Excited to see this work published! We find that the brain codes semantic relationships similar to contextual LLMs (like GPT2) but unlike LLMs, uses contrastive coding to prevent confusion of highly similar words. Many thanks to the reviewers and BCM neurosurgery team! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A population code for semantics in human hippocampus - Nature Neuroscience

Franch et al. show that human hippocampal neurons encode the meanings of the words we hear through distributed, context-sensitive population activity that mirrors some features of large language model...

nature.com

If you are at Bernstein, come by at poster 60 session IV (Wed 2pm), Charlotte will present our results on compositional and abstract representations of social stimuli in the monkey face patch system. Particularly proud of this as it’s the first poster from the first student of the lab 😊

Google finally updated some of its satellite images of Gaza and my god, it's horrific. The entirety of Rafah has been demolished. The majority of Khan Younis is in ruins. Entire towns completely leveled and erased of the map.

Summer xkcd.com/3299/

🎯

Grace Lindsay@neurograce.bsky.social · 2mo ago

MIT has put out an "AI and Education" report summarizing what they've found at their own institution. Seems thoughtful. aiandeducation.mit.edu/report/

pay living wages for all workers. tax the shit out of billionaires. happy labor day.

The superposition of these two studies — both incredible — reflect a snapshot of "one big thing" systems neuroscience has yet to resolve. In mice: 1. Task-related signals are everywhere. 2. Absent large swaths of "everywhere," suprisingly sophisticated learning & behavior remains.

Textbook: tracking position during navigation is primarily the job of the hippocampus. Recent findings suggest a more complicated story. Recording >20k neurons brainwide, we indeed find spatial representations in every region! With @kenneth-harris.bsky.social and @carandinilab.net

bioRxiv Neuroscience@biorxiv-neursci.bsky.social · last mo.

Brainwide representation of navigation https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.08.29.747979v1

🚨Update: Our analysis of global APC expenditure has now been expanded to cover more publishers (7 -> 14) and more years (2019-2025). We estimate $15B in APCs paid over seven years, $3.7B in 2025 alone. Elsevier crosses the $1B threshold by itself in 2025. arxiv.org/abs/2608.16322 #ScholComm

Eric Schares@eschares.bsky.social · 2y ago

🚨 Preprint! We combine our recent open dataset of #APC prices with the article counts per journal-year from #OpenAlex to estimate how much the academic community has paid in APCs over the last 5 years. A. $8.349 billion ($8.968 B in 2023 USD) $2.5B in 2023 alone. arxiv.org/abs/2407.16551 #metasci

Excited to share that I'll be starting as a junior professor and Emmy Noether awardee at the University of Göttingen this October! 🥳 🚀 I'll be hiring #phd students and #postdoc across #machinelearning, #neuroscience and #cogsci: modirlab.github.io/open-positio... Please spread the word! 🙏

Today in @thenation.com: a harrowing piece written from inside the Dilley ICE detention center by Maryam Tahmasebi, a green card holder who's been locked up along with her husband and son for months despite none of them committing any crime. www.thenation.com/article/soci...

One Woman’s Message From the Hell of ICE Detention

My husband, son, and I have been locked up for months—despite being permanent residents with no criminal record. It is an unendurable, unending nightmare.

thenation.com

Confused about all this talk of compositionality in neuroscience? Read our new perspective www.nature.com/articles/s41... with authors Reidar Riveland and Alex Pouget.

The compositionality continuum as a principle for studying the neural basis of intelligence - Nature Neuroscience

Compositionality exists on a continuum of increasing complexity rather than as a binary trait. Studying its implementation in simpler biological and artificial systems is the most tractable path towar...

nature.com

Fin/ check out the paper at www.nature.com/articles/s41...! Huge thanks to Pia O'Neill (new assistant prof at Dartmouth sites.dartmouth.edu/oneill-lab/) for leading this project, and to @stefanofusi.bsky.social & Daniel Salzman for the fantastic collaboration! Cover artwork matteofarinella.com/

The representational geometry of emotional states in basolateral amygdala - Nature Neuroscience

O’Neill, Posani and colleagues show that while single amygdala neurons encode multiple emotional state-related variables (for example, valence, fear and safety), population-level geometry can enable o...

nature.com

For a neural circuit to be "specialized", does it need specialized neurons? In our new work - now out in @NatureNeuro - we address this question in the BLA, using representational geometry to propose a new population-centric way of defining circuit specialization. 🧵👇 1/

Very proud to announce our recently published paper led by Gustavo Rodriguez et al. Impaired spatial coding and neuronal hyperactivity in the medial entorhinal cortex of aged APP knock-in mice: www.cell.com/cell-reports...

Impaired spatial coding and neuronal hyperactivity in the medial entorhinal cortex of aged APP knock-in mice

Using the Earth Mover’s Distance and machine learning techniques, Rodriguez et al. show increased instability in spatial representations and impaired spatial information coding in the medial entorhina...

cell.com

Most neurons seem to be generalists, not specialists. Cortical circuits prioritize diversity over categorical structure. Rarely categorical, highly separable representations along the cortical hierarchy www.nature.com/articles/s41... #neuroscience www.newscientist.com/article/2581...

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

This recent post by @earlkmiller.bsky.social got my attention. It shows how abstraction could emerge in the primate PFC. The paper is hard, but the main idea can be simplified to low-dims, so I made fun a little animation. A🧵with my toy model and notes: #neuroskyence #compneuro #NeuroAI

Scientists have long debated whether neurons are jacks of all trades or tend to specialize in one thing. Now @stefanofusi.bsky.social, @lorenzoposani.com & Liam Paninski present new evidence in @nature.com shedding light on how the brain performs complex tasks. tinyurl.com/yj3ew8en

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

Out today on @nature.com! Connecting neural specialization, population geometry, and their functional implications across the cortical hierarchy. So grateful for this beautiful and fun collaboration with @shuqiw.bsky.social, S Muscinelli, L Paninski, and @stefanofusi.bsky.social!

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

Our paper "Rarely categorical, highly separable representations along the cortical hierarchy" is now out in Nature! www.nature.com/articles/s41... In this paper, we studied whether the brain is well-organized and interpretable, both globally and locally. (See thread below.)

New lab paper ! "Shared neural geometries for bilingual semantic representations in human hippocampal neurons" led by @xinyuanyan.bsky.social. 🧵 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Shared neural geometries for bilingual semantic representations in human hippocampal neurons

The human brain has the remarkable ability to comprehend and express similar concepts in multiple languages. To understand how it does so, we examined…

sciencedirect.com

When reality surpasses fiction! Top: fictional forecast for August 2050, broadcast by French TV in 2014 to warn about the consequences of global warming. Bottom: Real French forecast for yesterday, June 22, 2026.

Every summer I repost this article on how to spot drowning. Please read it and pass on. In the last few years I’ve had SIX messages from people who saved a kid’s life after clicking on the link from my feed. slate.com/technology/2...

Drowning Doesn’t Look Like Drowning

Drowning is not the violent, splashing call for help that most people expect.

slate.com

more seriously congrats to the hungarian people for kicking that asshole out

Becoming a parent is much more detrimental to women’s academic careers than it is to men’s Read the full story: go.nature.com/4v4rxmQ

In my utopian vision of the future, instead of offloading all the pointless, annoying work tasks (like reports that none one will read and needlessly opaque forms) to robots, we restructure work and society so that the pointless tasks don't happen at all.

Somebody should invent a socioeconomic system which is good at allocating resources

Postdoc position in Paris: come help develop new generation human brain computer interfaces ⚡🧠💻 Interested? Contact me if you have experience with machine learning (e.g. simulation-based inference, RL, generative/diffusion models) or dynamical systems. See below for + details and retweet 🙏