For whatever reason the fact that LLMs manifest their task completion with language has had folks wanting to jump the gun on a big thorny question of whether/when they “think” in the sense that we all have come to understand it. They may simply not need “think” to to complete complex tasks.

As an AI-adjacent network neuroscience person who has also studied bits of media structure and political economy, I strongly agree with @karlbode.com: The biggest threat, by far, isn’t “superintelligence will soon kill us all!” but instead “information control by oligarchs will crush our society”

Karl Bode@karlbode.com · 2w ago

one recurring theme in the coverage of this AI Anthropic doomsday newscycle is nobody actually has any REAL ideas of what to do just a lot of ambiguous hand-waving in a country that's too corrupt to have working regulators, by a press that doesn't realize that's a central pillar of the conversation

If - as now seems likely - LLM companies are mining their logs for juicy problems, then that means that it's very likely that "secret" test sets don't stay secret for long. When looking at new models' performance on benchmarks that date from before that model, we shouldn't take results at face value

I think that this focus on the risk of AI going out of control misses the real danger which is that they will do what ruthless people and companies tell them to do. These models were doing what they were trained to do (not what they were instructed to do but what their training encouraged).

How can we design experiments that make computational models disagree? One section of our new @natrevneuro.nature.com Review with @kriegeskorte.bsky.social and @heikoschuett.bsky.social examines studies that used stimulus sets designed to elicit distinct predictions from competing models. 1/16

Are brains and artificial neural networks converging onto universal representations? There is a seductive idea making the rounds in NeuroAI / machine learning: train systems well enough, and they all converge on the same representation of reality (i.e. a unique world model). We have thoughts™ 1/n

The Umwelt Representation Hypothesis: rethinking Universality

Recent studies reveal striking representational alignment between artificial neural networks (ANNs) and biological brains, leading to proposals that all sufficiently capable systems converge on univer...

cell.com

Temporally organized activity in mouse V1 encodes newly sampled visual content during free movement https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.08.21.746335v1

A split second separates reacting from colliding! UCSB postdoc @mariusschneider.bsky.social earns $94K from Zaleski Discovery Award to build neuromorphic wearables that warn blind travelers in time⚡ Link: www.cs.ucsb.edu/happenings/a... #UCSB #ComputerScience #AssistiveTech #NeuromorphicComputing

Sanders' proposal for the government to take a 50% stake in AI companies is, IMO, a good idea. AI will be a critical piece of infrastructure, one which should be built with appropriate safe-guards and environmental planning. Trying to cancel AI is foolish - but leaving it to market forces is too.

things i have been saying for a while!

The Viking (Gunnar Blohm)@gunnarblohm.bsky.social · 4mo ago

towardsdatascience.com/meta-cogniti...

Unbelievably honoured to read Tatiana Engel's (@engeltatiana.bsky.social) wonderfully written Preview on our work "Linking neural manifolds to circtuit structure in recurrent networks" (with @lpezon.bsky.social & @gerstnerlab.bsky.social) in this issue of Neuron www.cell.com/neuron/fullt... 🙏

Finding clues to circuit structure in population dynamics and single-neuron selectivity

In this issue of Neuron, Pezon et al. introduce neural circuit models with flexible connectivity structure that can generate low-dimensional population dynamics with different distributions of single-...

cell.com

the ppl we thank in acknowledgement sections are "a more relevant predictor of publication success than formal collaborations (i.e., coauthorship), even after matching for gender, seniority, methodological orientation, geographical location, and institutional prestige." www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Informal connections outweigh coauthorship ties in academic impact | PNAS

Past work has documented the importance of formal collaboration, particularly coauthorship, in increasing research productivity and innovation. How...

pnas.org

Smell is topographically organized after all. A spatial code governs olfactory receptor choice and aligns sensory maps in the nose and brain: Cell www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

A spatial code governs olfactory receptor choice and aligns sensory maps in the nose and brain

Dorsoventral epithelial position induces graded expression of a transcriptional program that maps each of the 1,100 olfactory sensory neuron subtypes to stereotyped spatial distributions in the epithe...

cell.com

🧠Introducing OmniMouse: One of the largest datasets in neuroscience along with a systematic study of scaling properties of brain models Co-led by 🤩 K. Willeke, @pollytur.bsky.social and @alexrgil14.bsky.social Models trained on up to 3M neurons, >150B tokens

If you need a method to infer causality from neural data, even when the signal is short, check our recent paper: Paper: joss.theoj.org/papers/10.21... Code: github.com/CMC-lab/Tran...

TranCIT: Transient Causal Interaction Toolbox

Nouri et al., (2025). TranCIT: Transient Causal Interaction Toolbox. Journal of Open Source Software, 10(116), 9302, https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.09302

joss.theoj.org

Salar Nouri@sanouri.bsky.social · 6mo ago

Wanna infer causal interactions during brief, transient neural events? 🧠⚡ Many methods struggle with such non-stationarities, but we got a robust solution for you! 📦 My recent publication with @cmc-lab.bsky.social 🥳: TranCIT: Transient Causal Interaction Toolbox 📜 JOSS: bsky.app/profile/joss...

New paper out in @cp-neuron.bsky.social 🎉 What determines contextual modulation in V1? Why does the visual surround sometimes facilitate and sometimes suppress a neuron's response to its preferred stimulus?

New @annualreviews.bsky.social #neuroscience article 👁️🧠: bionicvisionlab.org/publications... w/ @crisniell.bsky.social, @michaelgoard.bsky.social, @spencerlaveresmith.bsky.social Grateful to be part of this collaboration & learn from such a sharp group while rethinking vision in natural settings!

Ecological visual processing in the mouse | Bionic Vision Lab

We review computations that are engaged in ecological contexts, including active sensing, motion processing, scene analysis, distance estimation, and spatial perception.

bionicvisionlab.org

Come check out our poster "[2-018] Predictive pursuit emerges in high dimensions" Friday from 1-4p if you are at #cosyne2016! This work was led (and is presented) by the amazing @wtredman.bsky.social alongside an awesome team incld. @xiaoxiao-lin.bsky.social, @fatihdinc.bsky.social, and May Chan.

En route to #Cosyne2026! 🧠🧪🇵🇹 @bionicvisionlab.org is represented with 2 projects: - control of electrically evoked activity in human V1 - predictive model of mouse V1 recovers cell- and state-dependent tuning Check out our posters on Thursday! #CompNeuroSky #NeuroSkyence

Looking forward to the poster session tonight at #cosyne2026! Poster [1-132] – Session 1 (Thu, Mar 12, 20:30) We trained a predictive digital twin of mouse V1 on freely moving visual experience and use it for in-silico physiology to test how active behavioral states reshape visual tuning.

CMC lab is heading to #Cosyne2026, with 3 wonderful posters (1-031, 3-001, and 3-008 also see thread 👇), 2 new enthusiastic team members (@clairesturgill.bsky.social and @maxschwabe.bsky.social ), and tons of excitement for discussions and new ideas!

DNN models of the brain are getting bigger. Are we replacing one complicated system in vivo with another in silico? In new work, we seek the *smallest* DNN models of visual cortex, balancing prediction with parsimony. It turns out these compact models are surprisingly small! rdcu.be/e5H8G

Compact deep neural network models of the visual cortex

Nature - Parsimonious deep neural network models can be used for prediction of visual neuron responses.

rdcu.be

This study is super cool (connecting ecology and perception), that suggest some aspects of animal's perception (temporal precision) is shaped by their environment (which somehow resonates w our proposal on internal foraging perspectives on perceptual selection www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...)

Pace of ecology drives the tempo of visual perception across the animal kingdom - Nature Ecology & Evolution

Using phylogenetic comparative methods across 237 species from disparate phyla, the authors show that species with fast-paced ecologies have higher temporal resolution of perception.

nature.com

Kevin Healy@healyke.bsky.social · 7mo ago

Our new paper is now out showing how time perception in animals is linked to their ecology. Using data from 237 species we show temporal perception is faster in species that fly and pursuit predators www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🌐

The inevitable conclusion of Sam's mental perambulation here is straight up eugenics, which is why people who are actually smart know better than to even think in these terms.

X2Y@handle.invalid · 7mo ago

SAM ALTMAN: “People talk about how much energy it takes to train an AI model … But it also takes a lot of energy to train a human. It takes like 20 years of life and all of the food you eat during that time before you get smart.”

With this one in print, I think I finally earned that PhD... 😅 Presented for the first time at the cosyne when the world ended (March 2020). I'll bring over a summary thread from twitter when it was still twitter... www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Neuronal spiking in the mammalian forebrain is dominated by a heterogeneous ground state

Neuronal firing patterns have significant spatiotemporal variability with no agreed-upon theoretical framework. Using a combined experimental and mode…

sciencedirect.com

It is not often I get an epiphany from our own research. But this year Torbjørn Ness, Christof Koch, and I realized that when we know how to compute electric brain signals generated by a neuron, we also know how to electrically stimulate the same neuron. journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...

Predicting neural responses to intra- and extra-cranial electric brain stimulation by means of the reciprocity theorem

Author summary Electric brain stimulation is widely used in neuroscience and medicine, from mapping brain function during surgery to treating disorders such as Parkinson’s disease and depression. Yet ...

journals.plos.org

Justin's stuff has blown my mind every time I see one of his talks. Today is no different. Beautiful and impactful work.

Anil Seth@anilseth.bsky.social · 9mo ago

Brilliant talk by Justin Wood (Indiana) on his "digital twin studies" - raising newborn chicks, and artificial neural networks, in the same (virtual) environments - fantastic new perspective on the nature/nurture debate #CIFARwinterschool #TWCF www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

Can your AI beat a mouse? This is happening Sunday! robustforaging.github.io NeurIPS workshop 11 to 2 California time on Zoom! @mbeyeler.bsky.social @sinzlab.bsky.social @ninamiolane.bsky.social @crisniell.bsky.social @mariusschneider.bsky.social J. Canzano, Y. Hou, J. Peng, et al. #NeurIPS2025

Spencer LaVere Smith@spencerlaveresmith.bsky.social · last yr.

Recently have been doing virtual reality experiments with mice in complex, open world environments. No linear tracks. No T-mazes. No simple gratings. No binary choices. No blocky, high contrast environments. Those are great for some experiments, but we want to focus on COMPLEX processing. (6/n)

Finally got the job ad—looking for 2 PhD students to start spring next year: www.gao-unit.com/join-us/ If comp neuro, ML, and AI4Neuro is your thing, or you just nerd out over brain recordings, apply! I'm at neurips. DM me here / on the conference app or email if you want to meet 🏖️🌮

Next: Join our NeurIPS workshop on Dec 7, 2025, 11 to 2 PT on Zoom! Hear from top competitors and our 3 keynote speakers: - @sinzlab.bsky.social - @ninamiolane.bsky.social - @crisniell.bsky.social More info: robustforaging.github.io/workshop #NeurIPS2025 #Neuroscience #AI