Tim Vogels

@tpvogels.bsky.social

Boutique Neurotheory & Snazz Compneuro at IST Austria

2 tweeprints to go. Good morning! If you've moved already today, you probably asked yourself: how? How did I even get up? Not the hangover. How does your nervous system orchestrate your muscles so well? We've been asking ourselves, too: How can fixed networks produce so many firing patterns?

Tim Vogels@tpvogels.bsky.social · 3w ago

Playing Pong with spikes, dancing rate networks, composite engrams & #ihngrams4engrams. The labs most recent work-in-progress, now on biorxiv.com. Stay tuned for more Pong doi.org/10.64898/202... Dale doi.org/10.64898/202... Composite engrams doi.org/10.64898/202... Ihngrams doi.org/10.64898/202...

Small sub panel of the "Dale" paper's Fig. 1 ,depicting a humanoid dancing with joy. The paper is about how motor cortex can orchestrate a rich and flexible repertoire of network dynamics for rhythmic and goal-directed movements. Computational studies have begun to illuminate the mechanistic origins of this repertoire, but a comprehensive model that can explain the emergence of both transient and self-sustained dynamics is still missing. Condruz et al. show that three simple ingredients: Dalean connectivity, stability, and nonlinear neural responses, suffice to reverse-engineer networks that produce transient, steady-state, and self-sustained periodic activity. A single dynamical principle underlies this repertoire: the interaction of non-normal amplification, inherent to Dalean networks, with neuronal nonlinearity, so to ignite and sustain multi-stable, controllable dynamics. The approach yields entire families of connectivity matrices that require no hand-tuning or learning of weights. Without fitting them to data, these networks reproduce the population-level signatures of motor cortex, implying that the richness of cortical dynamics need not be sculpted by learning, but may emerge from simple biological ingredients. But really, we just feel like dancing with JOY!!

Gentle reminder to my biosci tweeps that there are graduate students and postdocs in non-STEM disciplines at your University. Their compensation may differ somewhat from what is most familiar to you.

Heya @cimoore444.bsky.social, tell us the story around that paper again? I remember you told me not having heard of Carl vanVreeswijk's work; thinking everyone knew E and I were tightly locked; not worth a bigger fuss? Then, five years on, it was big news, albeit published by elseone? Story time!

Tim Vogels@tpvogels.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Thursday PSA: What's the first experimental observation of excitation inhibition balance? Probably (very likely) the (somewhat understated) (& undercited) Moore 1998 JNeurophys paper, Figure 7/ 8, in wich they casually observe E/I interactions, no drama. journals.physiology.org/doi/pdf/10.1...

With just four molecules, you get a grid cell attractor with functional 2D path integration. With N molecules, you get exponentially many Hebbian assemblies with discrete attractor dynamics. With smart biases between the molecules, you can get any dynamical system. Sequences, motor programs, …

*** New paper from the lab in Nature Comms !! *** “Noradrenaline causes a spread of association in the hippocampal cognitive map” by the amazing @reneecabbage.bsky.social in collab. w labs of Jill O’Reilly, Will Clarke, and modeling from Prakriti Parthasarathy and @tpvogels.bsky.social, see below!

Renée Koolschijn@reneecabbage.bsky.social · 7mo ago

Very pleased to share that our study “Noradrenaline causes a spread of association in the hippocampal cognitive map” is out in @natcomms.nature.com (my final PhD paper, only 3.5 years post PhD! 🙃) Find the paper here: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

This is such a cool idea! Not long term "networks" of young profs that create and cement in in-groups and out-groups, but summer schools, tailored to the acute needs of the young PI. Transient, but tailored, tidal and totally timeous, too. Terrific. Try today!

The Viking (Gunnar Blohm)@gunnarblohm.bsky.social · 9mo ago

@kordinglab.bsky.social and I ran a summer school last year to help young profs (<5 yrs) in systems/comp neuro thrive. compneurosci.com/Neuro4Pros/i... It was great! Now we want to know if you'd be interested in participating if we did this again this year? Let us know!

Excited to see the paper fully published. It's an important milestone for training SNNs with exact gradients, replacing our earlier tricks of a "delay line augmentation" to capture temporal relationships. Delays can now be learnt alongside weights naturally. Amazing work @mbalazs98.bsky.social !

Balázs@mbalazs98.bsky.social · 11mo ago

Our paper on event-based delay learning is now published! @neworderofjamie.bsky.social @drtnowotny.bsky.social TL;DR: It’s now possible to train synaptic delays in large-scale spiking neural networks with high temporal precision—even in recurrent connections. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

13 yrs ago some crusty prof asked me if I were "able to teach quantum chromo dynamics" during a faculty interview, as a means to disqualify me (his preferred candidate got the job, surprise!). These days, I am subjugated vicariously, when my postdocs experience the same BS. WTAF. So infuriating.

Last of my fave books back on a shelf, after 5 years in a box. I wouldn’t have thought it takes a full grant cycle to move but here we are. And there’s still more boxes. Of garbage. Mostly. But could not be happier to have the books back

Bild

"Spiking Networks Hate It! Find Out the One Plasticity Trick They Don’t Want You to Know! Never stabilise models by hand again." - I woke up thinking we missed an opportunity with the title of this one. :/ www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... Also: It snowed in Vienna, 10cm white fluffies! Happy Sunday!

Inhibitory Plasticity Balances Excitation and Inhibition in Sensory Pathways and Memory Networks

Plasticity at inhibitory synapses maintains balanced excitatory and inhibitory synaptic inputs at cortical neurons.

science.org

...and when I say @worldwideneuro.bsky.social, I really mean @bozelosp.bsky.social, obvs. Also, ...there is an all new front end for worldwideneuro coming soon. Stay tuned!

Tim Vogels@tpvogels.bsky.social · 11mo ago

Here is the product of a collab between @thetransmitter.bsky.social, @worldwideneuro.bsky.social & @moritzstefaner.bsky.social A portrait of the #StateofNeuro 2025: Text mining of (publicly available) neuro resources: Easy in concept, tricky in realisation, made possible by @simonsfoundation.org 🙏