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

Comprehensive characterization of human color discrimination thresholds

Leveraging the smooth variation of internal noise makes comprehensive characterization of color discrimination practical, offering an efficient framework for studying perceptual limits across various ...

elifesciences.org

Can neural networks model the human perception of geometric shapes?

Author summary Recent neural networks have achieved remarkable success across a wide range of visual tasks, often rivaling or surpassing human performance. Yet, it remains unclear whether these system...

journals.plos.org

Hippocampal ripples initiate cortical dimensionality expansion for memory retrieval - Nature Communications

How past experiences are reconstructed from memory remains unclear. Here the authors used intracranial EEG to show that hippocampal ripples reshape the geometry of cortical representations, supporting...

nature.com

Concept2Brain: an AI model for predicting neurophysiological responses to text and pictures - Nature Communications

Advancing toward human brain simulation remains a major challenge. Here, the authors introduce Concept2Brain, an AI web tool that predicts neural activity, thus generating synthetic and reproducible E...

nature.com

A neural network model of free recall learns multiple memory strategies - Nature Machine Intelligence

Li et al. show that recurrent neural networks optimized for free recall discover diverse, human-like memory strategies beyond classical temporal context models, with top models using an index-based me...

nature.com

A manifesto for Sustainability Robotics - Nature Machine Intelligence

Song et al. propose Sustainability Robotics as a new discipline to overcome fragmentation and enhance societal and environmental impact. They define three guiding principles, alongside two dimensions ...

nature.com

Deep Learning Reveals Cross-Modal Neural Representations of Auditory and Visual Mental Imagery in MEG | Journal of Neurophysiology | American Physiological Society

Mental imagery provides a unique window into the brain’s ability to internally simulate sensory experiences, offering valuable insights for both cognitive neuroscience and brain-computer interface (BCI) research. This study examined the neural representations of imagined auditory and visual stimuli using magnetoencephalography (MEG) and assessed the ability of machine learning models to decode these mental processes. MEG data were recorded from 18 right-handed participants during auditory and visual imagery tasks and source-reconstructed within modality-specific cortical regions of interest. We compared a convolutional neural network (CNN) and a linear logistic regression model within a subject-specific classification framework. Both approaches achieved above-chance decoding accuracies, with the CNN outperforming the linear model in both tasks, yielding a mean decoding accuracy of > 70% for the visual imagery task. Notably, the CNN achieved significant decoding performance even when trained on non-task-relevant cortical regions, indicating that imagined stimuli are represented in distributed and partially overlapping neural networks across modalities. This cross-modal decoding capability highlights the potential of deep learning models to capture complex, multimodal neural patterns and suggests that future brain-computer interfaces could benefit from integrating auditory and visual information. These findings advance our understanding of cross-modal mental imagery and point toward more flexible and personalized approaches in BCI design.

journals.physiology.org

The brain is a diverse place, why not computing? - Nature Machine Intelligence

The brain’s architecture exhibits diversity across many temporal and spatial scales, yet our computing architectures remain largely homogeneous. Low-powered neuromorphic hardware offers a path towards...

nature.com

Statistics of cortical representational drift can enable robust readout

Author summary Percepts, actions and experiences, such as the appearance of an apple and its flavour, are represented in the activity of populations of neurons in various parts of the brain. For decad...

journals.plos.org

Careless People: A story of where I used to work

The number one global bestseller and Book of the Year 2025 for Audible, The Times, Cosmopolitan, The Economist and more.‘Amazing: of all the books in all the world Mr Free Speech Zuckerberg wants to b...

uk.bookshop.org

Prevalence and severity of mental health problems in early-career researchers: a systematic review and meta-analysis - Nature Human Behaviour

Mental health concerns among early-career researchers are increasingly gaining attention. This preregistered systematic review and multilevel meta-analysis quantifies psychological distress among earl...

nature.com

Disinformation elicits learning biases

Learning from potential disinformation introduces specific cognitive biases, causing individuals to systematically deviate from an idealized Bayesian updating strategy.

elifesciences.org

Predicting continuous outcomes: Some new tests of associative approaches to contingency learning

Author summary When we learn about cause and effect in everyday life—such as whether a medicine helps recovery from illness—we experience outcomes that vary in degree rather than simply happening or n...

journals.plos.org

The war against ‘woke’ could end US science as we know it

“Everyone will be affected, not just scientists. Every community in the country.“

bit.ly

Learning shapes neural geometry in the primate prefrontal cortex - Nature Neuroscience

Learning transforms prefrontal cortex activity from flexible, high-dimensional representations into compact, task-relevant and abstract codes, enabling efficient generalization of learned rules to new...

nature.com

The Genomic Code: the genome instantiates a generative model of the organism

How does the genome encode the form of the organism? What is the nature of this genomic code? Inspired by recent work in machine learning and neuroscience, we propose that the genome encodes a generat...

cell.com