An acortical mouse — born without hippocampus and most of its neocortex — learns the Manhattan Maze: a 30× improvement in 5 hours, 18 rewards! Now a question for everyone: How can an acortical brain do this? Leave a comment! Preprint w/ @mameister4.bsky.social: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

We derived six laws of psychophysics from a single efficient-coding equation. The laws include Weber's law; scaling laws in visual working memory (which had been noted before, but with unclear theoretical justification); Wei & Stocker's law of human perception; arthurprat.com/pdfs/Prat-Ca...

This work is now published in @cp-cellreports.bsky.social! Thanks to co-authors H McCalmon, G Cai, C Tsibouris, @noehamou.bsky.social, J Hoskins, F Pashakhanloo, @sueyeonchung.bsky.social and V Kapoor.

Sparse input representations explain odor discrimination in complex, concentration-varying mixtures

Detecting a target odor against complex backgrounds requires separating signal from interference. McCalmon et al. show that discrimination performance depends on target odor concentration but not back...

cell.com

Venki Murthy@neurovenki.bsky.social · 8mo ago

New preprint from our group (collaboration with @sueyeonchung.bsky.social) showing that discriminating odor components within a complex mixture is constrained by neural sensitivity rather than background interference - likely due to sparse representations at the front end.

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Sainsbury Wellcome Centre@sainsburywellcome.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Join us for 'What can Neuroscience teach us about the Mind?', a 1-day symposium exploring whether neural mechanisms can truly explain behaviour, and what this means for minds both biological and artificial. Free and open to all: www.sainsburywellcome.org/events/stude...

Huge congrats to @snierwetberg.bsky.social , David (not on BSky), and @maxwellxchen.bsky.social for their paper! They developed a mouse task in which relational structure can be isolated from cue identity and reward statistics. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 🧠📈🧪 #neuroskyence @uclnpp.bsky.social

Our latest publication grapples with how the brain could implement gradient descent by sending learning targets top-down, gating plasticity with dendritic inhibition, and updating synaptic weights with biologically observed learning rules like BTSP. www.cell.com/cell-reports...

Cellular and subcellular specialization enables biology-constrained deep learning

Galloni et al. introduce “dendritic target propagation”: a Dale’s law-compliant learning algorithm for cortical microcircuits with soma- and dendrite-targeting inhibition and realistic connectivity co...

cell.com

Aaron Milstein@neurosutras.bsky.social · last yr.

New #NeuroAI #compneurosky preprint! To better understand how target-directed learning works in the brain, we sought to engineer an artificial neural network capable of solving complex image classification tasks that comprises only experimentally-supported biological building blocks. (1/15)

Excited to be co-organising a #cosyne2026 workshop with Alison Comrie on 'algorithms for learning from scratch'! With a great line-up of speakers, we'll be tackling the question of what processes enable naive biological & artificial agents to adapt to new situations. Info here: tinyurl.com/4u8enf7k

learningfromscratch

march 16th, workshop day 1 @ cosyne 2026

sites.google.com

Excited to launch Principia, a nonprofit research organisation at the intersection of deep learning theory and AI safety. Our goal is to develop theory for modern machine learning systems that can help us understand complex network behaviors, including those critical for AI safety and alignment. 1

New preprint from our group (collaboration with @sueyeonchung.bsky.social) showing that discriminating odor components within a complex mixture is constrained by neural sensitivity rather than background interference - likely due to sparse representations at the front end.

#ResultatScientifique🔎| L’hippocampe combine signaux externes et états émotionnels pour adapter le comportement face à l’environnement. ✍️ @mnpompili.bsky.social 📕 buff.ly/DulC2E9 ▶️ buff.ly/WwfQgfo

Relier le comportement aux signaux externes : une fonction intégratrice de l’hippocampe

Face au danger, le cerveau doit reconnaître les signaux de menace et élaborer une réponse adaptée.

buff.ly

Everyone knows dorsal and ventral hippocampus do different things. But how do neurons in these regions differ in function — and how are their contributions integrated? We tackled this with @noehamou.bsky.social and Sid Wiener in a paper just out in @pnas.org 👇🧵 1/12 www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1...

📢 Applications open on 19 Jan for the 7-week #Mathematics #SummerSchool in London. You will develop the maths skills and intuition necessary to enter the #TheoreticalNeuroscience / #MachineLearning field. Find out more & register for the information webinar 👉 www.ucl.ac.uk/life-science...

Cell assemblies are drawing increasing attention in neuroscience, but one could argue that they are just an epiphenomenon. Is the activity of cell assemblies relevant for the brain? The short answer is yes. The long answer is in our paper, now online at PLOS Biology. 🧵👇 1/10 doi.org/10.1371/jour...

Adaptive communication between cell assemblies and “reader” neurons shapes flexible brain dynamics

Cell assemblies have been proposed as key units of brain activity, underlying diverse functions, but their basic features are not well understood. This study shows that interactions between cell assem...

doi.org

Predictive learning enables compositional representations https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.26.678731v1

@noehamou.bsky.social and @gautamreddy.bsky.social (with a little bit of help from me) have written a really interesting theoretical paper on associative learning (in particular Pavlovian conditioning): www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Reconciling time and prediction error theories of associative learning

Learning involves forming associations between sensory events that have a consistent temporal relationship. Influential theories based on prediction errors explain numerous behavioral and neurobiologi...

biorxiv.org