Tim Behrens
@behrenstimb.bsky.social
Slowly becoming a neuroscientist. EiC @elife.bsky.social
We’re excited to introduce Karla Miller, Ph.D., the 2027 Lauterbur Lecturer! Join us in Vancouver for the 2027 ISMRM & ISMRT Annual Meeting & Exhibition. LEARN MORE: https://ow.ly/JzSi50ZMNaX #ISMRM2027 #ISMRM #ISMRT #MRI #MagneticResonance #Radiology #MedicalImaging #MRTechnologists #Radiographer
This made a social media buzz earlier this year, including an eLife paper. I am now pointing to the eLife correction. The authors used the correct antibody,but referred to the wrong one in the paper. They supplied the original receipts during the correction. elifesciences.org/articles/112...
Correction: p16 deficiency attenuates intervertebral disc degeneration by adjusting oxidative stress and nucleus pulposus cell cycle
elifesciences.org
Sholto David@sholtodavid.bsky.social · 4mo agoToday I'm posting a new blog about an astonishing scientific own goal. Hundreds of papers have reported using a totally wrong antibody to investigate the tumor suppressor p16. This mistake has happened because scientists have muddled the names of two proteins. forbetterscience.com/2026/06/02/m...
Oh. my. god. The biggest scientific publishers are collecting nearly $4 BILLION A YEAR in author fees. This is absurd. We've got to break free of this system. If everyone would just agree to it, we could just post all our new papers on bsky and it wouldn't cost anything. Or something. But not this.
Eric Schares@eschares.bsky.social · 4w ago🚨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
I just posted a few of the awesome recent things we have published in @elife.bsky.social. You can browse them all here elifesciences.org/browse. You can filter whether you just want to see the ones the reviewers raved about, or whether you want to ignore the reviewers and judge for yourselves.
Such beautiful experimental logic to test some of the most important ideas about basic cortical processing.
Tim Behrens@behrenstimb.bsky.social · 4w agoThis is a really really beautiful thing. One of my favourite papers of the year. elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre...
This is a really really beautiful thing. One of my favourite papers of the year. elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre...
🚨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
Reverse engineering neural circuits - @wiringthebrain.bsky.social talks to @behrenstimb.bsky.social www.thetransmitter.org/computationa...
Success stories from computational neuroscience
Kevin Mitchell talks with Timothy Behrens about ring attractors, the role of innate structure, and an expanded view of cognitive maps.
thetransmitter.org
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
My favourite paper of 2026.
Abraham Zelalem Vollan@azvollan.bsky.social · 2mo agoNow in Science: How does the brain’s navigation system allocate its limited representational resources during behavior? We found that grid cells sweep toward locations of interest, providing a potential mechanism for allocating spatial attention in the cognitive map.🧵 science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Kevin Mitchell @wiringthebrain.bsky.social talks to Timothy Behrens @behrenstimb.bsky.social about which neural systems the field has genuinely cracked. #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/computationa...
Success stories from computational neuroscience
Kevin Mitchell talks with Timothy Behrens about ring attractors, the role of innate structure, and an expanded view of cognitive maps.
thetransmitter.org
This was a fun chat about getting to mechanisms in cognition…
Kevin Mitchell@wiringthebrain.bsky.social · 2mo agoI had the pleasure of interviewing @behrenstimb.bsky.social for @thetransmitter.bsky.social, all about the goals and approaches and successes of computational neuroscience! www.thetransmitter.org/computationa...
An absolutely beautiful thing.
Helen Barron@helencbarron.bsky.social · 2mo ago***New preprint from the lab*** showing “Generative replay across hippocampal-neocortical circuits”. In sleep we show spiking sequences in V1 (sensory neocortex!) that represent information that has not been directly experienced www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... @bndu.ox.ac.uk @ndcnoxford.bsky.social
Have @ukri.org published the reasoning behind this decision? It seems like such an extraordinary decision on the surface that surely it should be defended in public. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
Jodrell Bank's Lovell telescope faces axe in science cuts, BBC understands
Astronomers warn it would tear the heart out of UK science, and leave a generation untrained.
bbc.co.uk
New perspective paper from our lab: “The hippocampus as a generative model” out now !! royalsocietypublishing.org/rstb/article... The traditional view of the hippocampus is that it creates a cognitive map. Here we extend this view to conceptualise the hippocampus as a “generative model”.
The hippocampus as a generative model
Abstract. A generative model can be defined as a model of the latent causes of sensory input that can be used to generate new data samples. By examining em
royalsocietypublishing.org
This is one of my favourite things. Direct replication of MEG and fMRI findings in intracranial recordings and a demonstration that cortical representations update in the right direction around hippocampal ripples.
Blake Richards@tyrellturing.bsky.social · 3mo agoFor a long time I felt like there was a hesitation in neuroscience to ascribe anything like a planning function to the various "replay" events we see in the hippocampus, but I think this is rapidly changing. Here's another new entry in human epilepsy patients: www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🧠📈 🧪
For a long time I felt like there was a hesitation in neuroscience to ascribe anything like a planning function to the various "replay" events we see in the hippocampus, but I think this is rapidly changing. Here's another new entry in human epilepsy patients: www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🧠📈 🧪
Human hippocampal ripples coordinate planning sequences and compositional representations in neocortex - Nature Neuroscience
Human hippocampal ripples and replay interact with the prefrontal cortex to update mental representations online, letting the brain compositionally combine familiar elements in new ways for flexible p...
nature.com
It wouldn’t be FENS if there wasn’t some sort of clash - definitely check out awesome work by @aryabhomick.bsky.social in Friday morning’s poster session tracking learning dynamics of abstract task structure in the PFC as well as evidence for complex hierarchical learning in rodents!
Mohamady El-Gaby@melgaby.bsky.social · 3mo agoIf you’re still around on Friday morning I’ll be giving a talk about the latest work and ideas from our lab - alongside lots of great theory and experimental talks in the “Latent representations for smart decisions” symposium. 5/5
Same session contains this exciting new work from friends: Athena Apostolelli @sandra-neuro.bsky.social @mathiassablemeyer.bsky.social and @behrenstimb.bsky.social showing PFC learning dynamics in a spontaneously emerging type of abstraction behaviour in mice
#FENS2026 poster alert: "Combining flexible electrode recordings with two-photon imaging to investigate brain-wide network coupling" Come to our poster PS01-07AM-375 on Tuesday morning to chat with Linus Meienberg and me, how we use ultra-flexible electrodes together with optical recordings.
Is spatial navigation innate 🧠? Using #NeuroPixels we show that the #torus 🍩 underlying the #GridCell map exists already on day 10 in rats — before pups open eyes and ears and before they start upright walking. 🧵1:4 👇 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
biorxiv.org
Ever wondered how the hippocampal cognitive map is read-out? @changmin-yu.bsky.social @zilong-ji.bsky.social with Jake & John, show that, during navigation, theta sweeps indicate remembered goal-directions (cf. current/next movements or perceptual targets) 1/2 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
PSA for trainees cold emailing with interest in joining a lab: Be careful about your use of LLMs in writing these emails!! It is now *extremely* common to get emails with a bizarrely-detailed, clearly-LLM take on a paper finding or with specific phrases pulled from the lab website. Don’t do this!
