This time, celebrating 19 days of being “on hold” on arXiv! “A Braitenberg vehicle’s habitat”, w/ @frosas.bsky.social and Filippo Torresan. Accepted at ALIFE 2026. What part of the environment constitutes an agent’s effective world, its habitat? 1/

New paper with @doctorjosh.bsky.social, @drmichaellevin.bsky.social, and co-first author Vaibhav Pai. This one is a doozy - in it we show that we can modulate the degree of emergent, multicellular organization in a Xenobot with an exogenous compound (ATP). 1/N www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Purinergic signaling disrupts emergent patterns of multicellular coordination in basal Xenobots.

The ability of self-organizing systems to display emergent, adaptive capabilities is a fundamental feature of biological life. Understanding the mechanisms by which cells co-ordinate at the micro-scal...

biorxiv.org

Got a great TMLR paper but missed the RLC deadline? Following last year’s success, @RL_Conference is back with a Journal-to-Conference track! Accepted TMLR papers within scope are invited to submit for consideration. Please submit here: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

RLC Journal to Conference Track

This form is used to organize applications for journal papers to be presented at https://rl-conference.cc/.

docs.google.com

𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗱𝗼𝗲𝘀 𝗮 𝗯𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻 𝗱𝗼 𝗮𝗻𝘆𝘄𝗮𝘆? Fascinating and profound book on what brains are *not* and what they might be. Including criticism of the computational and predictive brain frameworks. You might not agree with some of it but quite thought provoking.

We wrote a book! www.cambridge.org/core/books/s... Consciousness science is a fascinating but bewildering field: many competing theories, little consensus, and big open questions. If you are looking for an accessible guide through this complex landscape, this book is for you.

Scientific Theories of Consciousness

Cambridge Core - Neurosciences - Scientific Theories of Consciousness

cambridge.org

To be provocative, 𝗲𝗺𝗲𝗿𝗴𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲 might be a sleight of hand if you don't know enough math to understand what it means. There, I said it.

Institute of Art and Ideas@iai.tv · 3mo ago

"Emergence" has become one of the most fashionable words in science and philosophy — invoked to explain consciousness, life, and the flow of time. | https://bit.ly/46MVPjM But John Heil argues it's little more than intellectual sleight of hand, mistaking gaps in our explanation for gaps in reality.

How the right embodiment can simplify planing ✨

ContempraInn 🌹@contemprainn.bsky.social · 3mo ago

The landing technique of Swans 🦢

A computational theory of Aha! moments! New paper explaining why Aha! moments occur & why they feel so good. TLDR: They are a form of meta-cognitive prediction errors i.e. they occur when we surprise ourselves about our own abilities! @rachitdubey.bsky.social www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

🎉 📜 NEW #PREPRINT !! 📜 🎉 Spearheaded by Adam Barrett we tried to tackle some of the challenges of IIT. We confront aspects worth delving into, with an incredible team of collaborators, inc. Pedro Mediano, @frosas.bsky.social, Daniel Bor, Lionel Barnett, and @anilseth.bsky.social.

Integrated information theory: the good, the bad and the misunderstood

The integrated information theory of consciousness (IIT) is uniquely ambitious in proposing a mathematical formula, derived from apparently fundamental properties of conscious experience, to describe ...

arxiv.org

What makes brains (un)conscious? We provide new answers—and a universal mammalian blueprint for information processing—in a cross-species study of humans, macaques, marmosets & mice. Exploring convergent breakdown of integration in: www.nature.com/articles/s41... Led by @loopyluppi.bsky.social

Convergent transcriptomic and connectomic controllers of information integration and its anaesthetic breakdown across mammalian brains - Nature Human Behaviour

Luppi et al. identify transcriptomic and connectomic controllers of information integration and its breakdown induced by anaesthesia in humans, macaques, marmosets and mice.

nature.com

Join us for a postdoc @ the Donders Institute; application deadline March 24. www.ru.nl/en/working-a...

Postdoc Position: Affective Neuroscience and Computational Psychiatry at the Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging | Radboud University

Do you want to work as a Postdoc at the Faculty of Social Sciences? Check our vacancy!

ru.nl

The Mammalian Architecture of Information Integration🧠🧬 For #BrainAwarenessWeek, excited to share our latest work about #Neuroscience of #Consciousness in @nathumbehav.nature.com www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🧵👇

Convergent transcriptomic and connectomic controllers of information integration and its anaesthetic breakdown across mammalian brains - Nature Human Behaviour

Luppi et al. identify transcriptomic and connectomic controllers of information integration and its breakdown induced by anaesthesia in humans, macaques, marmosets and mice.

nature.com

Charles Bennett and Gilles Brassard have been named the winners of the A.M. Turing Award, one of the highest honors in computing, for their work establishing the foundations of quantum information theory. The award comes with a $1 million prize. www.quantamagazine.org/quantum-cryp...

Just out in @natneuro.nature.com! 🧠 “Competitive interactions shape mammalian brain network dynamics and computation” www.nature.com/articles/s41... Is large-scale brain communication purely cooperative — or is competition a core organizing principle? We built 🧠 models to find out: read on🧵👇

Competitive interactions shape mammalian brain network dynamics and computation - Nature Neuroscience

Brain network architecture may balance cooperation and competition across circuits. Here the authors use computational whole-brain modeling across three species to show that models with competition ar...

nature.com

Final version of this paper with Richard Watson is out! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... "Machines all the way up and cognition all the way down: Updating the machine metaphor in biology" (quite a bit different than the original preprint at osf.io/preprints/os...).

Machines all the way up and cognition all the way down: Updating the machine metaphor in biology

Cell and developmental biology (CDB) offer numerous remarkable examples of collective adaptive plasticity, as cells coordinate to implement large-scal…

sciencedirect.com

Happy to announce this new preprint! In it, we use info decomp (ΦID) on fMRI in Alzheimer's and MCI to explore how info-dynamic representations change. AD saw big decreases in synergy ('deductive' information) and increases in redundancy. Check it out here: 👇 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Hot take 🔥 Why math classes work well in uni? Not because that specific math will be useful later, but because solving hard problems makes you build instrumental skills, which enable you to solve other problems later in life … and that is exactly why next token prediction works so well

Indeed, rather than fight against it, it seems life surfs on entropy 🏄

Sean Carroll@seanmcarroll.bsky.social · 6mo ago

Noise is key to evolution; entropy is key to metabolism. We have to stop pretending that biology fights against these things rather than relying on them!

Tomorrow in Amsterdam I’ll be giving a talk about my most recent work on abstractions and world modelling 👇🏽👇🏽

Dutch Institute for Emergent Phenomena@emergencediep.bsky.social · 6mo ago

DIEP seminar tomorrow 11am! 🪞 Join us to attend a talk by @frosas.bsky.social (lecturer at the University of Sussex) titled “Mirroring the world: How symmetry shapes hierarchical beliefs” 🤼 Abstract & registration: ias.uva.nl/content/even... See you there!

DIEP seminar tomorrow 11am! 🪞 Join us to attend a talk by @frosas.bsky.social (lecturer at the University of Sussex) titled “Mirroring the world: How symmetry shapes hierarchical beliefs” 🤼 Abstract & registration: ias.uva.nl/content/even... See you there!

Mirroring the world: How symmetry shapes hierarchical beliefs - Institute for Advanced Study IAS

In this edition of the DIEP seminar series, Dr. Fernando Rosas, lecturer in Computer Science and AI at the University of Sussex and Honorary Research Fellow Imperial College London will be talking ab...

ias.uva.nl

Why don’t neural networks learn all at once, but instead progress from simple to complex solutions? And what does “simple” even mean across different neural network architectures? Sharing our new paper @iclr_conf led by Yedi Zhang with Peter Latham arxiv.org/abs/2512.20607

There is a new Postdoctoral Research Associate position available in my group, to work on computational analysis of human neuroimaging workflows to develop robust, interpretable and scalable biomarkers of cognitive brain health. Closing date 10th Feb 2026. www.imperial.ac.uk/jobs/search-...

Description

Please note that job descriptions are not exhaustive, and you may be asked to take on additional duties that align with the key responsibilities ment...

imperial.ac.uk

Finally published: “Your brain on nature: A scoping review of the neuroscience of nature exposure” www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... A synthesis of multiple EEG, fMRI, and fNIRS studies to map the mechanisms behind the restoring effects of nature on the brain 🧠🌱

Your brain on nature: A scoping review of the neuroscience of nature exposure

The relationship between natural environments and human cognition has gathered increasing attention across disciplines, including neuroscience, enviro…

sciencedirect.com

We're running a 5th edition of the always-exciting UCL Summer School on Consciousness and Metacognition this year, 8th-10th July 2026 in London. Accommodation and travel expenses are covered. For more information and how to apply, check out metacoglab.org/summer-schoo...

cool work about information decomposition in artificial systems! Synergistic information processing emerges through learning in LLMs and ablating these synergistic components causes large performance drops #NeuroAI 👇👇👇

Fernando Rosas@frosas.bsky.social · 7mo ago

Preprint time: A Brain-like Synergistic Core in LLMs Drives Behaviour and Learning arxiv.org/abs/2601.06851 LLMs are clearly different from actual brains… but could they share a similar functional architecture related to how they process information?

Preprint time: A Brain-like Synergistic Core in LLMs Drives Behaviour and Learning arxiv.org/abs/2601.06851 LLMs are clearly different from actual brains… but could they share a similar functional architecture related to how they process information?

A Brain-like Synergistic Core in LLMs Drives Behaviour and Learning

The independent evolution of intelligence in biological and artificial systems offers a unique opportunity to identify its fundamental computational principles. Here we show that large language models...

arxiv.org

Looking forward to participate in this workshop on high-order interactions and multivariate information theory: mithic2026.github.io

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗘𝗻𝘁𝗮𝗻𝗴𝗹𝗲𝗱 𝗕𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻 Annual reminder that the book is open access. How do we think of the brain as a deeply interconnected system with highly distributed, non hierarchical processing. Want to learn about the brain from a fresh perspective? #neuroskyence mitpress.mit.edu/978026254460...

The Entangled Brain

Popular neuroscience accounts often focus on specific mind-brain aspects like addiction, cognition, or memory, but The Entangled Brain tackles a much bigger ...

mitpress.mit.edu

A new, long paper on evolution - natural induction - split into 2: royalsocietypublishing.org/rsfs/article... royalsocietypublishing.org/rsfs/article... @RichardWatson90 and Tim Lewens

Evolution by natural induction

Abstract. It is conventionally assumed that all evolutionary adaptation is produced, and could only possibly be produced, by natural selection. Natural ind

royalsocietypublishing.org