Dan Levenstein
@dlevenstein.bsky.social
Neuroscientist, in theory. Studying sleep and navigation in 🧠s and 💻s. Wu Tsai Investigator, Assistant Professor of Neuroscience at Yale. An emergent property of a few billion neurons, their interactions with each other and the world over ~1 century.
Postdocs - come talk at Yale!
Yale Neuroscience@yaleneuro.bsky.social · yesterday📢 Calling all senior neuro postdocs: SYNAPSES brings postdocs from around the world to Yale to share their work during an in-person symposium on October 22, 2026. Apply today! Deadline Sept 3. medicine.yale.edu/neuroscience...
Of course for the lab's first year at SfN we get hazed with the Wednesday afternoon timeslot 🥲
Planning the first ever hippocampus GRC to overlap with cosyne was a choice 😿
I think the difficulty of understanding feedback loops underlies many big debates in science: Origin of life: "genes first" vs "metabolism first" (neither, it's a feedback loop) Development: "nature vs nurture" (neither, it's a feedback loop) Neuroscience: "brain vs behaviour" (you guessed it!)
Just discovered this gem of a final paragraph in Rumelhart, Hinton, and Williams 1986. Same energy.
This is why I’ve gone from “never want to touch a spiking network again” to “excited to do the kinds of things I always wanted to do with spiking networks” in the span of 5 years.
Dan Goodman@neural-reckoning.org · 3w agoI just gave a short tutorial on what is a spiking neural network and how to train one. From zero to a trained network in one hour. Slides and code you can run in Colab at this repo: github.com/neural-recko... 🤖🧠🧪
So asking "is the brain a computer" is not helpful. Symbolic computation is sometimes a useful way of thinking about a brain feature, and sometimes not. And that's it. We really can stop talking about it now. I'm going to regret this. I know it.
When we talk about the current demolishing of NSF, we think a lot about the loss of research and scientific progress (which are of course very important). But in its founding documents, NSF was also set up to be an equalizer.
This was in part because of the experience of doing science itself (and even getting to contribute an observation to the Minor Planet Circular!), but also because of what one of the graduate students said during one of those classroom days: "you get paid to do a PhD".
A good experiment-theory collaboration takes _________. Wrong answers only.
Marcus Ghosh@marcusghosh.bsky.social · 5mo agoHow can we build better experiment-theory collaborations in neuroscience? We're hosting a series of 6 in-person, interactive workshops to discuss this. Come along! www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/understand...
(apart from the important point that if we let AI do all our thinking, we are doomed) generally speaking this is why I have come to view presentations and paper writing as *doing science*, just as much as lab work or running computer simulations or whatever. Communication and discussion are central
Cian O'Donnell@cianodonnell.bsky.social · last mo.During my postdoc I was trying to move to a new area, my supervisor said: you have to go to a conference, it's the only way to learn what they are thinking and what the key questions are. He was completely right. Science is a collective and social human pursuit, not a bunch of pdfs online
Really excited about this work with the awesome Will de Cothi & @shipleysj.bsky.social, out in Nature Reviews Neuroscience. We propose acetylcholine is an analogue of dopamine — tracking not reward prediction errors but state-transition prediction errors. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41583-026-01058-w
These models were not built to explain the brain. But treating them as model organisms that we can perturb and evolve will move us closer to truly understanding the brain’s mechanics, writes @mtoneva.bsky.social. #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/artificial-i...
Transforming AI models into useful model organisms
These models were not built to explain the brain. Treating them as model organisms that we can evolve will move us closer to understanding the brain.
thetransmitter.org
Thanks! Completely agree. Safe knife skills become even more important when you start using chainsaws.
The most important step in designing a ML model is coming up with the name. For example, if your model name includes the string "(ours)", it seems to get way better performance on benchmarks. Someone should study the mechanism behind this.
One of the things I'm low key excited about getting married next weekend is that I'll never have to deal with Zola dot com ever again. Also all the other things, but that will be an unexpected bonus.
Interesting article on something I think is very relevant to open science: several teams analyzed the same ephys dataset and got quite different answers. Not because the analyses were bad, but because this kind of work involves many analysis choices, and those choices can change the result.
The Transmitter @thetransmitter.bsky.social · 2mo agoDifferences stemmed from the way researchers defined concepts, to the algorithms they used to analyze the data, to the parameters they employed when implementing the algorithms, note @mattiachini.bsky.social and Gaelle Chapuis. #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/reproducibil...
This is now enshrined in our dog's vet records, and that's kind of adorable.
What drives scientific discovery? Wrong answers only.
Berna Devezer@devezer.bsky.social · 2mo agoa description in the first sentence of a recent Nature abstract: "Scientific discovery is driven by scientists generating novel hypotheses for complex problems that undergo rigorous experimental validation." words without substance. think about all pathways to scientific discovery excluded by this
Winnie the Pooh and the Heffalump
ALT: Winnie the Pooh and the Heffalump
static.klipy.com
Gretchen McCulloch@gretchenmcculloch.com · 3mo agoToday in "there's a word for it" I have learned about the Woozle effect > The Woozle effect, also known as evidence by citation, occurs when a source is widely cited for a claim that the source does not adequately support, giving said claim undeserved credibility.
“under any single goal, the human connectome is suboptimal. Instead, its organization reflects multi-objective trade-offs navigated over evolution and development under biological and environmental constraints” Not just connectome…
CLaE@claeneuro.bsky.social · 3mo agoTrends in Cognitive Sciences Embracing the suboptimal organization of the human brain. www.cell.com/trends/cogni...
