Happy Monday! Come learn how jellyfish swim. In a review led by fluid dynamics maestro Alex Hoover, we outline how neuromechanical modeling will help us understand how modulation of neural activity allows jellyfish to jet and pirouette through fluids www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

New preprint! Joint SSL on neural data improves supervised decoding. Even includes some cool multi-species pretraining results! Great work by @ximengmao.bsky.social @nandahkrishna.bsky.social @averyryoo.bsky.social with @glajoie.bsky.social. Preprint here: arxiv.org/abs/2607.14086, blueprint below!

Leveraging unlabelled data for generalizable neural population decoding

Robust and accurate neural decoders are integral to neurotechnologies such as brain-computer interfaces and closed-loop experiments. Recent work has shown that tokenizing neural data at the spike leve...

arxiv.org

Nanda H Krishna@nandahkrishna.bsky.social · 2w ago

What if spike-tokenising decoders could learn from unlabelled neural data? 🧠⚡ Introducing MOJO, a joint SSL+SL framework for POYO- & POSSM-style models. MOJO improves decoding & few-shot transfer and yields more interpretable unit embeddings across neural datasets & tasks. 1/🧵

With the rumblings around CIHR wanting to move to one cycle per year not going away, in consultation with a diverse stakeholder group, we have put together a letter for CIHR leadership. Please consider signing this letter and share/RT: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F... @cannabrain.bsky.social

CIHR Project Grant Cycle Restructuring

Dear colleagues, Below you will find a draft letter regarding the proposed transition to a single annual CIHR Project Grant competition, and to invite you to sign on if you are in agreement with its c...

docs.google.com

Some of you saw a preview of this result at my Cosyne talk last week. We may have had too much fun working on this worm-fly model 🤣🤓🤣 (The digital sphinx may be imagery, but the lessons are real.)

John Tuthill@tuthill.bsky.social · 4mo ago

🧵 New preprint led by @bingbrunton.bsky.social, @elliottabe.bsky.social, @lawrencehu.bsky.social We gave a worm brain control of a fly body and it walked What did we learn? Nothing, other than deep reinforcement learning is effective We call it the digital sphinx www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Here's a lovely #blueprint on a new study from our lab led by @royeyono.bsky.social. tl;dr: it implies that there may be interneurons whose role is to normalize credit assignment signals during learning. #neuroscience 🧪

Roy Eyono@royeyono.bsky.social · 5mo ago

How do neural circuits in the brain implement normalization? 🧠 In our new paper, we show that just normalizing sensory input isn't enough. Crucially, we must also normalize the error signals! 🧵👇 Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2603.17676

New paper! We introduce JEDI, Jointly Embedded Dynamics Inference for neural dynamics. arxiv.org/abs/2603.10489. JEDI flexibly infers dynamical principles (across behaviors/contexts) from neural population data through RNNs constrained at single-neuron resolution to reproduce that data.

JEDI: Jointly Embedded Inference of Neural Dynamics

Animal brains flexibly and efficiently achieve many behavioral tasks with a single neural network. A core goal in modern neuroscience is to map the mechanisms of the brain's flexibility onto the dynam...

arxiv.org

New paper hot off the (pre-)press! We dig into the evolutionary origins of neural computations for behavioral control across mice, monkeys, and humans: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6.... As our lab's first foray into comparative analysis of neural dynamics, I’m super excited about this work! 1/18

1. I’m quite happy with this popular piece that Lee Dugatkin and I wrote recently. For the next two weeks it’s free to read on the American Scientist website.

Humbled by Evolution

Understanding the history and diversity of life inspires awe and wonder.

americanscientist.org

Our paper is out in Science Advances! What makes primate hands so dexterous? We show that evolutionarily distinct spinal and cortical pathways work together to balance stability and flexibility, supporting remarkable primate hand control. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Primate dexterous hand movements are controlled by functionally distinct premotoneuronal systems

Distinct spinal and cortical pathways coordinate muscle synergies and fine control to support primate dexterous hand movements.

science.org

Beautiful to see! Great work!

Adrien Peyrache@apeyrache.bsky.social · 6mo ago

New paper alert! 🚨 We found that the brain's compass is remarkably stable at two scales 1️⃣ the system maintains its internal organization for weeks 2️⃣ It "remembers" its orientation for weeks, even after a single visit This may be key to how the brain aligns its other maps. Paper: rdcu.be/e3waP

🚨📜+🧵🚨 Very excited about this work showing that people with no hand function following a spinal cord injury can control the activity of motor units from those muscles to perform 1D, 2D and 3D tasks, play video games, or navigate a virtual wheelchair By a wonderful team co-mentored w Dario Farina

Vishal Rawji@vishrawji.bsky.social · 7mo ago

New preprint! We show that people with tetraplegic spinal cord injury can use their residual motor unit activity to achieve up to three dimensional control using non-invasive high-density surface EMG With my co-first authors Xingchen Yang and Ciara Gibbs www.medrxiv.org/content/10.6... 1/13

Go work with Juan! I can vouch that this will be a very cool project.

Juan Gallego@juangallego.bsky.social · 8mo ago

Super happy for having been awarded an @erc.europa.eu Consolidator Grant to continue our basic neuroscience work on the neural basis for motor control and motor learning. What a great way to set things up here at Champalimaud! 🎉 🚨 Job Alert for postdocs research technicians, and PhD students in 🧵

🚨Job alert🚨 The lab has up to *3 postdoc openings* for comp systems neuroscientists interested in describing and manipulating neural population dynamics mediating behaviour This is part of a collaborative ARIA grant "4D precision control of cortical dynamics" euraxess.ec.europa.eu/jobs/383909

3 Postdoctoral Research Fellows

Champalimaud Foundation (Fundação D. Anna de Sommer Champalimaud e Dr.

euraxess.ec.europa.eu

If you're interested in dynamical systems analysis for neuroscience, definitely check out @oliviercodol.bsky.social 's revised version of our RL paper! Very cool results in the new Fig 6, worth it regardless of if you saw our previous version or if it's all new. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Brain-like neural dynamics for behavioral control develop through reinforcement learning

During development, neural circuits are shaped continuously as we learn to control our bodies. The ultimate goal of this process is to produce neural dynamics that enable the rich repertoire of behavi...

biorxiv.org

Olivier Codol@oliviercodol.bsky.social · 9mo ago

A tad late (announcements coming) but very happy to share the latest developments in my previous preprint! Previously, we show that neural representations for control of movement are largely distinct following supervised or reinforcement learning. The latter most closely matches NHP recordings.

A big "get" for the Champalimaud! Excited to see what comes out of the Warehouse and the next phase of Juan's lab

Juan Gallego@juangallego.bsky.social · 10mo ago

🚨Big news!🚨 The lab is relocating to Lisbon, joining a great team of experimental and theoretical neuroscientists, and the Neurotechnology Warehouse, a new initiative to bridge basic and translational research. I'll be sharing postdoc openings soon. Come join us in this new incarnation of the lab!

Very excited and proud to share my postdoctoral research with @neurrriot.bsky.social looking at the context-specific encoding of social behavior 💃🕺 in hormone-sensitive, large-scale brain networks in mice! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... #neuroskyence #compneurosky 🧪 1/12

Of potential interest to those keen on motor control and/or multi-task networks. Congrats to Elom and Eric. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Motor cortex flexibly deploys a high-dimensional repertoire of subskills

Skilled movement often requires flexibly combining multiple subskills, each requiring dedicated control strategies and underlying computations. How the motor system achieves such versatility remains u...

biorxiv.org

🚨 I’m excited to say that my CIHR Project Grant was funded! My NHP lab is now full-speed-ahead, and I’m hiring experimentalists (postdoc, PhD student, and/or a tech/manager). We’ll do multi-region ephys during reaching/grasping in macaques, with behavioral and spinal perturbations.

Awesome work from @juangallego.bsky.social and lab. An interface from single motoneuron control in tetraplegia!

Juan Gallego@juangallego.bsky.social · 12mo ago

🚨 New preprint + thread 🧵 We've gone back to studying motoneuron control principles and their applications & here's paper #1: A proof-of-concept study showing that people with tetraplegic spinal cord injury can control up to 2DoF from a single intramuscular implant www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

Check out @jordancollver.bsky.social’s‬ great illustration of modular RNNs training to work like a bio-brain🦾🧠 Thanks to Crearte for featuring our collaboration! www.instagram.com/crearte.ca/p...

The Crearte Foundation | #ArtScience on Instagram: "When a neurobiologist is also a comic artist, science can have a whole new storyline. In a 2022 collaboration between the Rajan Lab at Harvard Med...

6 likes, 0 comments - crearte.ca on July 28, 2025: "When a neurobiologist is also a comic artist, science can have a whole new storyline. In a 2022 collaboration between the Rajan Lab at Harvard Med...

instagram.com

Very happy about my former mentor Sara Solla having received the Valentin Braitenberg Award for her lifelong contributions to computational neuroscience! Sara will be giving a lecture at the upcoming @bernsteinneuro.bsky.social meeting which you shouldn't miss. bernstein-network.de/en/newsroom/...

📰 I really enjoyed writing this article with @thetransmitter.bsky.social! In it, I summarize parts of our recent perspective article on neural manifolds (www.nature.com/articles/s41...), with a focus on highlighting just a few cool insights into the brain we've already seen at the population level.

The Transmitter @thetransmitter.bsky.social · last yr.

Neural manifold properties can help us understand how animal brains deal with competing and multifaceted information, execute flexible behaviors and reuse common computations, writes @mattperich.bsky.social. #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/neural-dynam...

🚨New paper🚨 Neural manifolds went from a niche-y word to an ubiquitous term in systems neuro thanks to many interesting findings across fields. But like with any emerging term, people use it very differently. Here, we clarify our take on the term, and review key findings & challenges rdcu.be/ex8hW

'manifolds', and the overall conception of the brain using a dynamical systems framework, have come a long way.

Matt Perich@mattperich.bsky.social · last yr.

Check out our new review/perspective (w/ @juangallego.bsky.social & Devika Narain) on neural manifolds in the brain! It was a lot of fun to think through these ideas over the past couple of years, and I'm excited it's finally out in the world! 🔗: www.nature.com/articles/s41... 📄: rdcu.be/ex8hW

Check out our new review/perspective (w/ @juangallego.bsky.social & Devika Narain) on neural manifolds in the brain! It was a lot of fun to think through these ideas over the past couple of years, and I'm excited it's finally out in the world! 🔗: www.nature.com/articles/s41... 📄: rdcu.be/ex8hW

A neural manifold view of the brain - Nature Neuroscience

Recent advances in neuroscience have revealed how neural population activity underlying behavior can be well described by topological objects called neural manifolds. Understanding how nature, nurture...

nature.com

Finally out! Eight years after initiating this study with Simon Borgognon, Nicolo Macellari, and Gregoire Courtine, we have uncovered neural population dynamics shared among premotor, motor, and somatosensory cortices during various types of locomotor tasks. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Regional specialization of movement encoding across the primate sensorimotor cortex - Nature Communications

How the cortex generates movement to achieve different tasks remains poorly understood. Here the authors show that the cortex serializes motor control by first performing task-specific computations in...

nature.com

Our new approach for scalable, generalizable, and efficient neural population decoding is now online! Here we focus on real-time BCI but I'm excited about all of our next steps building on this. Awesome work led by @averyryoo.bsky.social @nandahkrishna.bsky.social @ximengmao.bsky.social

Avery HW Ryoo@averyryoo.bsky.social · last yr.

New preprint! 🧠🤖 How do we build neural decoders that are: ⚡️ fast enough for real-time use 🎯 accurate across diverse tasks 🌍 generalizable to new sessions, subjects, and even species? We present POSSM, a hybrid SSM architecture that optimizes for all three of these axes! 🧵1/7

Very late, but had a 🔥 time at my first Cosyne presenting my work with @nandahkrishna.bsky.social, Ximeng Mao, @mattperich.bsky.social, and @glajoie.bsky.social on real-time neural decoding with hybrid SSMs. Keep an eye out for a preprint (hopefully) soon 👀 #Cosyne2025 @cosynemeeting.bsky.social

Many apparent disagreements over the utility of neural manifolds come from a lack of clarity on what the term really encompasses, argues @mattperich.bsky.social #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/neural-dynam...

Neural manifolds: Latest buzzword or pathway to understand the brain?

When you cut away the misconceptions, neural manifolds present a conceptually appropriate level at which systems neuroscientists can study the brain.

thetransmitter.org

🧠 Our new (NIH funded!) paper reveals how the brain creates internal dynamics during both real- and imagined navigation. We recorded directly from the human hippocampus as participants moved through physical space and when they mentally navigated imagined routes. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Human neural dynamics of real-world and imagined navigation - Nature Human Behaviour

Seeber et al. studied brain recordings from implanted electrodes in freely moving humans. Neural dynamics encoded actual and imagined routes similarly, demonstrating parallels between navigational, im...

nature.com