After years of analyzing thousands of drawings from hundreds of adults and children, I am excited to share my first ever paper (w/ @samiyousif.bsky.social )! Using a simple drawing task, we show how topological structure is represented in the mind and its importance in spatial memory.

Our task-switching paper is now out at Current Biology! www.cell.com/current-biol... We find that that our brains reset to a task-neutral state between trials, providing flexibility when the upcoming task is uncertain. RNNs also learn this strategy, but only when trained to switch tasks.

Excited to share the lab’s first publication, co-led by talented postdoc Chuyi Su @chuyisu.bsky.social We leveraged cell type-specific optogenetics in the macaque cerebral cortex to elucidate the role of excitatory and inhibitory neurons in visual form processing. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Finally out: a very cool study by @jenbussell.bsky.social from the Axel lab--summarized here by @thetransmitter.bsky.social-- on the urge to know in mice, even without any immediate benefit for the animal

The Transmitter @thetransmitter.bsky.social · 2w ago

“All men by nature desire to know” is the first line of Aristotle’s seminal work “Metaphysics.” New findings show that this statement extends across the animal kingdom to mice, too. #neuroskyence By @sarahthau.bsky.social www.thetransmitter.org/behavior/wou...

Happy to share our new study comparing aggression level across 7 strains of mice, led by a talented undergraduate student, Xiuzhi Dai. Strain differences in aggression can be explained a lot by differences in the physiological properties of VMHvl cells. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Riley did a very good blog about this as a Library Science nerd that’s worth reading aftermath.site/google-searc...

i don’t want “accelerated”, “increased-speed” or “fast-paced” research. in fact, am not interested in any shortcuts to mindful, intentional, and slow science

New ms! During choice behavior, OFC neurons encode decision input and output, suggesting the presence of a neural decision circuit within this area. Computational models support the hypothesis, but little is known about actual – or at least functional – connectivity in OFC.

New NSF BIO solicitation says expected number of awards is 250-300. Historically, the number of awards is closer to 800-1000 for the Directorate of Bio Sciences: grantwitness.org/nsf/analyses... Unless I'm missing large, non-core programs, this seems really not good?

Agency Pulse: Grantmaking at NSF

An independent, up-to-date, grant-level record of federal science funding disruptions in the United States.

grantwitness.org

Microbiologist Elizabeth Hazen (b. #OTD 1885) & chemist Rachel Brown were granted a patent for Nystatin, an anti-fungal med in 1957. In 2016, it was the 217th most prescribed medication in the US w/ >2MM prescriptions. They gave all $13.4MM in royalties to a fund that heavily supported #WomenInSTEM

Sometimes we know an experience is important in the moment. Other times, its importance only becomes clear after the fact. Do these two cases have different consequences for memory? In our new paper we found that both kinds of prioritization impact memory in different ways! doi.org/10.1162/OPMI...

Prioritizing Detailed Item Memories Through Post-Encoding Motivation Requires Consolidation

Abstract. Prioritizing memories that are motivationally salient is adaptive for goal-directed behavior, ensuring that information being retained is the most relevant to future goals. Past research dem...

doi.org

Difficult decisions take time, but can we keep all accumulated evidence in mind long enough to make better choices? We find that working-memory limitations constrain decision-making, and these effects are modulated by dopamine. biorxiv.org/content/10.6... bioRxiv out with Cina Aghamohammadi et al.

Working memory limitations and dopamine modulation in probabilistic reasoning

Difficult decisions require gathering evidence over extended periods, placing demands on working memory. Yet, how working memory limitations affect decision-making remains largely unknown. We trained ...

biorxiv.org

These findings reveal how leader–follower dynamics are instantiated as asymmetric prefrontal representations, linking role-based decision-making to egocentric partner encoding at the cellular resolution. (2/3)

First study out! Using a new cooperative paradigm and multi-agent inverse RL, we show that mice spontaneously adopt leader/follower roles, and the prefrontal cortex encodes these role dynamics and an egocentric social value map of the partner’s position. (1/3) www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Asymmetric prefrontal representations for leader–follower dynamics - Nature

Mice spontaneously form leader and follower roles during cooperation, and the medial prefrontal cortex encodes these role dynamics and an egocentric social value map of the partner’s position.

nature.com

📣Algorithmic Grammar of Flexible Cognition: A Walk through Latent Operations osf.io/preprints/ps... Flexible behavior moves adaptively btwn cognitive modes. But units of analysis remain representations & few operations. Proposal: formalize open-ended cognition as walk over latent operations 1/n

they've done the bouba/kiki test on chocolate shapes now, i love linguistics

Research Investigating the Relationship between Shape and Taste of Chocolate Pieces Printed by a 3D…

This is Shigeo YOSHIDA, a Senior Researcher at OMRON SINIC X (OSX).

medium.com

@arthurpr4t.bsky.social has a new preprint with important results on a famous psychophysical law (Weber's law). It isn't, in fact, a law, because it can be broken. A more fundamental principle (efficient coding) shows when and why Weber's law holds true. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Efficient coding makes and breaks Weber's law

Weber's law is a rare quantitative regularity in psychology, yet its origins remain debated. Here we provide causal evidence that it arises from the more fundamental principle of efficient coding. Thi...

biorxiv.org

I gave a talk in our ISRC CN3 summer school yesterday on computational modelling of learning and memory, at the end I threw in a list of what I consider the big open questions in the the theory of learning in neural circuits. What did I miss??

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

🚨Now out in Science Advances @science.org: #Parkinson's patients off dopamine medication (PD-) explore too much and exploit too little. Modeling shows they overvalue uncertainty, not that they choose randomly. On levodopa (PD+) they become comparable to controls www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... 🧵👇

Dopamine depletion in Parkinson’s increases directed but not random exploration

Levodopa restores the balance between exploration and exploitation in Parkinson’s disease.

science.org

This is very solid work. It prompts a question I have never had a satisfying answer for: why do people want to infer spikes from calcium imaging data? The calcium signal contains sufficient information for *any* inference procedure, and none of the bias. Why don't people work directly with calcium?

Peter Rupprecht@ptrrupprecht.bsky.social · last mo.

Excited to share our work now in Nature Methods! We wrote this manuscript to help others better analyze and interpret calcium imaging data. As a central aspect, we show why nonlinear behavior of calcium indicators matters in practice. Very happy about this work!

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/

Where does curiosity come from? Neuroscientist @jenbussell.bsky.social wants to know. She found that mice, like us, seek information with no external benefit. Her new Nature Neuroscience research links this desire for knowledge to cells in the brain's orbitofrontal cortex. See tinyurl.com/3xjt8e5c

How does the brain represent the value of knowledge? In our paper--out now at Nature Neuroscience--we identify a representation of intrinsic information value within neural population structures in the orbitofrontal cortex in mice. www.nature.com/articles/s41593-026-02377-y #neuroskyence 🧠🧪 (1/8)

Representations of the intrinsic value of information in mouse orbitofrontal cortex - Nature Neuroscience

Mice are motivated to seek information of no extrinsic value. Recording neural activity in orbitofrontal cortex reveals a representation of the value of information that is distinct from the value of ...

nature.com

After a long break, I’m back to long-form blogging! The first population atlas of the human vagus gives us an extraordinary wiring map. But what do the wires actually do? I connect it to new mouse psychophysics, organ-targeted ultrasound and our human findings. www.the-ecg.org/2026/07/29/v...

The vagus has a map. Interoception still needs a model.

The first population-level atlas of the human vagus nerve has arrived. But a map of the wiring does not tell you what the wires are saying -- on va...

the-ecg.org

If an action results in error, each neuron requires an individualized teaching signal that guides change in its output. This is the credit assignment problem of learning. Are there neurons in the brain that can compute such a sophisticated teaching signal? Yes. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Climbing fibers encode the gradient of a loss function for the cerebellum

Neurons in the brain are often many synapses away from motoneurons, yet if a movement results in error, each distant neuron needs a teacher that considers its specific contribution to production of th...

biorxiv.org

Cellular mechanisms of serotonergic psychedelics - apical hypercontextualisation www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Cellular mechanisms of serotonergic psychedelics - apical hypercontextualisation

Classical serotonergic psychedelics primarily exert their profound effects through agonism at the serotonin 2A (5-HT2A) receptor, which is abundantly …

sciencedirect.com

It was a big deal for my identity when I finally developed the confidence to write in a book. It felt like a taboo, a special privilege for Real, Serious Thinkers. Every time I do it now it’s a tiny reminder that I can engage with any thinker, anywhere, across time and space.

“We humans tend to overestimate how special we are” www.nytimes.com/2026/07/21/s...

Monkeys Understand Shapes in Almost the Same Way as Humans (Gift Article)

Our geometric intuition, long considered something that sets us apart, seems to be shared with other primates.

nytimes.com

This is a really interesting and important study: www.nature.com/articles/s41... However, isn't it concerning that sweeping conclusions about functional organization of cortex are being reached on the basis of a single task?

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