How fast can mice learn complex mazes? With @mameister4.bsky.social we reveal memory, generalization, latent learning, and remote credit assignment of mice in the Manhattan Maze. Do mice born without a cortex or hippocampus have them too? Check it out! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Rapid spatial cognition in mice, with and without neocortex and hippocampus

Rapid learning, memory, and generalization are often attributed to circuits of the neocortex and hippocampus, but their specific role remains unclear. To examine these cognitive abilities together in ...

biorxiv.org

Really enjoyed reading this! Takes on some weighty issues – scientific integrity, fate of the world,... – through the eyes of an enthusiastic 17-y old. Who ended up changing his university before Christmas of his freshman year.

Why should the functions of the brain be understandable by humans? It's worth remembering that the human mind is a pitifully limited instrument for cognition. More arguments here: disq.us/p/35lqqzn

The Transmitter @thetransmitter.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Prediction without understanding sustained astronomy through a thousand years of epicycles, writes @tonyzador.bsky.social. AI is now offering neuroscience the same deal. #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/machine-lear...

Amazing new data set from Yeon Jin Kim and colleagues with the connectome of a human fovea: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Cool new work from Wiederhold and colleagues, analyzing the speed of mental processing during mental calculations like this one: www.youtube.com/watch?v=JawF... Open review in the comments. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Mental Arithmetic World Champion - Flash Anzan

YouTube video by Mega Hafıza

youtube.com

Just a reminder that we can do peer review without publishers. disq.us/p/35bbdxl disq.us/p/35b9ay8 meisterlab.caltech.edu/markusmeiste...

Really enjoyed this story about maintaining your sailboat (and your sanity). "Sometimes maintenance involves shooting the shark." books.worksinprogress.co/book/mainten...

The Maintenance Race - Seventh Draft | Books in Progress

Books in Progress is what we call a “public drafting tool”: Drafts will be made available for comment from the public, allowing for direct collaboration between author and reader.

books.worksinprogress.co

@erictopol.bsky.social posted this diagram earlier today. When I pointed out the obvious AI slop and copious errors, he blocked me. But you can also find it on his substack. Topol poses as a serious medical person, but disseminating such graphical nonsense is disqualifying. Unfollow.

Adam Kampff’s passion for understanding and explaining the world was unmatched. Living by example and not ever compromising on his dreams, Adam was uncanny in making people realize they can learn and understand anything and everything. Keep his dream alive! In his own words: tinyurl.com/ye29csw3

Come on Konrad, why do you cave so easily? Here, let me try it for you: 1. Spikes are (to good approximation) the only events that matter. 2. Extracellular fields are one way by which spikes interact with each other. 1/2

Konrad Kording@kordinglab.bsky.social · 10mo ago

As we are having a discussion on neural codes: @earlkmiller.bsky.social is entirely right that the "only spike rates matter" idea that is so prominent in neuroscience has no credible evidence. We simply do not currently know how neurons code relevant information. Oscillations are likely part of it.

Observed at an SfN poster session?

The Onion@theonion.com · 10mo ago

Man Trying To Enter Conversation Spends Few Minutes Smiling And Nodding At Edge Of Circle https://theonion.com/man-trying-to-enter-conversation-spends-few-minutes-smi-1819577205/

#SfN25 's hottest club is Poster X8 Tuesday Morning. This club has everything: mice hunting robotic bait, quantitative behavior modeling, chronic superior colliculus Neuropixel data, and GLM encoding/decoding, not to mention the cheap new DAQ EVERYONE's been rumbling about. See you there!

If you are looking for a postdoc with interests in animal cognition and behavior, be sure to talk to Jieyu Zheng: you won't regret it!

Jieyu Zheng@jieyusz.bsky.social · 11mo ago

I’m off to #SfN2025! Grateful for the TPDA sponsor from @sfn.org. I will present in two sessions, details below. I’m seeking 2026 postdoc positions to continue research in animal cognition/naturalistic behaviors—if you’re looking for a neuroethologist and a mouse whisperer, come to see me!

That image is from 1961 and an idealization. Here is an actual trajectory of fixational eye movements. The dots are 2 ms apart. If a midget ganglion cell, with single-cone receptive field, fires at 100 Hz, then every spike reports about a different cone. How can we ever read anything?

Matthias Nau@matthiasnau.bsky.social · 11mo ago

What a great figure! What we call “fixation” is really a complex pattern of fixational eye movements, several captured beautifully in this single shot. Love it! 👀 #EyeTracking www.nature.com/articles/nrn...

That's nothing! The US, as we know, is an agrarian economy, optimized for growing soybeans exported to China. The yearly production of soybean seeds, if placed end to end, forms a chain of beads 10^10 km long: the distance from the Sun to Pluto and back. It streams at about 0.1% the speed of light.

Kees van der Leun@sustainable2050.bsky.social · 11mo ago

Putting the 512 million panels of 1.95 meters long in a line, they form a band of 1 million kilometers length, wrapped 25 times around the equator. During those 6 months, it streamed from the factories into the country at a speed of 230 km/h :)

Sure, China has invented the future, with innovations like high-speed trains and all-electric traffic. But no-one talks about the Jim Beam Soda Fountain! Dispenses everything from straight Bourbon to 3 different cocktails. Beating Kentucky at its own game...

Human intelligence is overrated and not a useful yardstick for AI - a polemic. markusmeister.com/2025/09/15/w...

What a cool public science project! www.nytimes.com/2025/08/08/w...

A Starfish, a President and a Deep-Sea Frenzy in Argentina

nytimes.com

Schmidt Ocean Institute@schmidtocean.bsky.social · last yr.

This gathering belongs to the family Nephropidae. We suspect they are Thymops birsteini, or Patagonian lobsterette — crustaceans found on continental shelf around S. America, particularly Argentine Sea. #MarDelPlataCanyon #TaludContinental_IV Caption on Insta: www.instagram.com/reel/DNETqdy...

I learned a lot from reading this book on climate science: "Unsettled?" by Steven E. Koonin. Sure, it comes from a contrarian perspective, but it's quantitative, well-sourced, and nuanced in its critique. Lots of useful pointers to go explore the primary literature.

I wrote about the government's attacks on Harvard. Hope this reaches a few persuadable minds. prosyn.org/PhWi74r?h=Ky...

Defunding Harvard Hurts America | by Adam Ezra Cohen - Project Syndicate

Adam Ezra Cohen explains the real-world consequences of canceling federal research grants in the name of fighting antisemitism.

prosyn.org

If you're planning a course with mathematical methods content, or use such methods in your own work, please take a look at "Mathematics in Biology", by Meister, Lee, and Portugues, published at MIT Press. 1/2 @portugueslab.bsky.social mitpress.mit.edu/978026204940...

Mathematics in Biology

Biology has turned into a quantitative science. The core problems in the life sciences today involve complex systems that require mathematical expression, ye...

mitpress.mit.edu

A sobering assessment of consciousness studies from Hakwan Lau: "the label ’consciousness’ may eventually serve little other function but to signal that the associated studies are subpar and overinterpreted compared to mainstream cognitive neuroscience research"

hakwan lau@hakwan.bsky.social · last yr.

i have uploaded this preprint a while back, but hadn't promoted it directly here. in this piece i explain why i can no longer recommend trainees to participate in my former home field. The End of Conscioussness - osf.io/preprints/ps... but i've learned a lot. thank you for everything. 🧠📈

I'm with David Sussillo's critique here. If you want answers you have to ask concrete questions. Black-box modelling of huge data volumes won't get you any closer.

Blake Richards@tyrellturing.bsky.social · 2y ago

Eva Dyer and I wrote an opinion piece for @thetransmitter.bsky.social on why neuroscience needs to embrace complexity and accept the "bitter lesson" by using a data-driven regime at scale. With commentary from several wonderful researchers! 🧠📈 #NeuroAI 🧪

Here it is finally: Our mathematical methods book for life scientists! Aimed at advanced undergrads and beginning grad students, plus all those who want a deeper look at the math behind quantitative biology. @portugueslab.bsky.social. 1/3

MIT Press@mitpress.bsky.social · 2y ago

"Mathematics in Biology" is a concise but rigorous textbook for advanced undergraduate and graduate students across the biological sciences that provides a foundation for understanding the methods used in quantitative biology: @mameister4.bsky.social

I wrote about a scientific paper called “The Unbearable Slowness of Being” which finds that the human brain’s throughput is just 10 bits per second. Gift link: www.nytimes.com/2024/12/26/s... 🧪

Human Thought Is Far Slower Than Your Internet Connection (Gift Article)

A new study is “a bit of a counterweight to the endless hyperbole about how incredibly complex and powerful the human brain is,” one researcher said.

nytimes.com

"[It’s] the largest unexplained number in brain science. I feel like neuroscience should pay more attention to it ..." said Marcus Meister when @claudia-lopez.bsky.social sat down with him and @jieyusz.bsky.social for a Q&A about the brain's information-processing rate. #neuroskyence bit.ly/3ZXxWTf

Explaining ‘the largest unexplained number in brain science’: Q&A with Markus Meister and Jieyu Zheng

The human brain takes in sensory information roughly 100 million times faster than it can respond. Neuroscientists need to explore this perceptual paradox to better understand the limits of the brain…

bit.ly

The unbearable slowness of being: Humans still clock in at just 10 bits/s. Even after peer review :) Share link: authors.elsevier.com/a/1kHVa3BtfH.... ArXiv: arxiv.org/abs/2408.10234

After being gifted the most magical computing device on the planet, humans use it to organize more vicious fist fights. Does anyone still think that human intelligence is a useful milestone on the way to machine intelligence? www.nytimes.com/2024/12/15/t... #NeuroAI

How Student Phones and Social Media Are Fueling Fights in Schools

Cafeteria melees. Students kicked in the head. Injured educators. Technology is stoking cycles of violence in schools across the United States.

nytimes.com

Horace Barlow, by all accounts, was thinking about 30 years ahead of his time. Here is a transcript of the opening keynote I gave at a symposium honoring Horace's scientific legacy: markusmeister.com/2024/12/14/h....

If you're a student interested in quantitative life science, and you don't have this book on your shelf yet, this is the best time to correct that!

Steven Strogatz@stevenstrogatz.com · 3y ago

The third edition of my textbook, Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos, was published today. You can preview the first 68 pages on Google Books, or take a look at the preface below to see what's new. The main new thing is a chapter on the Kuramoto model! Hope you enjoy it.