Elliot Murphy
@elliot-murphy.bsky.social
• Postdoc, Dept of Neurosurgery, UTHealth • Compositionality in neural and artificial systems Website: https://elliot-murphy.com/
www.nature.com/articles/s42...
Beyond representational alignment with brain-guided language models for robust reasoning - Nature Machine Intelligence
Xiao et al. show that large language models partially align with human brain activity during deductive reasoning. They further show that brain signals can directly guide and improve model performance,...
nature.com
Excited to share a preprint of work done in collaboration with @emilynguist.bsky.social ! osf.io/preprints/ps... TLDR: some effect sizes are larger in lab than on web-based platforms. So when evaluating quantitative predictions, considering the testing platform can be important! 1/n
Thank you to the SFN organizers for this thoughtful planning 🙏🏼
Society for Neuroscience@sfn.org · yesterdayNotifications are out! Presenting authors of submitted abstracts have been notified of their acceptance status for #SfN26. Drop a comment below or tag us in your post and let's celebrate! 🧠 #neurosky #neuroskyence #scisky #medsky
Endogenous auditory and motor brain rhythms predict individual speech tracking journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...
Endogenous auditory and motor brain rhythms predict individual speech tracking
Endogenous brain rhythms are thought to support speech comprehension via auditory and motor interactions, but direct evidence for their role remains limited. This study shows that theta frequencies in...
journals.plos.org
Reconstruction of Imagined Melody with Relative Pitch Decoding in Electrocorticography www.eneuro.org/content/earl...
Reconstruction of Imagined Melody with Relative Pitch Decoding in Electrocorticography
Music imagery involves internally generated auditory experiences, yet decoding imagined melodic content from neural activity remains challenging. Here, we examined whether imagined melodies can be dec...
eneuro.org
Cocktail-Talker: Multi-Speaker Dialog Modeling in Noisy Social Environments with Turn Action GRPO arxiv.org/abs/2607.27756
Cocktail-Talker: Multi-Speaker Dialog Modeling in Noisy Social Environments with Turn Action GRPO
Spoken dialog systems are typically designed for clean, dyadic interactions in which a single user and an assistant take turns speaking. Real-world social conversations, however, are often more ambigu...
arxiv.org
Federal lawsuit accuses four major publishers of extorting article processing charges retractionwatch.com/2026/07/31/f...
Federal lawsuit accuses four major publishers of extorting article processing charges
iStock A lawsuit filed under the U.S. False Claims Act accuses four major publishers of perpetrating a decade-long scheme to defraud the government by charging exorbitant article processing charges…
retractionwatch.com
Universal rhythmic architecture uncovers two modes of neural dynamics www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Universal rhythmic architecture uncovers two modes of neural dynamics - Nature Communications
Brain oscillations are traditionally regarded as sustained rhythms. Here, the authors show that there are both high and low-rhythmicity bands, characterised by brief bursts, which can signal responses...
nature.com
New paper discussing how a neural code for language must be able to explain cross-linguistic influence, given that only a minority of the world's population is monolingual! Neurocomputational mechanisms of syntactic transfer in bilingual sentence production 🧵 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
My appearance on the Giant's Shoulder podcast :) www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLuH...
Meet the Neuroscientist Investigating Language and the Platonic Space
YouTube video by Giant's Shoulder
youtube.com
Surprisal Theory is Tautological (without Rational Grounding) arxiv.org/html/2607.21...
Surprisal Theory is Tautological (without Rational Grounding)
arxiv.org
Brilliant paper! 🧠 ⚡️ Surprisal is not a theory arxiv.org/abs/2607.20208
surprisal is Not a Theory
Surprisal Theory is often characterized as a computational-level explanation per (Marr, 1982). We argue in this work that, even though a computational level narrative has been used to support "represe...
arxiv.org
Love this new metaphor for AI. It’s basically a katamari. 😅 (Read the full thread)
Katamari Damacy: Rolling Up the City
Alt: Katamari Damacy: Rolling Up the City
static.klipy.com
Emily M. Bender@emilymbender.bsky.social · 2w agoThe shape of this discourse is equal parts fascinating and infuriating. I'm thinking today of the term "AI" as mushing together a wide range of products and services in an enormous, greasy, sticky ball, rolling and bouncing its way through our landscape. >>
Temporal constraints on the neural signatures of narrative processing www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Temporal constraints on the neural signatures of narrative processing
How the brain constructs meaning across extended contexts remains poorly understood. While neural responses to words and sentences are well characterized, much less is known about the brain mechanisms...
biorxiv.org
Excited to share new intracranial EEG work on low frequency dynamics! We used iEEG recordings in 32 participants to explore how the language network exports information to the default mode network during sentence reading. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Low-frequency modulations bridge the Language and Default Mode networks
As you read this sentence, you integrate meanings of individual words into complex, higher-order representations. In addition to the core language net…
sciencedirect.com
This is laughable --- "reporting says", well yes, these reporters did a bang-up job anthropomorphizing the system they are talking about, and obfuscating the responsibility that OpenAI holds here. bsky.app/profile/mims... Some examples:
Christopher Mims@mims.bsky.social · 2w agoI've seen some folks try to frame OpenAI's unreleased model hacking a company that tests its abilities as a cynical marketing ploy but reporting says that absolutely was not the case: This was a real-deal escape of an AI agent that could have done vastly more damage. www.wsj.com/tech/ai/how-...
This is a very thoughtful study, with a large number of terrific analyses! Asking all the right questions that we as a field should be addressing. A few comments on how these results relate to my ROSE model 🧵
Sophie Slaats@sophieslaats.bsky.social · 2w agonew preprint! 🥳 we investigated the encoding of syntax and probability in cortical activity recorded with ECoG 🧠, and, it turns out: high-frequency cortical activity represents both features - side-by-side 🙌, and in interaction 🤝. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... (thread to follow soon)
new preprint! 🥳 we investigated the encoding of syntax and probability in cortical activity recorded with ECoG 🧠, and, it turns out: high-frequency cortical activity represents both features - side-by-side 🙌, and in interaction 🤝. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... (thread to follow soon)
bioRxiv Neuroscience@biorxiv-neursci.bsky.social · 2w agoLinguistic structure and probability are jointly encoded in high gamma power https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.07.21.739808v1
Neural traveling waves in cortex: Network mechanisms and potential roles in neural computation www.cell.com/neuron/abstr...
Neural traveling waves in cortex: Network mechanisms and potential roles in neural computation
Muller et al. review how spiking and synaptic activity are often organized as traveling waves in single cortical areas that modulate excitability, perception, and behavior. Specific features of these ...
cell.com
Alpha rhythms in the left auditory cortex set the speed limit for speech comprehension www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1...
PNAS
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans...
pnas.org
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
The emerging field of cognitive brain–computer interfaces www.cell.com/trends/cogni...
The emerging field of cognitive brain–computer interfaces
Brain–computer interfaces (BCIs) have achieved transformative success in restoring movement and communication. However, extending these approaches to decoding or recovery of cognitive function, such a...
cell.com
New preprint (well, very updated). 🤖🧠🧪 We find that an abstract model of neuromodulation lets spiking neural networks perform much better, particularly in challenging noisy environments, using less energy. Relevant to #neuroscience and #neuromorphic computing. 🧵👇 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Neuromodulation enhances the capability and efficiency of spiking neural networks
Spiking neurons underlie the brain’s extreme energy efficiency, and therefore have great potential in neuromorphic computing, although realising this efficiency in practice has proven challenging. We ...
biorxiv.org
New preprint from the lab! “A number simplex in the human medial temporal lobe” led by @hanlin-zhu.bsky.social 🧵 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
A number simplex in the human medial temporal lobe
Humans handle numbers nimbly, suggesting a richer neural manifold structure than the prevalent mental number line model. In populations of medial temporal lobe (MTL) neurons in humans performing two s...
biorxiv.org
Prior knowledge reveals two computational regimes for syntactic processing in the human brain www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Prior knowledge reveals two computational regimes for syntactic processing in the human brain
The human brain rapidly transforms continuous speech into structured, meaningful linguistic representations, yet how prior knowledge constrains this process remains unclear. To characterize this influ...
biorxiv.org
How can an extremely simple equation open the door to virtually infinite complexity? Fifty years ago, Bob May’s classic paper in @nature.com on chaos showed how deterministic rules can generate unpredictability, with deep implications for ecology, physics & beyond. mym.iimas.unam.mx/ramon/docs/M...
Function is not tied to specific brain structures or time scales. The brain is not just a set of parts that each “do their own job”. Instead, networks are multifunctional and active across different speeds simultaneously. doi.org/10.1073/pnas... #neuroscience
Shared spatial and temporal principles govern connectome dynamics across timescales | PNAS
While the brain processes information at various speeds, little is known about how the functional connectome can concurrently support multiple spee...
doi.org
Congrats all! Very interesting, especially in relation to discussions at #AISB meeting on what it would take for an artificial system to be conscious. (I'd say it has to be living first) Also, Mike, what is my prize for occupying the centroid here? 😉
