📣 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 · 2w ago

Thoughts on the various Trump administration proposals to revamp US science funding - and what they all have in common:

Why I’m a fan of the Oxford comma.

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

Love having data to show the students

Ethan Mollick@emollick.bsky.social · 2mo ago

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.

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 · 2mo ago

Agentic 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 · 2mo ago

Agentic 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 · 2mo 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. 🧠 🔁

Frequentists mogged by priormaxxing

Statistics aka Likelihoodmaxxing

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 · 2mo ago

We 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 (Gutenberg Parenthesis) Jarvis@jeffjarvis.bsky.social · 2mo 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 · 2mo ago

Diurnal 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 ago

What 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?

Some reports say over 500 schools, 55 libraries, & 25 universities hit. You can debate the numbers, but hitting Sharif University & Beheshti is like hitting MIT & Stanford. I keep wondering: How would the scientific community respond differently if it was those universities? What’s the difference?

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."

Cosyne invited me to give a long tutorial (4 hours!) on methods to quantify differences high-d neural recordings across animals, brain regions, deep neural nets, etc. The recording is up on youtube. I hope it inspires more research on this fundamental topic! www.youtube.com/watch?v=n44x...

Cosyne 2026 - Cosyne Tutorial: Comparative Analysis of Neural Population Codes

YouTube video by Cosyne Talks

youtube.com

ArviZ 1.0 is out! We have refactored it to be more modular, flexible & lightweight. For an overview of the changes, check the migration guide. python.arviz.org/en/stable/us...

Checkout the notebook of this epic neuroscience dataset now on @dandiarchive.org and analyzed with pynapple!

DANDI Archive@dandiarchive.org · 5mo ago

Mission: record hippocampal place cells in zero gravity Crew: 3 rats with electrode arrays Vehicle: Space Shuttle Columbia Status: data now publicly available on DANDI, 28 years later The ratstronauts' mission is finally complete. 🐀🚀 h/t NASA about.dandiarchive.org/blog/2026/02...

So happy to announce my first published paper: Neuropixels reveal laminar microcircuit organization in monkey V1 in vivo www.pnas.org/doi/epdf/10....