Renato Duarte
@rcfduarte.bsky.social
Computational Neuroscience & Neural Computation https://rcfduarte.github.io/ https://www.comp-neuro.org/ https://groundedneuro.substack.com
Heading to Halifax for #CNS2026! 🇨🇦 Milestone year: it’s the first time my entire (small) group is attending together, showcasing results from our FCT exploratory project. If you're attending, drop by our posters or grab us during the social events to chat. See you in Halifax! 🧠💻
Wilson–Cowan. FitzHugh–Nagumo. Brunel. Kuramoto. The detailed models that motivated those reductions are mostly forgotten outside their original communities. The reductions are still being taught. A field note on why every mechanistic model deserves a small theoretical cousin.
Conceptual Reduction as a Research Tool
Most of the modeling work I do aims at maintaining a high degree of biological fidelity while elucidating computational primitives.
open.substack.com
Foundation models in neuroscience predict brain activity at unprecedented accuracy. But prediction ≠ understanding, and we should avoid conflating the two. New essay now out:
The Imitation Game
Foundation models in neuroscience: representational alignment versus mechanistic understanding
open.substack.com
I tracked every keyword in 22 years of Cosyne abstracts to map how computational neuroscience evolved — from Bayesian brains to neural manifolds to LLMs — and where it's heading next.
22 years of Brain Science: what CoSyNe tells us about the evolution of Neuroscience
Tracking the intellectual DNA of Computational and Systems Neuroscience through its flagship meeting
open.substack.com
Every computational model needs numbers. But most experimental data lives in figures, not files. On the hidden labor of turning papers into models, and why open data is infrastructure for theory.
Where Do the Numbers Come From?
On the hidden labor of turning papers into models, and why open data is infrastructure for theory
open.substack.com
The Chomsky hierarchy isn't a linguistic curiosity — it's a map of what kinds of memory architecture different classes of computation require. Do the boundaries between computational classes correspond to boundaries in neural architecture?
Sequential Structure All the Way Down
On formal grammars, cognitive evolution, and why a sequence benchmark might be the lens computational neuroscience needs
open.substack.com
For 200 years, Weber's law was the most replicated finding in psychophysics but nobody could explain why it holds. Turns out the answer was hiding in the data everyone ignored — not how often you get it right, but how long it takes you to decide.
The Missing Clock in Weber's Law
What decision speed reveals about the oldest regularity in perception
open.substack.com
New Field Note: a Deep dive into the work of our guest lecturers this week. Three papers from the Dynamical Inference lab on contrastive learning for neural time series—CEBRA, DCL, xCEBRA. What identifiability actually means, when you need dynamics modeling, applications and implications.
Contrastive Learning for Neural Dynamics: Deep Dive
Over the past week, I’ve been involved in organizing an Advanced Course on Systems and Computational Neuroscience. Offering modern perspectives via guest lectures and extensive practical tutorials, we...
open.substack.com
New Journal Club: Neural manifolds are maturing from visualization trick to biological claim. But if population activity lives on low-dimensional manifolds, what constrains the geometry?
Manifolds, Dendrites, and the Geometry of Neural Computation
The population doctrine—the view that populations, not individual neurons, constitute the fundamental unit of computation—has been gaining ground for years.
open.substack.com
I simulated a grant application evaluation committee using Claude. The result was super interesting and useful! open.substack.com/pub/grounded...
Building a Digital Jury
What Happens When You Simulate Your Own Peer Review
open.substack.com
"these structures served a purpose when disciplines were stable and problems were contained. They're actively harmful now." How traditional academia is making itself irrelevant with its outdated practices.
The Curse of Disciplinarity
How outdated academic systems are filtering out innovation
open.substack.com
New Journal Club explores TARPs as multi-domain regulators that couple synaptic strength to intrinsic excitability—providing a molecular substrate for coordinated adaptation across timescales. open.substack.com/pub/grounded...
Beyond Trafficking: Auxiliary Proteins as Multi-Domain Regulators of Neuronal Computation
Auxiliary proteins aren’t just molecular bystanders and supporters, they’re computationally active and play an integral role in intracellular communication.
open.substack.com
New opinion article: should we think about (declarative) memory as a continuum? open.substack.com/pub/grounded...
Rethinking Memory Taxonomies: From Categorical Divisions to Temporal Continuums
Why working memory might be the missing link in our understanding of long-term memory consolidation
open.substack.com
First journal club post: aiming for a weekly update on what I have been reading and annotating (deep dives), what new papers sparked my interest and joined the reading list (new papers on deck) and an attempt to make sense of it all. open.substack.com/pub/grounded...
Journal Club: Cell-type-specific dendritic integration and canonical cortical circuits
Dendrites are not passive cables dutifully delivering synaptic inputs to the soma, but active computational elements that shape what neurons respond to and when.
open.substack.com
Launching Grounded: biologically grounded computational neuroscience. Lab notes, Journal Clubs and Opinions made public. Networking through communication. Subscribe to follow our journey! open.substack.com/pub/grounded...
Why Grounded? Why now?
“There is no shortcut to understanding intelligence.
open.substack.com
This is so awesome!! With all feeds filled with politics and conflict, it's refreshing to be able to focus on science
Antonia Hamilton @antoniahamilton.bsky.social · last yr.Wow, I’ve just found a Bluesky channel that lets you see only posts with links to scientific papers and get a feed that focuses on the science discussions around them. This is transformative!
Wow, I’ve just found a Bluesky channel that lets you see only posts with links to scientific papers and get a feed that focuses on the science discussions around them. This is transformative!
Paper Skygest Team@paper-feed.bsky.social · last yr.Welcome to your personalized Paper Skygest, a curated feed showing posts from your network. 📌 To pin this feed, select the pin icon at the top right of the feed. When you pin it, you'll see it up above here! ➡️ Follow this account for Skygest updates!
I am looking for 2 Research Assistants for 1-year positions to investigate biophysical mechanisms of learning (finally the formal procedures are open for applications)
Check out our latest pre-print: #Up-down states as a dendritic effect.
Alessio Quaresima@bluedebris.bsky.social · last yr.Are #Up-down states all about network dynamics? In a recently revised preprint with @rcfduarte.bsky.social, H. Fritz, and P. Hagoort, we explore the role of nonlinear #dendrites as coincidence detectors and amplifiers of network fluctuations. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
"If we don’t know what we’re looking for, we’ll never find it, no matter how sophisticated our analysis tools." Beautiful piece by Sam Gershman on how far we still are from true progress in neuroscience
Konrad Kording@kordinglab.bsky.social · last yr.Sam Gershman writes beautifully about how theory-free neuroscience prevents the field from reaching its promise. Beautiful and true. Most folks do not test hypotheses. Running a NHST does not a hypothesis make. www.thetransmitter.org/theoretical-...
🚨URGENT: The Computational Neuroscience & Neural Computation (CNNC) lab is looking to fill 2x MSc Scholarships to investigate the interplay between synaptic, dendritic and neuronal adaption. Please apply here (or forward to interested students): www.comp-neuro.org/contact
CNNC
Computational Neuroscience & Neural Computation research lab
comp-neuro.org
Cutting it a bit fine, but here’s my review of the year in neuroscience for 2024 The eighth of these, would you believe? We’ve got dark neurons, tiny monkeys, the most complete brain wiring diagram ever constructed, and much more… Published on The Spike Enjoy! medium.com/the-spike/20...
2024: A Review of the Year in Neuroscience
Feeling a bit wired
medium.com
Out now in Nature from @behrenstimb.bsky.social and crew: www.nature.com/articles/s41... Understanding this kind of schematic pattern learning and transfer will be key, IMO, to moving towards models of what we might call "higher-order cognition" or "reasoning". 🧠📈 🧪
A cellular basis for mapping behavioural structure - Nature
Mice generalize complex task structures by using neurons in the medial frontal cortex that encode progress to task goals and embed behavioural sequences.
nature.com
This can be an argument for why normative modeling (optimization) may fail beyond the sensory areas of the brain. In the case of ANN models, there won’t be a finite set of loss functions that can lead to learning the whole range of neural dynamics, due to the unboundedness of real-world scenarios.
Jared Peterson@jaredpeterson.bsky.social · 2y agoThree formal arguments for why there cannot be a finite set of cognitive biases. The lack of a finite set of biases is one reason I believe Heuristics and Biases cannot survive long term as a prescriptive paradigm. A paradigm of deviations must eventually collapse under its own weight.
OK If we are moving to Bluesky I am rescuing my favourite ever twitter thread (Jan 2019). The renamed: Bluesky-sized history of neuroscience (biased by my interests)
