Our work on curriculum learning in humans and ANNs is now out in PLOS Computational Biology. Thanks to excellent feedback from the reviewers and editor, the final paper now contains some cool new findings.Take a look! 🧠🤖

Charlotte Volk@charlottevolk.bsky.social · 24h ago

Excited to share that our paper has now been published in PLOS Computational Biology! journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...

He also has one of my favorite quotes: If one wishes to understand the behavior of animals, one must take account of their individuality, annoying as this may be for those who prefer the tidiness of physics, chemistry, and mathematical formulations. -Donald Griffin

Greg Priest@gregpriest.bsky.social · 2d ago

Donald Griffin, discoverer of bat echolocation, was born OTD 1915. I imagine “small mammals enough like ourselves to feel that I could understand what their lives would be like, and yet different enough to make it a sort of adventure and exploration to see what they were doing.” 🐋🌱🧪 #HistSTM

Nothing in neural activity makes sense except in the light of dynamics and cybernetics. #CCN2026 GAC position. sites.google.com/ccneuro.org/...

GACs - 2026-3

Representations or Transformations: What Should Models of Neural Population Activity Explain? Julian Kędys, Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center Cezary Mazurek, Poznan Supercomputing and Netwo...

sites.google.com

Study finds that when a network with low-dimensional structure receives outside input or is perturbed by noise, it can produce either high- or low-dimensional responses depending on the finer structure of the network and its input. Read the study: https://go.aps.org/4fT3NLA

🧠New preprint! We identify minimal circuit motifs that generate diverse selectivity to support categorization, comparison, and decision-making. Trained RNNs converge on the same motifs, revealing principles that link connectivity to computation. @mpinb.mpg.de www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Structured connectivity for structured sequential computations

Cortical computations emerge from the coordinated activity of recurrent neural circuits and are often described through population dynamics and neuronal selectivity. However, how the backbone of the c...

biorxiv.org

Fascinating paper from Frank Jülicher looking at a continuous (as opposed to cellular automaton) version of the Game of Life, and finding Turing-like patterns. arxiv.org/abs/2607.27402

Continuous Game of Life: cell emergence and self-organization at the edge of growth

Conway's Game of Life shows that simple rules can generate a rich diversity of emerging structures. This cellular automaton has been translated to continuous space by Rafler (2011) in a simulation cal...

arxiv.org

Takuro Zama is presenting resenting at #CCN2026 (Poster B62 in Poster Session B)! Asymmetric Interruption Costs Reflect Transition Structure Shaped by Task-Neutral Attractors: 2026.ccneuro.org/poster/?id=7...

The final version of our amygdala dopamine paper is out! BLA dopamine dynamically tracks emotional salience and not value or reward prediction error. Congrats to Dr. Megan Brickner!! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Basolateral amygdala dopamine transmits emotional salience - Nature Communications

The basolateral amygdala dopamine system has received little attention. Here, authors show that BLA dopamine plays a unique role in learning, by encoding the emotional salience of sensory cues to supp...

nature.com

Did you know there’s actually an oversupply of brilliant academics so you don’t have to tolerate the monsters

Eugene Vinitsky 🍒@eugenevinitsky.bsky.social · 3d ago

Talked with a friend about her PhD experience and oh my god, some fields need clearing house. Just burn the whole thing down and start over

I actually don't mind being wrong.. we said this is what's happening on the Millennium Bridge.. what we proposed doesn't work. But it was interesting. We really did stick our neck out and unfortunately got our head chopped off. –Steven Strogatz, Cornell Professor @stevenstrogatz.com

Very cool paper systematically characterizing dopamine neuron development and striatal arborization in the mouse brain. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Single-neuron resolution mapping of dopaminergic connectivity across development, adulthood, and degeneration

Individual midbrain dopamine (mDA) neurons exhibit complex morphologies, a feature that may underlie their different functions and disease vulnerabili…

sciencedirect.com

Top: Markov chains contract the probability simplex toward the unique stationary positive eigenvector (Perron-Frobenius). Bottom: Sinkhorn contracts the simplex non-linearly to an approximate solution of optimal transport (nonlinear Perron-Frobenius).

starting a collection of quotes like this

“It was a pleasure to burn.” - Fahrenheit 451 futurism.com/artificial-i...

AI Companies Are Buying Antique Books, Ingesting Their Contents to Train Models, and Then Destroying Them at Incredible Scale, Even If Almost No Copies Remain

AI companies are quietly obtaining rare books, ingesting their contents, and then destroying them -- even if they're exceedingly rare.

futurism.com

How do you "see" with electric eyes? How does collective behavior emerge from individual interactions? Nocturnal weakly electric fish evolved to do this, but studying naturalistic social behavior is very hard. Our solution? Virtual 'fish' 🤖🐟⚡ 📄 arxiv.org/abs/2511.08436

Fascinating sounding study!! The hippocampus teaches V1 about statistical regularities in sensory inputs? #neuroskyence

Helen Barron@helencbarron.bsky.social · last wk.

***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

As promised (and only slightly late 😅): here's a figure-by-figure walk-through of our preprint "Random network structure stabilizes neural manifolds". This one is a bit more for the nerds. For an overview version 👉 bsky.app/profile/j-b-... Preprint: doi.org/10.64898/202... 1/8 🧠🧪

Random network structure stabilizes neural manifolds

Neuronal activity patterns change continuously over days and weeks, a phenomenon known as representational drift. Despite this, the geometric structure of population representations, namely the pairwise similarities between stimulus-evoked activity patterns, remains remarkably stable. How can ongoing changes in activity be consistent with stable representational similarity? We show that this is a generic consequence of random connectivity: in networks with random connectivity, output similarity is a monotonically increasing function of input similarity, independent of the specific connectivity pattern. Drift, whether driven by random synaptic turnover or Hebbian plasticity, merely transitions the network between random instantiations, leaving similarity intact. This extends to recurrent architectures and to deep neural networks, where continued training beyond performance saturation produces activity drift while preserving representational similarity. Although connectivity in the brain is not random, networks trained on high-dimensional inputs acquire connectivity that behaves statistically like a random projection, making these results broadly applicable to biological neural circuits. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, PCI2023-145967-2, PID2021-124702OB-I00 Spanish State Research Agency (AEI) – Severo Ochoa and María de Maeztu Program for Centers and Units of Excellence in R&D, CEX2020-001084-M German Research Foundation (DFG), FOR 5368 ARENA

doi.org

Jens-Bastian Eppler@j-b-eppler.bsky.social · 2mo ago

New preprint: Random network structure stabilizes neural manifolds We’re excited to share our new work on representational drift. doi.org/10.64898/202... Representational drift poses a puzzle. 👇 A short thread below. In the next days a figure by figure walk through will follow. 1/5 🧪🧠

Figures 4 & 5: how general is this? The phenomenon isn't specific to random rewiring in feedforward networks. We find the same behaviour with Hebbian plasticity, and it extends to recurrent networks. Preserving manifolds during drift is a surprisingly generic property of network dynamics. 6/8 🧠🧪

Figure 3: now let the network drift. We randomly rewire a fraction of synapses between sessions. The result looks strikingly like experimental representational drift: individual neurons change their tuning over time. At first glance, it looks as if the representation is falling apart... 4/8 🧠🧪

Figure 2: random networks preserve geometry. Before thinking about drift, we asked a simpler question: If similar stimuli enter a random network, are their outputs still similar? Well, yes. In fact, we show that output similarity is a simple monotonic function of input similarity. 3/8 🧠🧪

Figure 1: the puzzle. During representational drift, individual neurons change their tuning over days, yet the representational geometry is maintained. The figure illustrates exactly that. So... how can both be true? 2/8 🧠🧪

She loved her surgery cone for the first couple days (it made her feel powerful and intimidating) so we got her a courted ruff to look sinister in.

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

Book on Australian history pulls no punches: "...a person so devoid of initiative that he hardly cast a shadow." -The Fatal Shore

Happy Monday! Come learn how jellyfish swim. In a review led by fluid dynamics maestro Alex Hoover, we outline how neuromechanical modeling will help us understand how modulation of neural activity allows jellyfish to jet and pirouette through fluids www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Empirical evidence suggests human cooperation often departs from classic reciprocity models. Long-term relationships, partner choice, and relationship maintenance may be more central than tit-for-tat-like exchange. Rethinking Reciprocity(Mathew & Boyd, 2026): www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Jeffrey Epstein models Zuckerberg's Meta glasses. Spoof advertisements featuring the paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein wearing Meta’s AI glasses have been installed at bus stops across London in a guerrilla campaign protesting against privacy risks. The activist group Everyone Hates Elon

Spoof Epstein ads go up around London in protest against Meta AI glasses

The activist group Everyone Hates Elon targets smart glasses in a guerrilla campaign over privacy risks and non-consensual recording

thetimes.com

Important corollary: people are LESS likely to support authoritarian leaders if people around them don't. This is where "social proof" comes in. Be vocal and visible to social circles and neighbors about your resistance against authoritarians AND your support of pro-democracy candidates and causes

emptywheel@emptywheel.bsky.social · last wk.

People are more likely to support authoritarian leaders if people around them do. www.psypost.org/anti-democra...

At first glance I thought this was Golgi stained cortex 🧠 Fig 4a from Zhong, Liu, Wei, Dai, Step by Step Golgi-Cox Staining for Cryosection, Frontiers in Neuroanatomy (2019) www.frontiersin.org/journals/neu...

Beth Levin@betheena.bsky.social · last wk.

Between hypothesis and metamorphosis: “Geinrust Farm in Watery Landscape” by Piet Mondrian (1905)

While the Fields Medal celebrates the under-40s, the mathematician Joan Birman has, at the age of 99, solved a major open problem in representations of the Braid groups, a topic she has worked on for more than 60 years.