How do 🐁deal with complex landscapes? Turns out they learn a lot very quickly. We think they do this by learning a set of repeated sparse paths, which form a type of compressed world model. Joint work with the Hermundstad lab, led by Tzuhsuan Ma and Alison Comrie: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

mathematics in the age of AI starts to look a bit more like the "poke an incomprehensibly complex system with a stick and measure what happens" discipline of biology we have to accept that the mathematical realists have won. math is discovered not invented (at least not invented by humans)

Some exciting new work: arxiv.org/abs/2610.12426 On X, I shared some explanation and broader thoughts: x.com/d_g_clark/st... Additionally, an X user made an extremely good 3Blue1Brown-style explainer video. Each step is described accurately and beautifully: x.com/nachilos_/st...

Lyapunov spectrum of random neural networks

The Lyapunov spectrum of a nonlinear recurrent neural network with random asymmetric couplings is calculated in the limit $N\to\infty$. The calculation is based on a finite-$N$ identity that expresses...

arxiv.org

Hi all, I'm happy to announce that I have started at the University of Oregon as an assistant professor! My group will use computational methods to study learning and synaptic plasticity. I will be hiring grad students this year--please reach out if you're interested! colinbre@uoregon.edu

The dataset from our Reason to Play paper is now available on Hugging Face! Also, make sure to check out Csabi's awesome video explaining our approach.

Botos Csabi@botoscsabi.bsky.social · 4d ago

[Hugging Face release] We’re releasing the dataset behind Reason to Play! I’m incredibly proud of our team for reaching this milestone.

We are #hiring! We have numerous openings across the organization, including computational research jobs at our @flatironinstitute.org: https://bit.ly/4dFEufT #science #math

I gave a talk yesterday at a CiNeT / University of Osaka conference about AI & neuroscience. I started with this question — given that AI (especially language models) and brains are so different in structure and environment, how could they have anything to do with one another? 1/

Finding a "face neuron" in an ANN doesn't mean it encodes faces like we do. 🧵 In my first project with @apurvaratan.bsky.social, we show that category selectivity in ANNs ≠ category selectivity in brains. Details in thread + preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Feedback or questions welcome!

Category selectivity observed in the human brain is distinct from category selectivity observed in artificial neural networks

Category selectivity for images of faces, scenes, and bodies is among the most striking and reproducible findings in vision neuroscience. Artificial neural networks (ANNs) trained on visual tasks also...

biorxiv.org

Apurva Ratan Murty@apurvaratan.bsky.social · last wk.

Excited to first share @alishdipani.bsky.social 's study. Alish asked a (deceptively) simple Q: Are category-selective units in ANNs actually like category-selective regions in the brain? (why is this imp? read until the end). #neuroskyence #neuroscience #brain #neuroai

New paper from the lab! www.cell.com/current-biol... An object isn’t always where we perceive it to be. We used a classic visual illusion to ask whether primate brains and AI models represent this perceptual reality similarly. Macaque IT follows perception. Most current vision models don’t.

📣 Multiple Flatiron Research Fellow (FRF) postdoc positions are available in my @flatironinstitute.org group! We've never been better positioned to understand how high-dimensional nonlinear dynamical systems (neural circuits!) compute. If this is as exciting to you as it is to me, consider applying:

A project that I've been working on for the last couple of years (on & off), dealing with the question of how firing rates of neuronal populations change (1/6).

bioRxiv Neuroscience@biorxiv-neursci.bsky.social · 2w ago

Heteroskedasticity of neuronal population responses https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.09.26.754693v1

This was one of the cleanest, most straightforward projects I've ever done, from the hypothesis to the design to the conclusion. Of course still a lot of models, and it was made to look easy just because @jordanlei.bsky.social was so capable!

Jordan Lei@jordanlei.bsky.social · 2w ago

Our paper is out in Nature Communications! In our messy, noisy world, do you find planning difficult/less worthwhile? It's not just you. As we increased the stochasticity in a planning environment, we found that people spent less effort planning: www.nature.com/articles/s41... #cogsci #planning

🚨Postdoc hiring alert! 🚨 Applications for the Flatiron Research Fellows 2027 cohort at the Center for Computational Neuroscience are now live: apply.interfolio.com/193800. Come work with us!

Happy to have this finally out! TL;DR: The evolution of beliefs over time can be formulated as a dynamical system, and OFC neural activity appears to implement this system with its own dynamics. These emerge without explicit supervision—when animals learn to predict value in simple Pavlovian tasks

bioRxiv Neuroscience@biorxiv-neursci.bsky.social · 3w ago

Dynamic belief representation and updating through learned attractor-like dynamics in the frontal cortex https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.09.17.752495v1

Our lab's latest paper on the neurobiology of collective behavior is now published www.nature.com/articles/s41... This is the work of a great team in the lab - led by Jo-Hsien Yu, with Geoff Meyerhof, Jimjohn Milan, and Julia Napoli @nature.com @danionella.bsky.social

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*?

Nihar Shah did a heroic experiment for TMLR: he spent 20-25 hours over two weeks interviewing authors of seemingly low-quality submissions about their own papers. He confirmed what we all suspected: people submitting these papers have *no idea* what is going on in them.

Transactions on Machine Learning Research@tmlrorg.bsky.social · 4w ago

TMLR has faced a deluge of submissions, necessitating stricter desk rejection policies due to limited reviewer capacity Co-EiC Nihar Shah reached out to authors of 10 papers slated for desk reject. Could they answer questions about their *own* submission? medium.com/@TmlrOrg/ask...

My god. This plus $100K for H1B visa that follows OPT. Making it impossible for foreign students to work in the US

Michael Clemens@mclem.org · 4w ago

The US President's new proposal to tax international students has been approved by the White House for release this week. It's an unprecedented $100,000 tax on int'l grads who stay to work after graduation on Optional Practical Training (most grads do), a crucial bridge to remaining by any channel.

This is not just a wake up call for AI in research, it's an inadvertent comment on what needs to change in research culture: "the mass production at faster and faster pace of "true/false" statements could destroy fertile ground instead of breathing life into new ideas"

Terence Tao@teorth.bsky.social · last mo.

A group of 25 Fields Medalists, including myself, have made a joint declaration on Math and AI: mathandai.org . We welcome additional signatories. See also this article in the Economist announcing the declaration: www.economist.com/science-and-...

📢Have work to share with the computational and systems neuroscience community? Abstract submissions for #COSYNE2027 are now open. Deadline: 18 October 2026, 11:59 p.m. AoE Submit your abstract: www.cosyne.org/abstracts-su... #Neuroscience

I’m on the faculty job market this fall! 🐦🧠 I’m an NIH K99/R00 awardee studying how the brain learns complex skills, using birdsong to connect molecules, synapses, circuits, behavior & computation. Know of a search where I might fit? Please send it my way & share!

Drew Schreiner, Ph.D. | Neuroscience of Learning

I use birdsong to understand how the brain learns complex skills across molecules, synapses, circuits, behavior, and computation. On the 2026–27 faculty job market.

drewschreiner.github.io

Now out in Nature Neuroscience: fantastic work by @cxue.bsky.social, Sol Markman et al who discovered a neural reason that performance suffers under cognitive load: “Feature interference underlies a neuronal basis for the behavioral cost of task uncertainty”. www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🧪🧵1/

Feature interference underlies a neuronal basis for the behavioral cost of task uncertainty - Nature Neuroscience

Using a combined approach of monkey electrophysiology, artificial neural networks and human psychophysics, Xue et al. show that neuronal interference from irrelevant information underlies behavioral e...

nature.com

We are hiring! Start at a #MaxPlanckInstitute with your own independent Max Planck Research Group. This position is equivalent to a W2 Professorship at a German university, or Associate Professor internationally. 🔗Apply until October 14th! www.mpg.de/career/max-p... #ScienceCareer #MPRG #TenureTrack

Excited to share our new Cell Reports paper on paratenial thalamus (PT), which identifies a molecular marker for PT, and shows how PT interacts with the medial prefrontal cortex, nucleus accumbens, and basolateral amygdala, all done by my grad student Nigel Dao: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

More stories like this one, please and thank you www.nytimes.com/2026/09/06/s...

The 92-Year-Old Mathematician and the Teenage Apprentice

Joan Birman thought her major discoveries were behind her. Then came an email from a young neighbor — a girl who knew little but wanted to learn.

nytimes.com

We're hiring! PNI is recruiting an assistant professor of neuroscience working with non-human primates in any area. Review begins Oct 19: apply.interfolio.com/192521 #NeuroJobs #Neuroskyence

Hey, we’ve been studying mnemonic chunking in🐒! With @fkchiang89.bsky.social Here’s the rundown: 🧵 www.cell.com/current-biol...

Compression as a neural mechanism of mnemonic chunking in prefrontal cortex

Chiang and Rich show that macaques spontaneously chunk spatial targets in a self-ordered working memory task. dlPFC neurons compress chunked targets into lower-dimensional representations that are shi...

cell.com

I’m very excited to share our new paper, led by the very talented Jack Bowler, a postdoc in the lab! www.nature.com/articles/s41... We all know that the way we learn something matters. But how does a training curriculum actually shape how the brain learns to solve a problem? a 🧵 1/N

Structured experience shapes strategy learning and neural dynamics in the medial entorhinal cortex - Nature Neuroscience

The authors use recurrent neural networks to predict how structured prior experience shapes neural dynamics as mice learn flexible timing strategies during complex context-dependent behavior.

nature.com

I can finally tell the world that i was selected for an ERC stg 🤯 Maybe this what people mean when they say they are "humbled by" but I am at peak imposter syndrome, and I really mean it: 1/

European Research Council (ERC)@erc.europa.eu · last mo.

📣 Good news! 📣 Results of the ERC 2026 Starting Grant call are out! Funding worth a total of €705 million will go to 421 early-career researchers across Europe. Discover who, what and where 👉 link.europa.eu/9M3MmN 🧪 #ERCStG #FrontierResearch #HorizonEurope 🇪🇺 @scienceinnovation.ec.europa.eu

(1/8) Our approach for untangling brain-wide interactions is out today in @cp-neuron.bsky.social! Current-Based Decomposition (CURBD) uses RNNs constrained by real neural data to reveal the input driving neurons, uncovering how brain regions talk to each other. doi.org/10.1016/j.ne... 🧵👇