Today is Venn Day, in celebration of the mathematician John Venn, born on this day in 1834. To commemorate the occasion, here’s a poem in the form of a Venn Diagram.
Lucas C Parra
@parralab.org
NeuroAI, applied neuroscience, machine learning, brain stimulation, neural signals, medical imaging - physicist by training. parralab.org
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
Minds, Machines, and Brains | MIT Press
direct.mit.edu
🎉 *extremely* excited to share our human single neuron + movie dataset is out in #ScientificData! 📄 Human neuron activity during an 83-minute movie from 2,286 neurons and 29 patients 🔗https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-026-07955-0 1st public dataset from @humansingleneuron.bsky.social!🧵
As we explore the idea that brain-body connection plays a role in mental health and psychiatry, let this null results on intersection be a warning: Not all fashionable ideas work out. Important work!
Interoceptive performance is unrelated to mental health symptoms in a large multi-domain psychophysical investigation - Nature Mental Health
In this large-scale study, Banellis and colleagues investigate the links between mental health symptoms and interoception by measuring cardiac and respiratory interoceptive sensitivity and relating th...
nature.com
Leah Banellis@leahbanellis.bsky.social · 2w agoSensing your body (‘Interoception’) is everywhere in theories of mental health. But when we tested how well hundreds of people sensed their heart and lungs, the link to symptoms was almost nowhere to be found. 💣 🚨New @natmentalhealth.nature.com paper 🚨🎉 asks why 🧵 www.nature.com/articles/s44...
When we started the visceral mind project, we promised to publish what we found null and otherwise, and we delivered!
Leah Banellis@leahbanellis.bsky.social · 2w agoSensing your body (‘Interoception’) is everywhere in theories of mental health. But when we tested how well hundreds of people sensed their heart and lungs, the link to symptoms was almost nowhere to be found. 💣 🚨New @natmentalhealth.nature.com paper 🚨🎉 asks why 🧵 www.nature.com/articles/s44...
Congrats we just made it impossible to come here for a PhD www.bostonglobe.com/2026/07/16/m...
Trump administration limits student visas to four years, changing longstanding policy - The Boston Globe
The new rule, which also restricts the international students’ ability to transfer schools or change majors without approval in their first year, will go into effect in mid-September.
bostonglobe.com
really thinking about this tweet as i’ve been struggling to breathe through nausea for the last 5 hours
Luke LeBrun@lukelebrun.ca · 3w agoThese images of First Nations community members evacuating Collins, Ontario on motorboats are absolutely surreal www.facebook.com/reel/1548244...
From a great collaboration with @lorenzoposani.com, @shuqiw.bsky.social, Samuel Muscinelli, Liam Paninski, now in Nature: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Rarely categorical, highly separable representations along the cortical hierarchy - Nature
Cortical circuits prioritize diversity over categorical structure, supporting a computational regime geared towards high-dimensional, highly separable neural representations.
nature.com
Should I still teach coding? I take pride in the biomedical signal processing class I have been teaching and refining since 2003. This is the first class where our engineering students learn to code with concrete problems to solve (60% of the grade). Should I still insist that they code themselves?
The global neuronal workspace (GNW) is currently the best documented neuroscience mechanism by which conscious processing arises in the human brain — and now Anthropic researchers have discovered a similar workspace inside their large language model ! www.anthropic.com/research/glo...
A global workspace in language models
Interpretability research on Claude's internal thoughts.
anthropic.com
1. A bit of evolutionary biology. I'm really intrigued by a new perspective piece from Steve Frank that explores connections between how natural selection creates systems that generalize and recent work in machine learning about the surprising capabilities of massively overparameterized systems.
Generalization as the great leap in evolvability: insights from machine learning
Abstract. Natural selection encodes learned information in the genome. Learned solutions may be tuned specifically to past challenges, failing in altered e
academic.oup.com
New open dataset out in Scientific Data 🚨 We are releasing BBBD: the Brain, Body, and Behavior Dataset. Paper: www.nature.com/articles/s41... Work with @parralab.org
The Brain, Body, and Behavior Dataset (BBBD): Multimodal Recordings during Educational Videos - Scientific Data
Scientific Data - The Brain, Body, and Behavior Dataset (BBBD): Multimodal Recordings during Educational Videos
nature.com
Free eBook: Patterns, predictions, and actions: A story about machine learning by Moritz Hardt, Benjamin Recht This graduate textbook on machine learning tells a story of how patterns in data support predictions and consequential actions. arxiv.org/abs/2102.05242
Excited to share this preprint from @ianoldenburg.bsky.social . To evoke movement with holo stim, you need the right pattern at the right time! Interestingly, the preparatory state before spont motion is not the same as the state permissive for evoked motion. Dig in! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
The Importance of Synchrony in the Neural Control of Movement
Throughout the mammalian cortex, populations of neurons must work together to enact behaviors. While population recordings in motor cortex have revealed many aspects of when neurons fire during behavi...
biorxiv.org
(1/n) Thrilled to share my first paper at Meta FAIR! "EgoBabyVLM: Benchmarking Cross-Modal Learning from Naturalistic Egocentric Video Data" 👶 Human infants learn language from sparse, noisy multimodal input. Today's VLMs can't. We built a benchmark + challenge to close that gap. 🧵
Updated preprint and code from my lab. If you want to explore more realistic neural dynamics in models that can still perform visual tasks, check it out! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Modeling Dynamical Vision with Biologically Plausible Recurrent Convolutional Networks
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) trained for image recognition have demonstrated remarkable conceptual similarities to the primate ventral visual pathway, but their standard feedforward architectu...
biorxiv.org
5,843 terminated NIH grants. 110 canceled announcements. Courts ordering reinstatements. Political pre-issuance review in action. My take in MedPage Today. @medpagetoday.com www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/seco...
Opinion | I Was an NIH Program Official. Here's What a Peer Reviewer Doesn’t See.
The NEJM editors understand the threat of the proposed federal grant review changes
medpagetoday.com
Excellent and thought-provoking essay by Ted Chiang. [gift link] www.theatlantic.com/philosophy/2...
No, Artificial Intelligence Is Not Conscious
Taken to its logical conclusion, this line of thinking is absurd—and damning.
theatlantic.com
Spontaneous problem-solving in bumble bees. Amazing work by the bees who were put in these puzzling situations by @akshayebhambore.bsky.social in the lab of @olliloukola.bsky.social www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
ALRIGHT EVERYONE HERE IS THE OFFICIAL SUFS GUIDE TO LEAVING PUBLIC COMMENTS ON THE OMB-2026-0034 PROPOSED RULE: www.standupforscience.foundation/policy-and-advocacy/the-sufs-guide-to-writing-public-comments (share with all your friends!)
The SUFS Guide to Writing Public Comments — Your Site Title
Written by: Cole Donovan, Director of Policy and Advocacy and Colette Delawalla, PhD, CEO
standupforscience.foundation
Incredible! Scientists receive a rare standing ovation after announcing that a new treatment can double the survival time for pancreatic cancer, the deadliest cancer which was once considered “undruggable.” When we fund and support science, we can achieve anything! (Video: Dr. Wish Dhillon)
What are the real problems to be solved in continual learning? In my latest post, I tackle this question — reviewing where I think the field went astray in the past, how language models changed things, and where the real challenges remain. infinitefaculty.substack.com/p/what-are-t...
What are the real problems of continual learning?
Reflections on catastrophic interference, plasticity, and learning for the future in the era of large language models
infinitefaculty.substack.com
🚨🚨New open resource for EEG researchers 🚨🚨 Want to work with neural synchrony and intersubject correlation of EEG? We released ready-to-use correlated components spatial filters for the 64-channel 10–20 montage.
Attentional state, not trait, predicts test performance in video-based learning
Computer science; Social sciences; Education
tinyurl.com
This paper changed my mind on how visual processing works in the brain. We knew it was dynamic given all the recurrent connections. But I thought it would converge to a fixpoint during a fixation. Not so, it seems ... The dynamic captures different aspects of the stimulus at different times. Nice.
Tim Kietzmann @timkietzmann.bsky.social · 3mo agoA huge effort and a new take on what constitutes the "feedforward pass" across the visual system. Make sure to check out our new preprint:
Where, exactly, does learning happen in the brain? Out today in @nature.com, we identify a synaptic locus of birdsong learning and show that the circuit can be tuned to make birds learn faster - but at a cost. Read on👇 #neuroskyence 🧪 #prattle 💬 #bioacoustics Shareable link: rdcu.be/fiyrS
A synaptic locus of song learning - Nature
Combining a computational framework and optogenetic and chemogenetic manipulations within and downstream of the cortico-basal ganglia circuit identifies the specific cortico-basal ganglia synapse...
nature.com
Now out in Nature Machine Intelligence @NatMachIntell “Adopting a human developmental visual diet yields robust and shape-based AI vision”: doi.org/10.1038/s422.... A wonderful case where brain inspiration improved AI. With @martisamuser.bsky.social, Radek Cichy and @timkietzmann.bsky.social .
"Quality is a relic now. Nobody wants it. Nobody pays for it. Nobody measures it. The metric is velocity. The metric is how fast you can ship a 3,167-line function that burns a quarter million API calls daily and call it 100% AI-written." 🔥 techtrenches.dev/p/the-snake-...
Claude Code's Source: 3,167-Line Function, Regex Sentiment
Anthropic claimed 100% of Claude Code is AI-written. A source leak exposed a 3,167-line function, regex sentiment analysis, and 250K wasted API calls daily
techtrenches.dev