The phrase "stochastic parrot" is full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Which, ironically, is exactly what the authors got wrong about language, and the core technical mistake of the paper. 1/ (cross-quote-post because I think this topic is important)

Proud to present our latest work "Tracking human foragers and their prey reveals adaptive predator-prey dynamics", now hosted on BioRxiv! 🧵 doi.org/10.64898/202... @ralfkurvers.bsky.social @scioi.bsky.social @arc-mpib.bsky.social @alexschakowski.bsky.social @dominikdeffner.bsky.social

I’ve listened to a lot of Ezra Klein, and the Jensen Huang interview was easily one of the worst. Not because Ezra did anything differently, but because Jensen came in with a rehearsed monologue.

Four months ago, US sanctions shut Iranian students out of Neuromatch. So we built our own! 180+ students, 9 TAs, 14 mentors, and an incredible team made NeuroCONNECT happen. Proud to have been part of it. A reminder that sometimes, together, we can break the barriers and injustices imposed on us.

CONNECT@lets--connect.bsky.social · last mo.

We just wrapped up something we’re really proud of: 12K hours of learning! This was our 3-week Summer School in Computational Neuroscience, inspired by the Neuromatch. This brought together more than 180 Students, 9 TA's and 14 Mentors for three weeks of intensive learning, projects, and mentoring.

No surprise to those who do interdisciplinary research. Two main reasons: 1) the review panels are most of the time happily disciplinary. 2) the interdisciplinary calls are rare exceptions and quite competitive. So, yes, interdisciplinary is necessary but the funding system isn’t built for it.

laserhedvig@laserhedvig.bsky.social · last wk.

Interdisciplinary research is great and necessary, and also has consistently lower funding success www.nature.com/articles/nat... #academiclabourmarket #academia #research

I’m beyond honoured to be named a 2026 @schmidtsciences.bsky.social Polymath. With US$2.5 million over five years, I’ll be able to pursue an interdisciplinary project to combine quantitative and qualitative data to better capture human neurodiversity. 🧠📈 www.schmidtsciences.org/2026-polymat...

[grant season rant] Two-year grants combined with perpetual uncertainty are one of the major ingredients of PI misery.

This hits the core of it: real scientific progress isn’t just handing AI a neat puzzle to solve. True science is the slow, decades-long controversies over what "progress" actually looks like in the first place.

Tahereh Toosi@taherehtoosi.bsky.social · 3w ago

The problem is verifiability. Fast, reliable, everyone-agreed-upon verifiability.

I’ve been thinking… now that AI is taking on groundbreaking, award-winning problems across science, what are those equivalent problems in #neuroscience? What would one of these models actually have to do to leave us all in awe? 🧠🤖

Okay, let’s go home!

Jieyu Zheng@jieyusz.bsky.social · 4w ago

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...

Great post. What @phillipisola.bsky.social describes below isn’t a matter of possibility anymore, imo. Given the reports on Astra’s success in robotic control, many will pursue it, and it will surely show some success. But … 1/2

Phillip Isola@phillipisola.bsky.social · 3w ago

Recently, there have been a lot of impressive demos of AI agents, like Claude, controlling robots. I wrote a short blog post with my thoughts on the advent of these "robot-use agents." web.mit.edu/phillipi/www... I think it's an important change in the trajectory of robotics!

Astra’s most striking leap across several fronts (eg robotic control) boils down to spatial intelligence. I used to think genuine spatial understanding was impossible for language models without physical real-world interaction. Well … Astra proved that wrong or it's far more than just a mere LLM

🚨 8 months after, this paper found its home at Science Advances. We came up with a generative brain network model based on game theory and found that the human brain is suboptimal both in terms of wiring cost and communication efficiency. Here's why: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Kayson Fakhar@kayson.bsky.social · 10mo ago

🚨new work with the dream team @danakarca.bsky.social @loopyluppi.bsky.social @fatemehhadaeghi.bsky.social @stuartoldham.bsky.social @duncanastle.bsky.social We use game theory and show the brain is not optimally wired for communication and there’s more to its story: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

New position piece w/ @tylerbonnen.bsky.social out now in COBS! We suggest that data augmentation is a useful framework for understanding hippocampal contributions to generalization, and offers a path towards more precise modeling: 1/

New preprint! Have you ever wanted to measure psychometric functions in high-dimensional stimulus spaces, but realised that this is infeasible? We present and validate a technique to adaptively estimate psychometric functions for stimulus spaces up to 50 dimensions. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Adaptive experiments in high-dimensional feature spaces: A particle filtering approach

Behavioral experiments are often infeasible when stimulus spaces have many dimensions or when testing time is limited. One way to address this challenge is adaptive stimulus selection, where informati...

biorxiv.org

Our work on curriculum learning in humans and ANNs is now out in PLOS Computational Biology. Thanks to excellent feedback from the reviewers and editor, the final paper now contains some cool new findings.Take a look! 🧠🤖

Charlotte Volk@charlottevolk.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Excited to share that our paper has now been published in PLOS Computational Biology! journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...

Excited to share that our paper has now been published in PLOS Computational Biology! journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...

The curriculum effect in visual learning: The role of readout dimensionality

Author summary Learning new skills is fundamental to humans and animals. However, a key challenge in learning is generalization: applying learned skills to new situations not encountered during traini...

journals.plos.org

Charlotte Volk@charlottevolk.bsky.social · last yr.

🚨 New preprint alert! 🧠🤖 We propose a theory of how learning curriculum affects generalization through neural population dimensionality. Learning curriculum is a determining factor of neural dimensionality - where you start from determines where you end up. 🧠📈 A 🧵: tinyurl.com/yr8tawj3

Our work on curriculum learning in humans and ANNs is now out in PLOS Computational Biology. Thanks to excellent feedback from the reviewers and editor, the final paper now contains some cool new findings.Take a look! 🧠🤖

Charlotte Volk@charlottevolk.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Excited to share that our paper has now been published in PLOS Computational Biology! journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...

The apical dendrite looks great, and does wonders in a slice. What does it do in the living cortex? It depends on the cell. A causal spatial role for apical dendrites in the cortex www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... by @anyiliu.bsky.social with @kenneth-harris.bsky.social and @fedrossi.bsky.social

🎉 *extremely* excited to share our human single neuron + movie dataset is out in #ScientificData! 📄 Human neuron activity during an 83-minute movie from 2,286 neurons and 29 patients 🔗https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-026-07955-0 1st public dataset from @humansingleneuron.bsky.social!🧵

🔮At #ICML2026 we presented Attentive Multi-Layer Fusion for Vision Transformers, an efficient method for decoding information from multiple layers of ViTs for downstream task predictions. It’s almost as performant as full fine-tuning but only an inch more expensive than linear probing!

ExplainableML@eml-munich.bsky.social · 3mo ago

8/ ALF: Attentive Multi-Layer Fusion for ViTs @lciernik.bsky.social , Marco Morik, @zeynepakata.bsky.social , @lukasmut.bsky.social [Paper] openreview.net/forum?id=wSXZtvqwoa [Code] github.com/lciernik/attentive-layer-fusion

Exactly @gershbrain.bsky.social! But more importantly: these mice are overtrained on this one task. Maybe stuff gets more broadly distributed across the brain if it is the one thing you do all day every day. And, they are MICE with tiny brains! So, important study, but let's not over-generalize.

Sam Gershman@gershbrain.bsky.social · 2mo ago

This is a really interesting and important study: www.nature.com/articles/s41... However, isn't it concerning that sweeping conclusions about functional organization of cortex are being reached on the basis of a single task?

Looking to the brain to improve energy efficiency of AI when we started 3 years ago, i thought if we didn't pull it off in a couple of months, the topic would be soon out of fashion of coz, long distance collab -> we stalled ... but strangely, it isn't totally irrelevant yet. what does this mean?

megan peters 🧠@meganakpeters.bsky.social · 2mo ago

I am *thrilled* to share this review in @currentbiology.bsky.social out today, by yours truly, @myoo.bsky.social, @michalk.bsky.social, Taro Toyoizumi, @tyrellturing.bsky.social, @taylorwwebb.bsky.social, & @hakwan.bsky.social www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... 🧵👇

I am *thrilled* to share this review in @currentbiology.bsky.social out today, by yours truly, @myoo.bsky.social, @michalk.bsky.social, Taro Toyoizumi, @tyrellturing.bsky.social, @taylorwwebb.bsky.social, & @hakwan.bsky.social www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... 🧵👇

Looking to the brain to improve energy efficiency of AI

Modern artificial intelligence (AI) systems have achieved remarkable capabilities, but at an extraordinary energy cost. Training and running large-sca…

sciencedirect.com

Mixed feelings from #NeurIPS ACs on the new task of writing initial meta-reviews. Yeah... "it's yet another task for ACs", "why do what authors are supposed to do"... I'm there with you. But on the plus side, it forces ACs to engage earlier and better with discussions. Right?

New Preprint! We gave neural networks infant-like curiosity and let them free to explore. They grew brain-like architecture, followed human synaptic development, and even started to display compositional thought. So we think curiosity doesn't just come from a complex mind... it helps us build one 👇

Curiosity shapes brain-like architectures and functions

How does complex cognition emerge from simpler underlying processes? We show that two components are sufficient: infant-like curiosity and brain-like biophysical constraints jointly drive the emergenc...

biorxiv.org

New preprint (well, very updated). 🤖🧠🧪 We find that an abstract model of neuromodulation lets spiking neural networks perform much better, particularly in challenging noisy environments, using less energy. Relevant to #neuroscience and #neuromorphic computing. 🧵👇 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Neuromodulation enhances the capability and efficiency of spiking neural networks

Spiking neurons underlie the brain’s extreme energy efficiency, and therefore have great potential in neuromorphic computing, although realising this efficiency in practice has proven challenging. We ...

biorxiv.org

Great paper! could someone please point me to a paper or two that has seriously pushed for ideas that would be in contradiction with this decoder? I know @benhayden.bsky.social, @pessoabrain.bsky.social et al have done that on bluesky but an actual research paper? Feels like a total straw man

Shahab Bakhtiari@shahabbakht.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Important paper: "The response profiles of neurons in different brain regions differ enough that a decoder can determine the region to which a particular neuron belongs." Sounds like the perfect antidote to the "everything is everywhere" view.

Important paper: "The response profiles of neurons in different brain regions differ enough that a decoder can determine the region to which a particular neuron belongs." Sounds like the perfect antidote to the "everything is everywhere" view.

@stefanofusi.bsky.social · 3mo ago

From a great collaboration with @lorenzoposani.com, @shuqiw.bsky.social, Samuel Muscinelli, Liam Paninski, now in Nature: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

From a great collaboration with @lorenzoposani.com, @shuqiw.bsky.social, Samuel Muscinelli, Liam Paninski, now in Nature: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Rarely categorical, highly separable representations along the cortical hierarchy - Nature

Cortical circuits prioritize diversity over categorical structure, supporting a computational regime geared towards high-dimensional, highly separable neural representations.

nature.com