If at CCN, please check out three posters from our lab today. In the morning session: A62 - Deep Learning Models of Attention Reveal Peripheral Encoding as a Bottleneck for Selective Listening Through Cochlear Implants, by Annesya Banerjee

Very excited to attend #CCN2026 this week and to present various projects from my lab! Here's a list of our posters and talks in case you'd like to see what we've been up to.

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

What does synapse position buy a neuron? We trained a dendritic network to place its own synapses on a covariance task. It clustered correlated inputs onto shared branches, and shuffling that placement destroyed performance while every weight stayed intact. Preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2607.24503 🧵-->

Synaptic clustering emerges from learning and supports covariance discrimination

Functional synapse clusters (FSCs) are synapses with correlated presynaptic activity that are colocalized on the same neuronal dendritic branch. FSCs have been observed after learning in cortical and ...

arxiv.org

This September, I will join the @flatironinstitute.org Center for Computational Neuroscience as a Group Leader, where I will launch the High-Dimensional Dynamics & Computation Group. Information for postdocs and grad students is forthcoming. I am grateful to my mentors who made this possible!

The Neuroscience Department at UC Berkeley is hiring an Asst Professor in Computational Neuro. All areas of computational/theoretical neuro are welcome. Deadline Oct 30. Join our neuroscience community! aprecruit.berkeley.edu/JPF05446 #AcademicJobs #Neuroscience #NeuroJobs

Assistant Professor - Computational Neuroscience - Department of Neuroscience

University of California, Berkeley is hiring. Apply now!

aprecruit.berkeley.edu

🚨We’re moving! 🚨 Starting this fall, my lab will be moving to the Center for Neural Science at NYU and the Center for Computational Neuroscience at the @flatironinstitute.org. 1/

New preprint led by @rgast.bsky.social- part 1 of Richard's ongoing effort to make a better firing rate model: developing mean-field models that can be fit to biological data to capture both the dynamics of neural populations and the underlying physiological heterogeneity that sculpt those dynamics.

Richard Gast@rgast.bsky.social · last wk.

The Ott-Antonsen ansatz revolutionized our understanding of coupled oscillator systems with heterogeneous oscillators. We developed a multi-ensemble method that increases the applicability of the OA ansatz to empirical data substantially arxiv.org/abs/2607.09516, as we demonstrate on neural data.

**Four** positions in AI/ML for biology at @dukemedschool.bsky.social, including in Neurobiology. @scottsoderling.bsky.social and David Page are leading a tremendous initiative in Discovery AI. Wonderful colleagues, wonderful place.

AI/ML for Biology - 4 tenure-track assistant professor positions - Durham, North Carolina job with Duke University - Biochemistry & Cell Biology | 12862109

Discovery AI Initiative and Departments of Biochemistry and Cell Biology, Integrative Immunobiology, Neurobiology, and Pharmacology & Cancer Biology

nature.com

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

My department, Neurobiology and Biophysics at the University of Washington (nbio.uw.edu), is hiring a new tenure-track Assistant Professor, application deadline 09/30/26. It's a broad search — molecular to organismal, all of neuroscience/physiology/biophysics welcome. apply.interfolio.com/187735

Yes, and one more reason to not refer (even playfully) to college/university as not part of the real world. The right very much sees higher ed as part of the real world.

Rebecca Sear@rebeccasear.bsky.social · last mo.

The right takes academia seriously, and is pouring money into neutering it. Would be good to see left wing politicians taking academia equally seriously, and taking action to support it www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

Updated preprint and code from my lab. If you want to explore more realistic neural dynamics in models that can still perform visual tasks, check it out! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Modeling Dynamical Vision with Biologically Plausible Recurrent Convolutional Networks

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) trained for image recognition have demonstrated remarkable conceptual similarities to the primate ventral visual pathway, but their standard feedforward architectu...

biorxiv.org

Tremendously excited to announce that I will be joining @rockefeller.edu as an Assistant Professor and Head of Lab starting in January 2027! My group will be broadly focused on theoretical neuroscience, and mathematical problems in neural computation in the large.

Neural activity in mouse cortex forms rotating spiral waves. The architecture of individual axons matches the wave geometry, centered on somatosensory cortex. Beautiful new pape from our colleagues in the @steinmetzneuro.bsky.social lab. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

1/ We work hard to factor "noise" out of behavior. But the brain doesn't. Strip away noise and you may miss what the brain evolved to do I wanted to share this pre-Bluesky paper where we found premotor (M2) corticostriatal circuits encode a broad history of behavior, beyond just action + reward 👇

Information normally considered task-irrelevant drives decision-making and affects premotor circuit recruitment - Nature Communications

Prior experience is used by the brain to guide adaptive behaviour during decision making. Here, the authors show that mice also selectively use information learned through recent and longer-term exper...

nature.com

Our new paper is out this week in Nature Neuroscience! www.nature.com/articles/s41... We built a BCI that works with the brain's natural geometry — and we found that people could learn to play a video game with their brains in <1 hr of training. This efficiency is groundbreaking & here's why:

Human learning of noninvasive brain–computer interfaces via manifold geometry - Nature Neuroscience

Busch et al. use nonlinear neural manifolds to help humans gain rapid control over a noninvasive brain–computer interface, allowing them to learn how to play a video game with real-time fMRI neurofeed...

nature.com

Even if they don't dismiss the evidence of its existence, a big chunk of neuroscientists don't seem to get a key question that representational drift raises. The whole point is that responses reconfigure *without* loosing representational fidelity. This means *of necessity* that any geometric/

Job opening at MIT for a research methodologist to facilitate open science practices and data management across all areas of neuroscience and cognitive science. PhD and some postdoctoral experience required. Please circulate to your networks. careers.peopleclick.com/careerscp/cl...

Neuroscience Research Methodologist

MIT - Neuroscience Research Methodologist - Cambridge MA 02139

careers.peopleclick.com

New preprint with @lingqiz.bsky.social: Neurodata Without Boredom: Benchmarking Agentic AI for Data Reuse arxiv.org/abs/2605.12808 1/10

Some more Brain-Machine Interface shenanigans: this time we think we found evidence that an animal's agency in a task modulates hippocampal maps of that task. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

In a #ICML2026 position paper we argue a dynamical systems perspective is needed to drive time series models forward: arxiv.org/abs/2602.16864 For TS, we need to move away from transformers that do not respect a system’s dynamical structure, esp. if out-of-domain generalization & insight is sought.

Neural ODEs are great as continuous-time dynamical systems, but slow and tedious to train. In a new #ICML2026 paper we intro a novel solver for continuous-time RNNs that does not rely on numerical integration. It's not only way faster & robust, but enables explicit analysis: arxiv.org/abs/2602.15649

Posting for Vibhu Sahni: Due to unforeseen circumstances the Burke Neurological Institute will have to terminate its research operations 5/22. There are international postdocs on visas who are looking for new homes. Please reach out to Vibhu if you can help

Congratulations to #FlatironCCN director @eerosim.bsky.social on his election to the National Academy of Sciences! https://bit.ly/42AEUhl #science #neuroscience

CCN Director Eero Simoncelli Elected to National Academy of Sciences

Eero Simoncelli, director of the Flatiron Institute’s Center for Computational Neuroscience (CCN), has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences.

bit.ly

Excited to see our paper describing a stereotyped receptor map for smell (led by @davidhbrann.bsky.social ) out in the world! See below for short thread with open access link to paper www.nytimes.com/2026/04/29/s...

Scientists Unveil ‘Long Lost’ Map for Smell

nytimes.com

Oh they've really got him up against the ropes now.

🧵 New preprint led by @bingbrunton.bsky.social, @elliottabe.bsky.social, @lawrencehu.bsky.social We gave a worm brain control of a fly body and it walked What did we learn? Nothing, other than deep reinforcement learning is effective We call it the digital sphinx www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

New preprint from my lab! We study how reinforcement learning & selective attention interact. To do so, we built a set of models describing different ways that value & reward prediction error can modulate top-down attention. We compare model outcomes to monkey data from a color value learning task

bioRxiv Neuroscience@biorxiv-neursci.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Modulation of feature attention by reward prediction error explains value learning behavior https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.04.10.717847v1