Ryan Senne (he/him)
@ryguy.io
Computational Neuroscience Ph.D. Student @ Boston University. Labs of Dr. Brian DePasquale, Ben Scott, & Steve Ramirez. #JuliaLang stan.
My initial take on this is that yes some of our previous questions are either solved or feel less relevant. But, scaling isn't producing human like intelligence. There are still fascinating questions. How do we learn and compute with so little sample data and energy? for example.
If you are an undergraduate student interested in computational and systems neuroscience research, this is your chance to attend #COSYNE27 !!! Apply here for our undergrad travel grant tinyurl.com/cos27ugtravel deadline is Oct 30 (and if you are not an undergraduate, please help to spread the word!)
Cosyne 2027 Undergraduate Travel Grant Program
This is the application form for the Cosyne 2027 Undergraduate Travel Grant Program. The deadline to apply is October 30th 2026.
tinyurl.com
Check out my latest work from the Ramirez lab with co-author @rsuthard.bsky.social! It’s got astrocytes—what more do you need!?
Steve Ramirez@okaysteve.bsky.social · 3w ago🚨 new work from the lab! "Hippocampal astrocytic sequences emerge during learning and memory recall" by @ryguy.io & @rsuthard.bsky.social thank you to the entire team for your camaraderie and for muscling through science together 🧠 -- we welcome all feedback! nature.com/articles/s41...
Nature research paper: Amygdala astrocyte primary cilium mechanisms contribute to stress behaviours go.nature.com/3UiC3bT
Amygdala astrocyte primary cilium mechanisms contribute to stress behaviours - Nature
Amygdala astrocyte primary cilia are disrupted during stress, and their restoration leads to improvements in stress-related behaviour in mice.
go.nature.com
📣 NEW! I’ve just released the BIGGEST and perhaps most creative project I’ve ever worked on! “Searching for Birds” searchingforbirds.visualcinnamon.com 🐤 A project, an article, an exploration that dives into the data that connects humans with birds, by looking at how we search for birds.
Harrison gives the state-space modeling tutorial at CNN
I co-sign this great summary from @dereklowe.bsky.social . The goal is to destroy academic science, and these are the reasons. And all the “gold standard” and “needs reform” and “not high risk” stuff is transparent bullshit to hide the ball on what they are doing.
Derek Lowe@dereklowe.bsky.social · 2mo agoThoughts on the various Trump administration proposals to revamp US science funding - and what they all have in common:
Hippocampal engrams configure prefrontal context representations to guide flexible decisions Impressive combo of methods to manipulate and record this process: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Hippocampal engrams configure prefrontal context representations to guide flexible decisions
Flexible behavior requires using past experiences to configure cortical computations to suit current task demands. A central question in neuroscience is how memory representations control such reconfi...
biorxiv.org
Polls show that only 8% of Americans have a positive view of Adolf Hitler. But in this Palo Alto ketamine bar, that number feels much higher
Today I learned that some of my nested quantile visualizations implemented for R and Python in github.com/betanalpha/m... have been implemented for Julia in the FlexiChains library, pysm.dev/FlexiChains..... Neat!
GitHub - betanalpha/mcmc_visualization_tools: Markov Chain Monte Carlo Visualization Tools
Markov Chain Monte Carlo Visualization Tools. Contribute to betanalpha/mcmc_visualization_tools development by creating an account on GitHub.
github.com
I’m so outrageously mad having realized a bunch of inane reviewer comments are probably AI. I’m also too busy and would rather be compen$ated for my reviews, but 1) who are we as academics if we don’t value reading and thinking about the literature and 2) dont waste my/student’s time with slop!!
Really don't like how every person with a social security account now gets unsolicited political messages from the SSA.
@aloctavodia.bsky.social has been porting Bayesian Workflow book avehtari.github.io/Bayesian-Wor... case studies to Python using CmdStanPy, numpyro, ArviZ, Bambi, and kulprit arviz-devs.github.io/bayesian-wor... He is working on porting the rest of the case studies, too
Bayesian Workflow book: Case studies in Python – Bayesian Workflow case studies in Python
arviz-devs.github.io
More evidence, from a large-scale study in China, that using AI hurts learning if it undermines mental effort. When homework time drops due to AI use, so do test scores. Across studies, there is a clear theme: AI tutoring in support of classes is good, using AI to "help" with homework is bad.
How can AI change theoretical neuroscience? Technologies separate us from the mechanics of computation. Are we liberated to focus on the big picture or abandoning the substrate of thought? Born from an ongoing experiment in my lab about balancing these technologies for research and training
The Transmitter @thetransmitter.bsky.social · 4mo agoAgentic coding makes it possible to specify a neuroscience model in hours instead of months, writes @briandepasquale.bsky.social. The field risks becoming prolific but shallow—generating models faster than we can generate insights. #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/the-big-pict...
Interesting Transmitter article by Brian DePasquale on what will be the effect of the increasingly widespread use of LLMs to code up research ideas in neuroscience. Includes a somewhat sceptical commentary from me. 😉
The Transmitter @thetransmitter.bsky.social · 4mo agoAgentic coding makes it possible to specify a neuroscience model in hours instead of months, writes @briandepasquale.bsky.social. The field risks becoming prolific but shallow—generating models faster than we can generate insights. #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/the-big-pict...
Check out the new work from the DePaq lab!
Brian DePasquale@briandepasquale.bsky.social · 4mo ago🚨 New preprint from the lab! 🚨 We introduce BiXformer, a bidirectional cross-attention transformer for disentangling inter-regional neural dynamics. Recordings from multiple regions superimpose feedforward & feedback signals 🔁, offset in time, making it difficult to tease these signals apart. 🧠 🔁
In Jan 2029 a trifecta should pass a large bill package that overturns somewhere between 20 and 50 Roberts Court decisions of the last three decades. We can roll back what they did to legalize political bribery, enable fraud, empower white collar criminals, destroy the govt, etc.
Scabby Don't@generalmonkey.bsky.social · 4mo agoWe need Congress to be able to pass resolutions that state that a particular decision, while not being overturned, used an interpretation that does not represent the will of Congress, so it shall not be considered as precedent.
Russell Vought’s OMB published a rule today attacking peer review, which came along with a Murdoch NY Post article favorable to the rule- and attacking peer review. Which all makes the timing of yesterday’s Murdoch WSJ article attacking peer review seem much more suspicious!
Jeff (Hot Type) Jarvis@jeffjarvis.bsky.social · 4mo ago#MurdochJournal attacks peer review as, uh, woke "group think." If the academy is so left-wing, it's amazing how easy it for the Journal, Times, and Post to find right-wing profs to write op-eds. A Way to Challenge the Groupthink of Scholarly Journals www.wsj.com/opinion/a-wa...
Move over, GLM-HMM—there’s a new hidden Markov model in town. In our new preprint, we introduce the DDM-HMM: a model that jointly infers latent decision states from reaction times and choices. Using 24-hour behavioral data from rats, we found that evidence accumulation changes with time of day!
bioRxivpreprint@biorxivpreprint.bsky.social · 4mo agoDiurnal rhythms of choice: a novel state-dependent drift diffusion model uncovers time-dependent changes in rat decision making https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.05.25.727672v1
And finally it was published! Massive thanks to my coauthors, the editor and reviewers, and the institutions that supported our research. journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...
What did the dove sing to Pope Gregory? Ancestral melody reconstruction in Gregorian chant using Bayesian phylogenetics
An attractive goal in the study of Gregorian chant melodies is reconstructing unobserved melodies as they may have been transmitted along their history, especially as early chant notation does not cap...
journals.plos.org
Gustavo A. Ballen@gaballench.bsky.social · 2y agoWhat did the dove sing to Pope Gregory? A thread on phylogenetics and cultural evolution featuring our new preprint with Jan Hajic jr. and Klára Mühlova (www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...) and previous contributions to the field.
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
Super excited to (finally!) show our work on identifying cell types! Now in press www.nature.com/articles/s41.... We show how to identify cell types from ephys recordings *without* optotagging. This opens the study of not just individual cell types, but the interacting neural circuit during behavior
There seems to be a broad perception across psychology and neuroscience that work shouldn't be "too technical" in order to reach the broadest possible audience. While I think we should strive for accessibility, I feel that this attitude can also be self-defeating: why are we dumbing down?
The Orange Cat Brain Atlas is here. 🧠🐈 Today, we published the first comprehensive cellular map of the orange cat brain. The new atlas reveals a single, specialized neuron responsible for behaviors like staring at walls, knocking objects off tables, and the 3am "zoomies."
