Find me and my poster at #Bernstein2026 today during Session 1. I will be talking about Infantile Amnesia and how Representational Drift might have something to do with it. The abstract can be found at: abstracts.g-node.org/conference/B...

Getting ready for @bernsteinneuro.bsky.social, let me know if you want to catch up or grab a cofee. also, does anyone have a spare time-turner for attending multiple workshops?

New preprint from my PhD at MPI CBS 🧠, with @doellerlab.bsky.social and @andrejbicanski.bsky.social “A computational model of the two dentate gyrus blades” What mechanisms allow the two DG blades to support distinct coding regimes? (www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...) 1/9

New preprint! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Nearly a decade after starting the project, the first major results from our comparative connectomics work is online! Comparing the head direction circuits of the central complex in bees, ants and flies, recapitulating >300million years of evolution.

New lab paper ! "Shared neural geometries for bilingual semantic representations in human hippocampal neurons" led by @xinyuanyan.bsky.social. 🧵 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Shared neural geometries for bilingual semantic representations in human hippocampal neurons

The human brain has the remarkable ability to comprehend and express similar concepts in multiple languages. To understand how it does so, we examined…

sciencedirect.com

AI couldn't come up with this

Amazing to see how far this has come in less than a year! Excited to see where this is going next

Jean-Rémi King@jeanremiking.bsky.social · 7mo ago

Our latest work, on modeling the human brain responses to sight, sound and language at scale:

1/7 🧠 My journey into development begins with this work and question: how does the brain's spatial navigation system develop? We found that the neural networks for spatial navigation (tori and rings) are preconfigured and only later anchor gradually to the world with experience! 🧵

Edvard I Moser@edvardmoser.bsky.social · 7mo ago

Is spatial navigation innate 🧠? Using #NeuroPixels we show that the #torus 🍩 underlying the #GridCell map exists already on day 10 in rats — before pups open eyes and ears and before they start upright walking. 🧵1:4 👇 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

1/N: Dear cognitive map fans, I’d like to share a model I’ve been working on for a while (clearing backlog :). I show how a vector navigation architecture (VNA) and a “positional inference network” (PIN) can build Universal Cognitive Maps (UCMs) for abstract spaces. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Can whole-brain fMRI responses to naturalistic video stimuli be predicted using only transcripts? Last year, I gave a tutorial on exactly that. Since the response was very positive, I’ve now released both the tutorial notebook and the trained models publicly.

I am totally pumped about this new work . "Task-trained RNNs" are a powerful and influential framework in neuroscience, but have lacked a firm theoretical footing. This work provides one, and makes direct contact with the classical theory of random RNNs: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

“Humans across multiple languages spontaneously associate the nonwords kiki & bouba with spiky & round shapes, respectively...We tested the bouba-kiki effect in baby chickens. Similar to humans, they spontaneously chose a spiky shape when hearing a kiki sound & a round shape when hearing a bouba.”😲🧪

Matching sounds to shapes: Evidence of the bouba-kiki effect in naïve baby chicks

Humans across multiple languages spontaneously associate the nonwords “kiki” and “bouba” with spiky and round shapes, respectively, a phenomenon named the bouba-kiki effect. To explore the origin of t...

science.org

The hippocampal map has its own attentional control signal! Our new study reveals that theta #sweeps can be instantly biased towards behaviourally relevant locations. See 📹 in post 4/6 and preprint here 👉 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 🧵(1/6)

Introducing DroPE: Extending Context by Dropping Positional Embeddings We found embeddings like RoPE aid training but bottleneck long-sequence generalization. Our solution’s simple: treat them as a temporary training scaffold, not a permanent necessity. arxiv.org/abs/2512.12167 pub.sakana.ai/DroPE

Our paper on data constrained RNN that generalize to optogenetic perturbations now citable on eLife: doi.org/10.7554/eLif...

Guillaume Bellec@bellecguill.bsky.social · 2y ago

Pre-print 🧠🧪 Is mechanism modeling dead in the AI era? ML models trained to predict neural activity fail to generalize to unseen opto perturbations. But mechanism modeling can solve that. We say "perturbation testing" is the right way to evaluate mechanisms in data-constrained models 1/8

New preprint! Have you ever wondered, what are these fuzzy simplicial sets, the theoretical framework behind e.g. UMAP? Here we show that you may simply see them as marginal distributions over simplicial sets. This provides a generative model for UMAP. (1/2) arxiv.org/abs/2512.03899

Probabilistic Foundations of Fuzzy Simplicial Sets for Nonlinear Dimensionality Reduction

Fuzzy simplicial sets have become an object of interest in dimensionality reduction and manifold learning, most prominently through their role in UMAP. However, their definition through tools from alg...

arxiv.org

Three German universities offering post-docs for researchers "who cannot conduct or continue their work in the USA appropriately because of actual political pressure. " www.uni-konstanz.de/zukunftskoll...

Foraging in conceptual spaces: hippocampal oscillatory dynamics underlying searching for concepts in memory www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Foraging in conceptual spaces: hippocampal oscillatory dynamics underlying searching for concepts in memory

How does the brain access stored knowledge? It has been proposed that conceptual search engages neurocognitive processes similar to foraging in physical space. We tested this idea using intracranial E...

biorxiv.org

New preprint from the lab and great work by Fei Wang. We show how subiculum trace vector cells can be modeled consistent with known effects in CA1. Traces are driven by a mismatch learning rule to keep associative memories in line with experience. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Dynamic updating of cognitive maps via traces of experience in the subiculum

In the classical view of hippocampal function, the subiculum is assigned the role as the output layer. In spatial paradigms, some subiculum neurons manifest as so-called boundary vector cells (BVCs), ...

biorxiv.org

Super proud of this collaboration with rockstar Ryan Raut - born out of playing in the sandbox in our last year of grad school! Multi-scale brain activity can be predicted from a simple measure of arousal like pupil diameter. Out with linear causality, in with dynamic systems to explain neurobiology

Arousal as a universal embedding for spatiotemporal brain dynamics - Nature

Reframing of arousal as a latent dynamical system can reconstruct multidimensional measurements of large-scale spatiotemporal brain dynamics on the timescale of seconds in mice.

nature.com

1/ 🚨 New preprint! 🚨 Excited and proud (& a little nervous 😅) to share our latest work on the importance of #theta-timescale spiking during #locomotion in #learning. If you care about how organisms learn, buckle up. 🧵👇 📄 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 💻 code + data 🔗 below 🤩 #neuroskyence

Can a single cell learn? Even without a brain, some microbes show simple forms of cognition. Can this basal cognition be engineered? Check our new paper with @jordiplam.bsky.social on the minimal synthetic circuits & their cognitive limits. @drmichaellevin.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Andrej is a great scientist and teacher, highly recommended!

Andrej Bicanski@andrejbicanski.bsky.social · last yr.

Dear colleagues, we have an open PhD position in computational neuroscience - spatial memory models and intracranial recordings - fully funded. Re-advertised, candidates are ideally available in the near future. A collab. with 4 labs. Apply here: tinyurl.com/yc84ctap

Congratulations to @reznikdan.bsky.social and @sofievalk.bsky.social for this tremendous achievement!

Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences@mpicbs.bsky.social · last yr.

Huge congratulations 🥳 to @sofievalk.bsky.social & @reznikdan.bsky.social for receiving ERC Starting Grants 2025! We're proud of you! Learn more about their projects: www.cbs.mpg.de/2397348/2025...

In sum, we believe this is the first direct evidence in humans of systems consolidation theory for specific memories: the hypothesized transformation of memories from hippocampus to cortex over sleep. Take look for yourself on @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social t.co/xFEDpqVXfE 6/6

🚨We believe this is a major step forward in how we study hippocampus function in healthy humans. Using novel behavioral tasks, fMRI, RL & RNN modeling, and transcranial ultrasound stimulation (TUS), we demonstrate the causal role of hippocampus in relational structure learning.

bioRxiv Neuroscience@biorxiv-neursci.bsky.social · last yr.

Causal necessity of human hippocampus for structure-based inference in learning https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.08.19.664920v1

Now out in @natneuro.nature.com What happens to the brain’s body map when a body-part is removed? Scanning patients before and up to 5 yrs after arm amputation, we discovered the brain’s body map is strikingly preserved despite amputation www.nature.com/articles/s41593-025-02037-7 🧵1/18

#CCN2025 was fantastic!! It was great to meet and catch up with many of you in Amsterdam – Feeling really inspired now by all the cool work I've seen over the past few days @cogcompneuro.bsky.social! Until next year!

Since July 21st, we have a good reason to celebrate the summa cum laude Defense of the newly minted Dr. Hettwer who received her PhD from @hhu.de under the supervision of Prof. Simon Eickhoff @sbe.bsky.social with strongest support of Dr. Sofie Valk! Congratulations Meike!!!🥂👏🏻🥁🎊

Appreciate @davidpoeppel.bsky.social's reminder to scientists of their role in this time, at #CCN2025 (the reminder may be even more pertinent to non-US colleagues who have a chance to prevent the some of the worst effects before they really arrive)