Zilong Ji
@zilong-ji.bsky.social
Postdoc in Burgess Lab at UCL Computational neuroscience, hippocampus and NeuroAI 🤓🧠 Loves hiking 🗻 skiing ⛷️ and cooking 🍳
I thought the entorhinal-hippocampal circuit may underlie a world model, did I miss anything here?
New paper with Celia Bougou, Richard Andersen, Josh Tenenbaum, @rtpramod.bsky.social and others: A Unified World Model in Human Posterior Parietal Cortex. Shoutout to heroic participant RD who let us record from individual neurons while he performed our tasks. doi.org/10.64898/202... A Thread...
A huge thank you to our fantastic sponsors for supporting the UCL NeuroAI Annual Conference 2026! 🧠🤖🚀 👏 Callosum: www.callosum.com 👏 Google DeepMind: deepmind.google 👏 @sainsburywellcome.bsky.social : www.sainsburywellcome.org
callosum.com
UCL NeuroAI@ucl-neuroai.bsky.social · 2d ago🚀 Just one week to go until the UCL NeuroAI Annual Conference 2026! 🧠🤖 Exciting talks and plenty of brain-meets-AI discussions! Looking forward to catching up with familiar faces and meeting new ones! 📅 11 November | Kennedy Lecture Theatre, London www.ucl.ac.uk/life-science... #NeuroAI
This preprint reminds me of the theta-paced flickering between hippocampal cognitive maps reported by Jezek et al. 15 years ago in Nat Neurosci: www.nature.com/articles/nat.... （Magic theta🤔）
Theta-paced flickering between place-cell maps in the hippocampus - Nature
It is thought that external environments are represented in the brain by a network of hippocampal place cells indicating discrete points on a neuronal 'map'. Place representations have been shown to t...
nature.com
@koenvervaeke.bsky.social · 2w agox.com/doristsao/st...
Since grid-like representations were reported in human fMRI in 2010 by @doellerlab.bsky.social @caswell.bsky.social @neilburgess10.bsky.social, linking them to rodent grid cells has remained a major puzzle. Excited that our work takes a step towards bridging this gap! Huge credit to the whole team!
Guglielmo Reggio@guglielmoreggio.bsky.social · 2w agoWhere does the six-fold grid signal (HexMod) in human fMRI come from? Our preprint points to firing rate adaptation in grid cells 🧵 1/7 Work with Misun Kim @zilong-ji.bsky.social Daniel Bush @caswell.bsky.social @neilburgess10.bsky.social, on bioRxiv: doi.org/10.64898/202...
Call for papers: NeuroAI 2.0 at AAAI 2027! The 2nd workshop on Neuro for AI & AI for Neuro comes to Montreal, Feb 22-23, 2027 to discuss context-dependent learning, continual learning, and what brains can teach foundation models about adapting. Papers due Nov 20: https://bit.ly/4kaKGAf
We asked a simple question: If we model different brain areas as separate neural networks, connect them together, and train them to navigate a space, can the same types of brain cells and connections emerge naturally in this network? Here's what we found: doi.org/10.64898/202...
doi.org
Zilong Ji@zilong-ji.bsky.social · last mo.Excited that our paper, “The limbic navigation system as a hierarchical RNN”, has been accepted at #NeurIPS! Joint work with two talented students, Huiwen Zhang, Krishna Gorantla, and @neilburgess10.bsky.social. We use a multi-module RNN to explore how the brain’s navigation circuits works.
🚨 Last call for NeuroAI Conference 2026! ⏰ Registration and abstract submissions close at 12pm TODAY! If you’re planning to join us, now might be a good time to stop thinking and start clicking. 🧠🤖🏃💨 The clock is ticking faster than your neurons are firing! ⚡
UCL NeuroAI@ucl-neuroai.bsky.social · 3w agoSubmission deadline in one day!🔍
Early Career Researchers: Apply to present at the 2027 Winter Neuroscience Conference in Sölden, Austria. Deadline 31 Oct: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F... Conference information: www.swc.ucl.ac.uk/winterneuros... @sandra-neuro.bsky.social
Excited that our paper, “The limbic navigation system as a hierarchical RNN”, has been accepted at #NeurIPS! Joint work with two talented students, Huiwen Zhang, Krishna Gorantla, and @neilburgess10.bsky.social. We use a multi-module RNN to explore how the brain’s navigation circuits works.
For our next talk, we will have Arno Onken @arnoonken.bsky.social from the University of Edinburgh, who’ll talk about: "Vision transformer models for predicting neural responses: insights and challenges." 🧠🤖 🗓️Wed 14 October 2026 ⏰1-2pm BST via zoom Register: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/ucl-neuroa...
UCL NeuroAI Talk Series
A series of NeuroAI themed talks organised by the UCL NeuroAI community. Talks will continue on a monthly basis.
eventbrite.co.uk
Next Wednesday — don’t forget to register! 🧠🤖 Ji-An will be talking about the Tiny RNN work recently published in Nature. Tiny networks, big ideas 👀
UCL NeuroAI@ucl-neuroai.bsky.social · 2mo agoOur online seminar series is back for the new academic year! Excited to welcome Dr. Ji-An Li from NYU, who’ll be talking about: "Discovering cognitive strategies with tiny recurrent neural networks" 🧠🤖 🗓️Wed 16 September 2026 ⏰4-5pm BST via zoom Register here: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/ucl-neuroa...
Come join us in London on 11 November — great neuroscience, great AI, great people, and hopefully great fun! 🎉
UCL NeuroAI@ucl-neuroai.bsky.social · 2mo ago📢 🧠🤖Save the date! The 7th UCL NeuroAI Annual Conference will be held on 11 November 2026 in London. We look forward to bringing together communities across neuroscience and AI once again! More details, including keynote speakers and poster submissions, coming soon. #Neuroscience #AI #NeuroAI
Thanks Caswell! Happy to see this out. Recent interesting work from Vollan et al @azvollan.bsky.social showed that the decoded locations from grid cell activity sweep out in a left-right alternative way across successive theta cycles, steered by an “internal direction” signal in parasubiculum.
Caswell Barry@caswell.bsky.social · 8mo agoReally interesting from the Burgess stable — theta sweeps in entorhinal cortex show a dorsoventral gradient, with different spatial scales coordinated at different frequencies. Nice work @zilong-ji.bsky.social @neilburgess10.bsky.social 👏 biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2026.03.08.710351v1
Come and join us for our first online seminar in 2026!
UCL NeuroAI@ucl-neuroai.bsky.social · 10mo agoFor our first UCL #NeuroAI online seminar in 2026, we are happy to welcome Dr. Kristopher Jensen @kristorpjensen.bsky.social (UCL SWC) 🗓️Wed 28 Jan 2026 ⏰2-3pm GMT Talk title: 'A mechanistic theory of planning in prefrontal cortex' Registration: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/ucl-neuroa...
Deadline for these jobs is 5th September, so you've got until next week on Friday to apply! Come join us in beautiful York, complete with Minsters, snickelways, fMRI and OPMs - what more could you ask for?! #neuroskyence #neurojobs #psychscisky #cognition #psychjobs
Aidan Horner@aidanhorner.bsky.social · last yr.2 Lecturer (Assistant Prof) positions available @yorkpsychology.bsky.social! Come join our department! #neuroskyence #cognition #psychscisky #neurojobs jobs.york.ac.uk/vacancy/lect...
🚨 We’re hiring: Associate Professor/Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience 🧠 Lead pioneering imaging-informed cognitive neuroscience research 🌍 Open to international applicants | Visa sponsorship available 📍 Permanent, full-time, on-site 🔗 Apply now: www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...
Excited to share our latest paper: “Phase Precession Relative to Turning Angle in Theta-Modulated Head Direction Cells” together with Dr. Eleonora Lomi (co-first author) Prof. @katejj.bsky.social Prof. Anna Mitchell and Prof. @neilburgess10.bsky.social doi.org/10.1002/hipo...
Phase Precession Relative to Turning Angle in Theta‐Modulated Head Direction Cells
Grid and place cells typically fire at progressively earlier phases within each cycle of the theta rhythm as rodents run across their firing fields, a phenomenon known as theta phase precession. Here...
doi.org
🧠 Our new (NIH funded!) paper reveals how the brain creates internal dynamics during both real- and imagined navigation. We recorded directly from the human hippocampus as participants moved through physical space and when they mentally navigated imagined routes. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Human neural dynamics of real-world and imagined navigation - Nature Human Behaviour
Seeber et al. studied brain recordings from implanted electrodes in freely moving humans. Neural dynamics encoded actual and imagined routes similarly, demonstrating parallels between navigational, im...
nature.com
This is cool! As a CCN student (2017) and a TA during the pandemic (2021), I highly recommend. It is also a good opportunity to explore China. CCN will happen again in Suzhou this time, which is a famous historical and cultural city in China.
Joao Barbosa@jbarbosa.org · 2y agoSuper excited for my first summer school as faculty with such an awesome group! I was a CCN student (2016) and TA (2019), and I highly recommend it. Apply by March 31, 2025 www.csh-asia.org?content/2621
I really enjoyed reading this commentary of our recent paper about modeling left-right sweeps in grid cells: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... from Prof. Michael Hasselmo, Dr. Jennifer Robinson and Dr. Patrick LaChance.
Navigation: Scanning your future path
A new model of how we plan pathways through the world shows that populations of neurons that code our current position, including entorhinal grid cells and head direction cells, could interact to aid ...
cell.com
Ha ha. I am indecently excited by this! I think there are so many amazing neuroscience stories that don’t get told it’s great to be able to show some of them off! I hope the kids (and adults!) that read this will be as excited as I am about the way the brain works.
Lucy Ann Unwin@lucyannunwin.bsky.social · 2y agoIt's in The Bookseller previews, which makes it official!! My non-fiction collaboration with @caswell.bsky.social - INSIDE YOUR BRAIN - is due in 3 months time!! & it happily coincides with @waterstones.bsky.social 25% off pre-order campaign! Treat yourself! > www.waterstones.com/book/inside-...
Very happy to see this out! Based on the microcircuit identified by Vollan et al., we made some interesting predictions about theta sweeps along the parasubiculum-MEC-HPC pathway, especially theta modulated head direction cells which direct the left-right sweeps in downstream grid cells.
Neil Burgess@neilburgess10.bsky.social · 2y agoReally impressive identification of this functional circuit! Even better it just needs continuous attractor dynamics & firing rate adaptation (or similar) to work, which also makes some new predictions (model with @zilong-ji.bsky.social, Tianhao Chu, Si Wu) www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
I have been reading about cognitive maps and finding this literature fascinating, in particular that they could be reused to generalize. But is there really evidence for this? More generally, IYO what piece of evidence is missing to demonstrates the brain uses CM in important ways? Please RT🙏
ICN is hiring at Prof / reader level. Come and join the best and most fabulous cognitive neuroscience department anywhere www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/.... Please share
UCL – University College London
UCL is consistently ranked as one of the top ten universities in the world (QS World University Rankings 2010-2022) and is No.2 in the UK for research power (Research Excellence Framework 2021).
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@cosynemeeting.bsky.social workshops are posted and they’re 🔥🔥🔥, as always. www.cosyne.org/workshops-pr... #cosyne #cosyne2025 #neuroskyence
Program — COSYNE
cosyne.org
Happy head direction cell day y’all! On this day, 41 years ago, Jim Ranck recorded the first “HD cell” in his Brooklyn lab in 1984. Jim shared the news with the world at SFN that year, showing a video of the cell’s firing on a TV he somehow acquired and brought to his poster… (1/3)
UCL colleagues and alumni have paid tribute to award-winning researcher, Professor Eleanor Maguire @uclqsion.bsky.social, whose studies into spatial awareness and memory led to a deeper understanding of how the brain works and had a profound impact on neuroscience www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2025/ja...
Tribute to pioneering cognitive neuroscientist Professor Eleanor Maguire
UCL colleagues and alumni have paid tribute to the award-winning researcher, Professor Eleanor Maguire, whose groundbreaking studies into spatial awareness and memory, led to a deeper understanding of...
ucl.ac.uk
Excited to share that our preprint is out! doi.org/10.1101/2024... The structure of place cell reactivations was disordered in AD mice compared to WT! This was predictive of reduced place cell stability and memory performance on a radial-arm maze task. Here are a few details: 1/5🧵
Disordered Hippocampal Reactivations Predict Spatial Memory Deficits in a Mouse Model of Alzheimer's Disease
Alzheimer's disease (AD) is characterised by progressive memory decline associated with hippocampal degeneration. However, the specific physiological mechanisms underlying hippocampal dysfunction in A...
doi.org