️ Groundbreaking talks, lively discussions and inspiring ideas across #NeuroAI topics! 🧠🤖 A huge thank you to all our speakers, organizers, and participants for making #NeuroAISymposium2026 such a success 🙌 📸 Highlights at neuroaisymposium.com

🧠 PhD position: computational brain origami. Fully funded 4-year PhD on a new NWO-funded project combining 7T MRI, population receptive field mapping, and computational neuroscience to understand why human brains fold the way they do. 📢 vacatures.knaw.nl/job/Amsterda... #PhD #Neuroscience #Hiring

LLMs could never.

Ljá@ideocene.eurosky.social · 4mo ago

Happy May Day!

Nature research paper: Neural representation of action symbols in primate frontal cortex go.nature.com/4v1FDED

Neural representation of action symbols in primate frontal cortex - Nature

A drawing-like task designed to study compositional generalization identifies a specific neural population in the ventral premotor cortex in primates that encodes action symbols.

go.nature.com

I'm proud to say we are releasing LAION-fMRI, a densely sampled 7T fMRI dataset of natural images, with very broad stimulus sampling for testing countless hypotheses and for deeply exploring brain representations. The dataset is now available at laion-fmri.hebartlab.com What does LAION-fMRI offer? 🧵

LAION-fMRI - a 7T fMRI dataset of human vision

LAION-fMRI (LfMRI / LAION MRI dataset): 5 subjects, 25,052 launch-release natural images, 165 acquired 7T fMRI sessions with single-trial GLMsingle betas, retinotopy, localizers, and diffusion.

laion-fmri.hebartlab.com

New paper from the lab! "Plasticity and language in the anaesthetized human hippocampus" www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Plasticity and language in the anaesthetized human hippocampus - Nature

In the hippocampus, complex processing of sensory stimuli occurs even in the unconscious state.

nature.com

New peer-reviewed paper w/ @mheilbron.bsky.social, @predictivebrain.bsky.social & Jakub Szewczyk! Pre-onset brain encoding has been taken as evidence that brains–like LLMs–predict upcoming words. We show that the same signatures arise in systems that cannot predict. (elifesciences.org) (1/8)

Categorization is ‘baked’ into the brain — a Perspective by Lisa Feldman Barrett & Earl K. Miller @lisafeldmanbarrett.com @earlkmiller.bsky.social #neuroscience #neuroskyence www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Categorization is ‘baked’ into the brain - Nature Reviews Neuroscience

Categorization, the grouping of objects, living organisms, actions or events into equivalence clusters, is fundamental to adaptive behaviour. In this Perspective, Barrett and Miller discuss evidence t...

nature.com

Just out! Expectations modulate stimulus-evoked recurrent, but not feedforward, processing, and this is attention-dependent. NMDA-dependent feedback specifically supports perceptual integration (illusory contours), rather than mediating expectations (base rate). www.jneurosci.org/content/46/1...

Effects of Expectation, Attention, and NMDA Receptor Blockade on Feedforward and Feedback Processing

Perception is increasingly viewed as an inferential process wherein sensory inputs are integrated with prior expectations. We employed time-resolved decoding on electroencephalography (EEG) data ( n  ...

jneurosci.org

New preprint! w/ @mheilbron.bsky.social We found that, even during simple natural scene viewing, human visual cortex predicts—hierarchically in central vision and at higher levels peripherally—reconciling classical predictive coding with recent evidence from animal models and AI (e.g. JEPA) (1/10)

To this theoretical physicist, time is not a basic ingredient of reality.

Carlo Rovelli’s Radical Perspective on Reality | Quanta Magazine

The theoretical physicist and best-selling author finds inspiration in politics and philosophy for rethinking space and time.

quantamagazine.org

An optical illusion with nine simple dots reveals a surprising amount about the eye and brain

What color is this dot? New illusion demonstrates weird vision quirk

An optical illusion with nine simple dots reveals a surprising amount about the eye and brain

scientificamerican.com

What are the systems in neuroscience that we really have something that we can call “explanation” at all relevant levels, other than reflexive feed-forward like circuits. Here are a few that I would argue are getting there. Obviously not complete explanations but genuinely satisfying.

The Transmitter @thetransmitter.bsky.social · 6mo ago

Neuroscience has become increasingly concerned with prediction, and machine learning with causal explanation, with each field adopting methods from the other, writes @gershbrain.bsky.social. Will this bring us closer to understanding neural systems? www.thetransmitter.org/the-big-pict...

For nearly two decades resting-state fMRI has ruled supreme. And resting-state is suprisingly powerful. But we can do so much better by using broad batteries of tasks with the right design. Here a double-punch delivered by two papers from @carobellum.bsky.social and @basselarafat.bsky.social!

basselarafat.bsky.social@basselarafat.bsky.social · 6mo ago

You have 10 minutes of task fMRI to map functional brain regions in an individual. Three decisions matter: How do you localize regions? Which tasks do you include? How do you arrange tasks in your experiment? Here, we tackle all three! Preprint👇 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

We've posted a new fMRI study of semantic relations (has-part, is-a, made-of, etc.), a key aspect of language. We find that relations are represented in the same brain regions as are other semantic concepts, though voxels tend to be selective for only one relation or another. doi.org/10.64898/202...

📢 PhD position in the NeuroAI of Language Why can LLMs predict brain activity so well? We're hiring a PhD student to find out -- AI interpretability meets neuroimaging Deadline March 20 Please RT 🙏 👇 mpi.nl/career-education/vacancies/vacancy/fully-funded-4-year-phd-position-neuroai-language

A new generation of engineered immune cell destroys cancer cells in mice as effectively as conventional CAR-T-cell therapies without suppressing the immune system go.nature.com/4agA7Fl

Innovative CAR-T therapy destroys cancer cells without dangerous side effects

Nature - In mice, the treatment selectively targets tumour cells without suppressing the immune system.

go.nature.com

Interesting convergence: The trick that made predictive self-supervised vision models work seems to be what the brain was doing all along w/ @predictivebrain.bsky.social: visual cortex is most sensitive to high-level prediction errors -- even in V1 Now published: journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...

Higher-level spatial prediction in natural vision across mouse visual cortex

Author summary How does the brain make sense of the constant stream of visual information? A popular theory suggests the brain is not a passive receiver but an active predictor, constantly generating ...

journals.plos.org

micha heilbron@mheilbron.bsky.social · last yr.

New preprint, w/ @predictivebrain.bsky.social ! we've found that visual cortex, even when just viewing natural scenes, predicts *higher-level* visual features The aligns with developments in ML, but challenges some assumptions about early sensory cortex www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

What is the brain for? Active inference is widely discussed as a unifying framework for understanding brain function, yet its empirical status remains debated. Our review identifies core predictions across the action-perception cycle and evaluates their empirical support: osf.io/preprints/ps...

I have a PhD opening for my #VIDI BrainShorts project 📽️🧠🤖! Are you or do you know an ambitious, recent (or almost) MSc graduate with a background in NeuroAI and interest in large-scale data collection and video perception? Check out our vacancy! (deadline Feb 15). werkenbij.uva.nl/en/vacancies...