Neuron continues its three-part series on neuroscience and AI with “Neuroscience and AI: Emerging Synergies”. Explore how brains and AI are converging, from language models and scientific discovery to more brain-like AI systems. The synergy deepens. www.cell.com/neuron/issue...

Re-post 🔁 is appreciated! #neurojobs: we’re looking for new team members to join us @cmc-unit.bsky.social!
If you’d like to study decision-making in naturalistic & embodied contexts (integrating RL, RNNs & cross-species data analysis) in a cool & collaborative research environment 😎, check 👇

Shervin Safavi@neuroprinciplist.bsky.social · 2w ago

Link to ads: Postdoc position: nextcloud.tuebingen.mpg.de/index.php/s/... PhD position: nextcloud.tuebingen.mpg.de/index.php/s/... We’re also both at @bernsteinneuro.bsky.social and happy to chat!

1/ Why does predicting in latent space (JEPA, CPC, SimCLR...) work so well on messy data, with changing lighting, camera angles, and busy backgrounds? The usual answer: it can ignore nuisance. But that answer holds a conundrum.

New work by @msaddler.bsky.social with a striking finding: a wide range of human perceptual thresholds are replicated in a neural network optimized for real-world auditory tasks. Suggests that thresholds are determined by linear separability in task-optimized representations.

Mark R. Saddler@msaddler.bsky.social · 4d ago

Pleased to share my new preprint with @joshhmcdermott.bsky.social and Torsten Dau: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... ! It shows that many of the characteristic limits of human hearing emerge from perceptual representations optimized for everyday hearing behavior. [1/6]

Excited to be launching our new PhD program in Minds and Machines at UCL with co-Directors Tali Sharot and @nadinedijkstra.bsky.social To apply, find out more here: www.ucl.ac.uk/brain-scienc... Our launch event is on Nov 10th, with a cracking lineup of speakers: luma.com/cikzcth0

In our Nature paper, we introduce the first superhuman Stratego AI, which we built using general techniques that we developed for RL & test-time compute under imperfect information. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Scalable decision-making for games of imperfect information - Nature

Ataraxos, an AI for the board wargame Stratego, establishes a design pattern for reinforcement learning and search that is effective under large amounts of hidden information, a longstanding desiderat...

nature.com

Our Neuroevolution textbook is finally in print! Free online edition: neuroevolutionbook.com Pre-order: a.co/d/06DpkH9h I am incredibly grateful to my co-authors Sebastian Risi, Yujin Tang, and Risto Miikkulainen for making this happen. Thread:

#Psilocybin🍄 shifts visual cortex dynamics towards a state of surprise! Thrilled to share our work w/ OpenScope at @alleninstitute.org lead by postdoc @roberto-defilippo.bsky.social. We combined visual change detection w/ Neuropixels recordings in mice to uncover how psilocybin changes circuits 1/

What is the nature of universal representations in AI models, and what determines whether they emerge? Our paper accepted at #neurips2026 led by @florianmahner.bsky.social & @rothj.bsky.social addressed these questions comparing 162 vision models, with intriguing results. arxiv.org/abs/2605.13675 🧵

Characterizing Universal Object Representations Across Vision Models

Deep neural networks trained with different architectures, objectives, and datasets have been reported to converge on similar visual representations. However, what remains unknown is which visual prop...

arxiv.org

My hot take: We were *already* in a state of being overwhelmed by reviewing grants, scholarships, and papers prior to generative AI. Now it's not even close to tenable. The time to start rethinking the entire peer review model in #academia was 10 years ago. Hopefully this will force it!

Nico Schuck@nicoschuck.bsky.social · 3w ago

2023: 8,039 proposals 2024: 10,360 proposals 2025: 17,066 proposals 2026: 21,627 proposals Something's gotta give

NEW BRAIN DROPPED

Very excited to announce our most recent paper! TL;DR we made our prior work on comparing dynamics (DSA) much faster and generalizable to diverse data domains and problem settings (1/)

A metric for comparing complex systems by their dynamics

Comparisons are fundamental to science: experiment against model, one organism against another, a system against itself across time. Because many systems, from brains to climate, are characterized by ...

biorxiv.org

I have a question about the future of metrics for hiring and promoting faculty in science. Academic journal articles have been our currency for a long time, but are under extreme & mounting pressure. Is any dept or field already using a better metric *for hiring and promoting faculty*?

video games should include Hofstadter's Badge, which can be earned for earning Hofstadter's Badge

If you really think that AI running out of control is a dangerous possibility, then make tech company CEOs legally liable for illegal actions taken by their company's agents.

We're hiring! 2 postdocs + 3 PhD students to join InfantNeuroAI at Trinity College Dublin: awake infant fMRI & OPM-MEG, plus computational models of how infants learn. Aims: understand infant visual cognition, infant neuroimaging methods, more energy-efficient learning 🧵 www.cusacklab.org/vacancies

This paper shows how measures and constructs in psychology get introduced but rarely reused. Would love to see a similar analysis done on methods of analyzing neural data. A Fragmented Field: Construct and Measure Proliferation in Psychology" Anvari et al., 2025 journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Super cool review on model identifiability in #NeuroAI! Generating “controversial” stimuli and using out-of-distribution (OOD) tests to reveal differences that standard benchmarks may hide. We’ve explored both directions in our recent work, two papers worth highlighting 🧵👇

Tal Golan@talgolanneuro.bsky.social · last mo.

How can we design experiments that make computational models disagree? One section of our new @natrevneuro.nature.com Review with @kriegeskorte.bsky.social and @heikoschuett.bsky.social examines studies that used stimulus sets designed to elicit distinct predictions from competing models. 1/16

Terrific paper on the concept of information, so central to modern science and spanning some of our most profound theories and deepest mysteries, from the universe itself to consciousness and intelligence! www.nature.com/articles/s42... 👇👇👇

Four faces of information in natural systems - Nature Reviews Physics

This Perspective proposes a pluralistic understanding of ‘information’ that reflects how this notion is used in natural sciences today. It distinguishes engineering, statistical, thermodynamic and ont...

nature.com

Sean Carroll@seanmcarroll.bsky.social · last mo.

Ever wonder what "information" really means? Here's our new paper, led by @frosas.bsky.social, that lays out the multiple ways the term is used in natural science. rdcu.be/fCDGv

To tell if a maze is solvable, just hang it by its corners If it tears into pieces, you’ve found a solution

Our new paper in @natureportfolio.nature.com. Psychedelics don’t simply disorder the brain. We found hidden, context-sensitive organisation beneath the apparent chaos -- strongest in people reporting more positive, profound experiences and a reduced sense of separation from the world. 🧵👇

If you use a computer to analyze your brain data, then you're doing ✨ computational neuroscience ✨ If you use Claude Code to vibe code a linear regression with cross validation instead of using excel for statistical analysis, then you're working at the ✨ frontiers of computational modeling ✨

Lucina Uddin@lucinauddin.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Just realized a lot of people have the term "computational" in their lab's name. They are all doing similar things to what my lab does (human connectomics, network neuroscience). Have I been "computational" this whole time and not realized it?! I guess I don't know what computational means anymore 😆

New perspective piece out in @cp-neuron.bsky.social with Zaid Zada, @adelegoldberg.bsky.social, and Uri Hasson! We try to articulate some of our excitement about LLMs and discuss what kinds of insights they might provide into the neural computations supporting natural language in the human brain.

What an incredible way to kick off RLC26! The first keynote by Marc Bellemare was amazing with a fantastic start with “Stability & Scale in Experimental RL”! Excited for the next few days? -w/ @eugenevinitsky.bsky.social @glenberseth.bsky.social @sologen.bsky.social @audurand.bsky.social

This is a wrap for #CCN2026! We look forward to meet again in Edinburgh next year!

🚨Now out in Science Advances @science.org: #Parkinson's patients off dopamine medication (PD-) explore too much and exploit too little. Modeling shows they overvalue uncertainty, not that they choose randomly. On levodopa (PD+) they become comparable to controls www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... 🧵👇

Dopamine depletion in Parkinson’s increases directed but not random exploration

Levodopa restores the balance between exploration and exploitation in Parkinson’s disease.

science.org

The next time a climate change denier comes at you with that excuse:

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

Looking forward to #CCN2026 next week! On Monday I’m running a keynote & tutorial with @pessoabrain.bsky.social on whole-brain modelling using probabilistic state space models 💫 Materials coming soon: 2026.ccneuro.org/k-and-t-lang...

💡What makes some ideas spring to mind while others we have to reach for? We built an #NLP #fMRI #MachineLearning framework to find out. New study from our lab, led by @kaixiangzhuang.bsky.social out in @natcomms.nature.com 🧵 🔗 www.nature.com/articles/s41... #CognitiveNeuroscience #Fudan #ISTBI