Excited to share our new paper accepted at ICML 2026 with @tyrellturing.bsky.social and Doina Precup! 🇰🇷 See you in Seoul. A major challenge in continual reinforcement learning is balancing: • plasticity (learning new things) • stability (not forgetting old ones) 🧵 1/15

🚨🧠 Our paper is out! We introduce a simple computational model that generates macroscopic, long-timescale dynamics as seen in large-scale neural recordings. #neuroscience #dynamics @marius10p.bsky.social @zhong-lin.bsky.social @hhmijanelia.bsky.social Link: go.nature.com/4tRNjIu

Nature@nature.com · 3mo ago

Nature research paper: A critical initialization for biological neural networks go.nature.com/4tRNjIu

We have an implicit model of neurodegenerative disease: many discrete diseases, with their own disparate biology. Underlying all of them is the general process of aging. We must strike at the root of senescence. Here's our plan for addressing brain aging. blog.amaranth.foundation/p/solving-br...

Towards Solving Brain Aging

The most important problem in medicine, and the case for acting now.

blog.amaranth.foundation

From @tonyzador.bsky.social and crew, a paper showing that neurons' positions in the brain are not just determined by molecular, but also by lineage: www.cell.com/neuron/abstr... #neuroscience 🧪

A lineage-based model of scalable positional information in vertebrate brain development

How is brain development coordinated over long distances as it grows from a single zygote to billions of cells? Kerstjens et al. propose that positional information is inherited through the cell linea...

cell.com

Do you think that the canonical cortical circuit is complicated? It's so much worse than that! Overlayed on top of the wired connectome, there are *18* different signal-carrying peptides in cortex! Their range is ~similar to the size of a cortical column elifesciences.org/articles/47889 1/

Stoked this is finally out! We ask: how can we simulate the brain from the bottom up? It's not sufficient to grab the connectome and wire it up in silico! We need 1) ultrastructure 2) (causal) calibration data 3) functional data. Then we can build a simulation compiler. 1/

Konrad Kording@kordinglab.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Preprint out arguing that we should build the techology to translate (compile) molecularly annotated connectomes into dynamics. I think this is incredibly important. arxiv.org/abs/2603.25713

Paradoxically, when you see a yellow on blue slide, you know you're about to get a fantastic lecture. Bonus points for Times New Roman.

🧵 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...

If you have a good substack about neuro / AI and are cranking out solid content, happy to add it to my list of recs on substack—that little feature has driven 100's of subscribers to other newsletters

A cool insight here: CDM isn’t just hard to infer, it’s hard to train directly (because it can’t be specified as a loss on systems behavior). This means it either needs to emerge as a consequence of other losses, data, or architecture choices.

Sean Escola@seanescola.bsky.social · 5mo ago

We know about cosmological dark matter despite being unable to measure it because, without it, galaxies would fall apart. By analogy, let's talk about "cognitive dark matter" (CDM): brain functions that meaningfully shape behavior but are hard to infer from behavior alone. New paper! 🧵👇

Current AI models are trained on human behavior -- the words we produce. New preprint explores the idea that we might be able to address some of the gaps in these systems by training on the latent variables behind that behavior: human cognition.

Sean Escola@seanescola.bsky.social · 5mo ago

We know about cosmological dark matter despite being unable to measure it because, without it, galaxies would fall apart. By analogy, let's talk about "cognitive dark matter" (CDM): brain functions that meaningfully shape behavior but are hard to infer from behavior alone. New paper! 🧵👇

A remarkable journey of resilience and transformation, from the chaotic corridors of group homes to the halls of Columbia and Stanford, EMERGENCE is a coming-of-age tale where heartbreak and humor meet the scientific wonder of modern artificial intelligence. 🔗 Preorder: tinyurl.com/fzcxb5ea

We know about cosmological dark matter despite being unable to measure it because, without it, galaxies would fall apart. By analogy, let's talk about "cognitive dark matter" (CDM): brain functions that meaningfully shape behavior but are hard to infer from behavior alone. New paper! 🧵👇

There's no better way to learn than to teach! Help make NMA a resounding success!

Neuromatch@neuromatch.bsky.social · 5mo ago

💼 Paid Opportunity: Join Neuromatch Academy and Climatematch Academy as a #virtual #TeachingAssistant this July. 8hrs/day, Monday to Friday during the course dates. ➡️ Learn more here: neuromatch.io/become-a-tea... ➡️ Apply before 15 March portal.neuromatchacademy.org/sign-in #JobPosting #TA

Ran into David Chalmers at Wash Sq Park. Beautiful day to ponder the hard problem of consciousness.

Looking for YOUR INPUT on what we've learned in neuro in the past 20 years. I've only heard pessimistic takes! Come on, grid cells, manifolds, optogenetics, connectomes, moving past the monoamine theory of depression and the Ab theory of AD, glymphatics and lymphatics, what is sleep?! We did stuff!

Patrick Mineault@patrickmineault.bsky.social · 5mo ago

I want to write a fun little post on what we've learned in neuroscience in the last 20 years. What are the most interesting results you can think of? Biggest trends?

I want to write a fun little post on what we've learned in neuroscience in the last 20 years. What are the most interesting results you can think of? Biggest trends?

DNN models of the brain are getting bigger. Are we replacing one complicated system in vivo with another in silico? In new work, we seek the *smallest* DNN models of visual cortex, balancing prediction with parsimony. It turns out these compact models are surprisingly small! rdcu.be/e5H8G

Compact deep neural network models of the visual cortex

Nature - Parsimonious deep neural network models can be used for prediction of visual neuron responses.

rdcu.be

Lots of things to think about in these posts from @patrickmineault.bsky.social -- nice to see more blog entries :)

Patrick Mineault@patrickmineault.bsky.social · 5mo ago

What are cell types good for, computationally? Encoding innate behavior! In this 2-parter, I break down the relationship between cell types—which I had, in years prior, dismissed as mere implementation detail—and computation. I changed my mind! www.neuroai.science/p/cell-types...

What are cell types good for, computationally? Encoding innate behavior! In this 2-parter, I break down the relationship between cell types—which I had, in years prior, dismissed as mere implementation detail—and computation. I changed my mind! www.neuroai.science/p/cell-types...

Cell types: encoding the brain's BIOS

Inferring the structure of primary rewards from connectomics

neuroai.science

I'm excited to announce that I had my first (co-authored) book published today! "The Rational Use of Cognitive Resources" with Falk Lieder and Tom Griffiths (@cocoscilab.bsky.social ). You can read it for free! (see thread)

The revised version of our paper on the impact of top-down feedback is now out @elife.bsky.social: doi.org/10.7554/eLif... tl;dr: we show that using human-brain-like feedback/anatomy in a deep RNN leads to human-like visual biases! This work was led by @tmshbr.bsky.social #NeuroAI 🧠📈 🧪

🚨 new work from the lab on how eye movements 👀 versus orofacial movements influence 🐭 visual cortex activity 🧠 #neuroscience #behavior #neuroAI

Atika Syeda@atika-syeda.bsky.social · 6mo ago

Excited to share “Orofacial behaviors, not eye movements, govern neural activity in mouse visual cortex” www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Summary below...

Discovered @patrickmineault.bsky.social's excellent Good Research Code Handbook today, which was always awesome, but is even more necessary as more scientists consider integrating coding agents into their workflows. goodresearch.dev

The Good Research Code Handbook

This handbook is for grad students, postdocs and PIs who do a lot of programming as part of their research. It will teach you, in a practical manner, how to organize your code so that it is easy to...

goodresearch.dev

www.neuroai.science/p/claude-cod... Why yes this is very helpful for me as an undergrad. I like the way the methods that Patrick laid, how to aid research using AI and its pros vs cons

Claude Code for Scientists

Abundant code without the sharp edges

neuroai.science

From @patrickmineault.bsky.social, on how scientists can use Claude Code to help with all the heavy data analysis coding that is a big part of our lives. use a make system, set up folder structures, write tests, use git, use package managers. Notes on notebooks and visualizations too. 🧪

Minh-Huy Mai-Duc@sabertoaster.bsky.social · 6mo ago

www.neuroai.science/p/claude-cod... Why yes this is very helpful for me as an undergrad. I like the way the methods that Patrick laid, how to aid research using AI and its pros vs cons

🚨📜+🧵🚨 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

Just published my review of neuroscience in 2025, on The Spike. The 10th of these, would you believe? This year we have foundation models, breakthroughs in using light to understand the brain, a gene therapy, and more Enjoy! medium.com/the-spike/20...

2025: A Review of the Year in Neuroscience

Enlightening the brain

medium.com

✈️ Montreal AI and Neuroscience is over, off to Costa Rica. Great catching up all things NeuroAI with hometown friends. Thanks for the shirt and the bagels, folks!

🔴 Live: Panel discussion #1: @ MAIN2025 The future of Neuroscience - The role of AI ?  with Andreas Tolias, Siva Reddy, Joao Sacramento, Ching Fang + Eva Portelance Moderated by Patrick Mineault @patrickmineault.bsky.social @andreastolias.bsky.social