Personal update: I’m elated to have joined NVIDIA as a researcher in Seattle where I will be working on human-inspired sim2real perception in robotics. Grateful for the amazing opportunity and excited to see where this journey goes!

To be clear, there is nothing inconsistent with 1) large scale “areas” being extremely functionally relevant and 2) them being just one scale of a locally and globally coherent map of activity!

Ben Hayden@benhayden.bsky.social · 11mo ago

Sad day for peope who still believe brain areas are the primary organizational units of function in the brain. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Very excited to be in Amsterdam for #CCN2025! See below for my two presentations -- a talk today and a poster Friday. Come say hi!

What makes visual processing in the brain so powerful and flexible? Very excited to share our new work where we started from SOTA models that accurately predict dynamic brain activity during hours of video watching, and investigated core computations underlying visual perception

Yingtian (David) Tang@davidtyt.bsky.social · last yr.

🧠 NEW PREPRINT Many-Two-One: Diverse Representations Across Visual Pathways Emerge from A Single Objective www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Excited to share a new preprint w/ @annaschapiro.bsky.social! Why are there gradients of plasticity and sparsity along the neocortex–hippocampus hierarchy? We show that brain-like organization of these properties emerges in ANNs that meta-learn layer-wise plasticity and sparsity. bit.ly/4kB1yg5

A gradient of complementary learning systems emerges through meta-learning

Long-term learning and memory in the primate brain rely on a series of hierarchically organized subsystems extending from early sensory neocortical areas to the hippocampus. The components differ in t...

bit.ly

Exciting new preprint from the lab: “Adopting a human developmental visual diet yields robust, shape-based AI vision”. A most wonderful case where brain inspiration massively improved AI solutions. Work with @zejinlu.bsky.social @sushrutthorat.bsky.social and Radek Cichy arxiv.org/abs/2507.03168

Very cool work and very in line with how we've been thinking about category selectivity in topographic neural net models -- one scale of an inherently interactive topographic network. Their results provide important constraints for the next generation of active, multimodal neural net models.

Lenny van Dyck@levandyck.bsky.social · last yr.

How is high-level visual cortex organized? In a new preprint with @martinhebart.bsky.social & @kathadobs.bsky.social, we show that category-selective areas encode a rich, multidimensional feature space 🌈 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... #neuroskyence 🧵 1/n

Can seemingly complex multi-area computations in the brain emerge from the need for energy efficient computation? In our new preprint on predictive remapping in active vision, we report on such a case. Let us take you for a spin. 1/6 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Has nominative determinism gone too far h/t @benjaminschneider.ch

BREAKING: A federal judge reversed National Institutes of Health's terminations of hundreds of critical research grants that were canceled because of their alleged connection to disfavored topics, including diversity, equity, inclusion, and gender identity. This is a major win for public health.

What shapes the topography of high-level visual cortex? Excited to share a new pre-print addressing this question with connectivity-constrained interactive topographic networks, titled "Retinotopic scaffolding of high-level vision", w/ Marlene Behrmann & David Plaut. 🧵 ↓ 1/n

Our new story. Now also posted by the official side. :) Activity patterns drift. Representational maps are preserved. Even after single neuron ablations, representational maps are recovered within days.

Nature Neuroscience@natneuro.nature.com · last yr.

How homeostatic mechanisms protect the representational map of sounds after neuron loss in mouse auditory cortex www.nature.com/articles/s41...

America cannot long remain free, nor first among nations, if it becomes the kind of place where universities are dismantled because they don't align politically with the current head of the government.

What are the organizing dimensions of language processing? We show that voxel responses during comprehension are organized along 2 main axes: processing difficulty & meaning abstractness—revealing an interpretable, topographic representational basis for language processing shared across individuals

Respectfully, news orgs should not report that "Harvard can no longer" do xyz -- Trump just saying some shit doesn't make it law. Stop carrying water for him rhetorically.

WBUR@wbur.org · last yr.

Harvard can no longer enroll international students after the Trump administration revoked Harvard University's ability to enroll international students. The school called the decision "unlawful."

🧪 Basic science boosts the economy: "The proposed dismantling of NSF [and NIH] raises an urgent question: do these cuts actually save money or merely delay spending until the bill gets larger? The answer is clear: these cuts will cost the economy billions."

Trump’s NIH And NSF Cuts Estimated To Cost The U.S. Economy $10 Billion Annually

Economists find public R&D drives a quarter of U.S. productivity growth — and pays for itself

forbes.com

I’m happy to be at #VSS2025 and share what our lab has been up to this year! I’m also honored to receive this year’s young investigator award and will give a short talk at the awards ceremony Monday

How Your Brain Splits Space to Double Its Perception Power neurosciencenews.com/brain-hemisp... #neuroscience

How Your Brain Splits Space to Double Its Perception Power - Neuroscience News

Despite popular myths about left- and right-brain thinking, research shows the hemispheres truly do divide up certain tasks—especially visual spatial perception.

neurosciencenews.com

Just back from an awesome visit to Georgia Tech to speak at their Computational Cognition Postdoc Day. Very impressed by their community. And really happy to finally have met my good friend and student @neurotaha.bsky.social in person after knowing each other remotely for over 3 years!

Time to catch up on the past week’s news about science and medicine in the US. Whew. 1/10

in press @natcomms.nature.com 🌟 "Multimodal gradients unify local and global cortical organization" 7T MRI + cytoarchitectonics reveal a sensory-paralimbic axis of areal specialization & integration led by superstar Yezhou Wang & a terrific team of friends & colleagues ▶️ doi.org/10.1038/s414...

NIH is going to hold a town hall for staff with director Jayanta Bhattacharya, and apparently the form to submit questions is publicly available. In case that’s of interest. forms.office.com/pages/respon...

I got an email yesterday afternoon that my NSF SPRF Postdoctoral Fellowship was terminated. My grant focused on testing interventions to address online misinformation and I was 8 months into a two year appointment.

Mike Wagner@prowag.bsky.social · last yr.

Friday Night Massacre of accurate information. A devastating day for the USA as tens of millions of dollars of grants seeking to combat the spread of false information were terminated. We have a federal govenrment that does not consider the verifiable truth a priority. www.nsf.gov/updates-on-p...

Dendritic arbors structure memories | Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Dendritic arbors structure memories

Synapses on different dendritic domains store distinct types of information

science.org

There is a PR narrative quickly emerging about “entitlement” of elite universities, as if this $ is some sort of subsidy Harvard & others must counter this quickly The $ doesn’t flow into Harvard’s coffers - this is grant money, most of which goes to research the govt has agreed has social value

Top-down feedback is ubiquitous in the brain and computationally distinct, but rarely modeled in deep neural networks. What happens when a DNN has biologically-inspired top-down feedback? 🧠📈 Our new paper explores this: elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre...

Extremely proud of Harvard for making this choice. I was feeling a lot of despair at the idea that they would cave like Columbia, and that others would follow suit. Let the battle for intellectual freedom begin. www.harvard.edu/president/ne...

The Promise of American Higher Education

No government—regardless of which party is in power—should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue

harvard.edu

1. LLM-generated code tries to run code from online software packages. Which is normal but 2. The packages don’t exist. Which would normally cause an error but 3. Nefarious people have made malware under the package names that LLMs make up most often. So 4. Now the LLM code points to malware.

David D. Levine@daviddlevine.com · last yr.

LLMs hallucinating nonexistent software packages with plausible names leads to a new malware vulnerability: "slopsquatting."

This is excruciating but critical for us to hear. “If you take Columbia university as really the first trial of this strategy, we’ve seen an enormous payoff, and so I’d like to see … that prototype industrialized and applied to all of the universities as a sector" www.nytimes.com/2025/04/11/p...

The Conservative Activist Pushing Trump to Attack U.S. Colleges

Christopher Rufo has helped inspire Republican messaging and bills on hot-button issues.

nytimes.com