1/2 🎇 Good news! 🎇 The kind people at Behavioral and Brain Science have made the new collection on "Conscious AI and biological naturalism" #OpenAccess for a limited time: target article, all 50 commentaries, & my response. Go to the link and click 'save pdf': doi.org/10.1017/S014.... Do share!

Out today in @nature.com: our review on how single cells evolve into multicellular organisms. With Ozan Bozdag, @kaitong25.bsky.social, Peter Yunker, and @matthewherron.bsky.social. rdcu.be/9ZuiKow9twKa For an overview, check out the video below.

Thank you to everyone sharing in this moment! I’m so grateful to all my trainees & collaborators… dlab.stanford.edu/group-members (pic: Peter and I together in 2017) Reading for all those asking: for technical details: dlab.stanford.edu for everyone: deisseroth.org/projections

Exclusive: A new analysis refutes James Watson’s claim that he was the first to recognize the significance of the famed photograph 51. https://scim.ag/4rTKck8

How did Rosalind Franklin miss the helix in her iconic DNA image? She didn’t

New analysis refutes James Watson’s claim he was first to recognize significance of famed photograph 51

scim.ag

How do philosophers and scientists of mind actually work together, and where does the collaboration break down? ISPSM is launching In Conversation, a new online series that aims to bring philosophers and scientists together to work through questions like these. 📅 23 Oct 2026, 1pm BST/8am EDT

In light of the Cornell case: an invitation to Actively stop group abuse of women at all levels. Report text chains, stop them. But also Data shows mundane group abuse of women in slander/gossip, dismissal of expertise, policing, low credit/hiring/promotion/pay, humiliation, disrespect, etc. Say No⛔

Congrats @felipedebrigard.bsky.social on the McArthur genius award! So well deserved.

Four days ago, a scientist was surprised by the news that Anthropic discovered new virus genes for making DNA. He says he’s been studying them for years—and feeding his data to Anthropic’s AI as part of his own research. Coincidence? Here’s my story. nyti.ms/3VSWayc

Did Anthropic’s A.I. Really Make a Scientific Discovery on Its Own? (Gift Article)

An expert at the University of Copenhagen said his team had been sharing its research with the company’s A.I. model, Claude, and that its new finding matched their work.

nyti.ms

I started researching ML before I built a synth, but you can get a great intuitive understanding of interaction within a generative system by building a modular analog synthesizer and watching how your components interact, and seeing what surprises emerge and what stays predictable as you scale up.

Our inaugural event, "Philosophy and science in conversation”, features a stellar, cross-disciplinary line-up of experts: Megan Peters (UCL/UC Irvine) @meganakpeters.bsky.social Ida Momennejad (Microsoft Research, NYC) @neuroai.bsky.social Jorge Morales (Duke) @jorgemorales.me

Agreed. Also as a community we need to (re)normalize asking critical questions at talks, conferences, random convos. Asking about scientific rigor sometimes takes a backseat to social considerations, esp when someone's charismatic or overconfident (student or prof). Ask kindly/thoughtfully, but ask.

2/2 The longer version of my case against conscious AI is in my 2025 @berggruen.org Prize essay – The Mythology of Conscious AI – published in @noemamag.com www.noemamag.com/the-mytholog...

The Mythology Of Conscious AI | NOEMA

Why consciousness is more likely a property of life than of computation and why creating conscious, or even conscious-seeming AI, is a bad idea.

noemamag.com

This paper shows how measures and constructs in psychology get introduced but rarely reused. Would love to see a similar analysis done on methods of analyzing neural data. A Fragmented Field: Construct and Measure Proliferation in Psychology" Anvari et al., 2025 journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

To tell if a maze is solvable, just hang it by its corners If it tears into pieces, you’ve found a solution

📣Algorithmic Grammar of Flexible Cognition: A Walk through Latent Operations osf.io/preprints/ps... Flexible behavior moves adaptively btwn cognitive modes. But units of analysis remain representations & few operations. Proposal: formalize open-ended cognition as walk over latent operations 1/n

A crucial part of doing science is the art of expressing & engaging with disagreement. Cheng et al show 11 AI models are sycophantic & make users more convinced they're right & less willing to take responsibility or repair conflict. Q. As we adopt AI in science how can we preserve healthy discourse?

Sycophantic AI decreases prosocial intentions and promotes dependence

Despite rising concerns about sycophancy—excessive agreement or flattery from artificial intelligence (AI) systems—little is known about its prevalence or consequences. We show that sycophancy is wide...

science.org

New preprint! We investigate the role of language in the transmission of mental models in cultural evolution. Using a transmission chain design with over 2000 participants, we show that only language allows for the transmission and refinement of mental models. osf.io/preprints/ps...

🧠🧵 New paper accepted at @jocn.bsky.social! Led by @amyqixx.bsky.social We found that memory traces carry an "echo" of how they were last accessed: the way you retrieve a concept leaves a measurable signature in the brain the next time you recognize it. doi.org/10.1162/JOCN... 1/9

Memory Traces Reflect How They Were Last Accessed

Abstract. Episodic memories are known to change with each act of retrieval. We hypothesize that accessing semantic knowledge in different ways during episodic retrieval—from unique perceptual features...

doi.org

Brooklyn bodega cat presents new finding.

Confused about all this talk of compositionality in neuroscience? Read our new perspective www.nature.com/articles/s41... with authors Reidar Riveland and Alex Pouget.

The compositionality continuum as a principle for studying the neural basis of intelligence - Nature Neuroscience

Compositionality exists on a continuum of increasing complexity rather than as a binary trait. Studying its implementation in simpler biological and artificial systems is the most tractable path towar...

nature.com

Out now in @science.org : How does the brain rapidly scan space to guide navigation? We found that the brain’s internal map is continuously retuned from moment to moment, focusing neural activity on what matters most. 🧵1/8 👉 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Adaptive modulation of theta sweeps in the brain’s navigation circuit

Efficient navigation requires prioritizing information from behaviorally relevant locations. In rats, such selective sampling may arise from theta-paced sweeps in grid and place cell populations, whic...

science.org

Bring your feedback and suggestions for future CCNs to our Community Meeting at 3:30–4:15pm in the Skirball Theater.

Hello world! 👋 We’re Minds, Machines, and Brains (MMB) 👤🤖🧠 a new open access journal from @mitpress.bsky.social exploring the principles of intelligence and cognition across natural and artificial minds. Submissions open this Fall! 🔗 direct.mit.edu/mmb

“It was a pleasure to burn.” - Fahrenheit 451 futurism.com/artificial-i...

AI Companies Are Buying Antique Books, Ingesting Their Contents to Train Models, and Then Destroying Them at Incredible Scale, Even If Almost No Copies Remain

AI companies are quietly obtaining rare books, ingesting their contents, and then destroying them -- even if they're exceedingly rare.

futurism.com

***New preprint from the lab*** showing “Generative replay across hippocampal-neocortical circuits”. In sleep we show spiking sequences in V1 (sensory neocortex!) that represent information that has not been directly experienced www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... @bndu.ox.ac.uk @ndcnoxford.bsky.social

Generative replay across hippocampal-neocortical circuits

To make flexible decisions, the brain needs to make inferences between events that were not directly experienced together. In sharp-wave ripple (SWR) events, during periods of rest and sleep, spiking ...

biorxiv.org

Don’t make me write a newsletter about how Emily Wilson is allowed to be an expert, you guys

Taylor is an exceptional mentor and collaborator. I highly recommend applying to work with his brand new lab at Princeton!

Taylor Webb@taylorwwebb.bsky.social · 3mo ago

I'm recruiting two postdocs (or potentially PhD students) to work on projects at the intersection of cognition, neuroscience, and AI (with a particular emphasis on mechanistic interpretability). Apply here: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F... and please share!

For me, the broader idea is that memory retrieval isn't simply replay. Instead, hippocampal output may initiate a transformation that expands compressed memory traces into rich cortical representations capable of supporting conscious recollection. I'd love to hear what people think.

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

1/ The world's songbirds sing in just 8 basic sounds. And where a bird lives decides which ones it uses. My first PhD paper is out now in @science.org (www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aee6239) Here is what we found:

The prefrontal cortex across scales: laminar architecture, white-matter constraints, and distributed control in cognition link.springer.com/article/10.1... #neuroscience

The prefrontal cortex across scales: laminar architecture, white-matter constraints, and distributed control in cognition - Brain Structure and Function

The prefrontal cortex (PFC) is often treated as the anatomical seat of executive control. We defend a distributed but structurally constrained account. The PFC is not an exclusive executive locus; it ...

link.springer.com