He also has one of my favorite quotes: If one wishes to understand the behavior of animals, one must take account of their individuality, annoying as this may be for those who prefer the tidiness of physics, chemistry, and mathematical formulations. -Donald Griffin

Greg Priest@gregpriest.bsky.social · 2d ago

Donald Griffin, discoverer of bat echolocation, was born OTD 1915. I imagine “small mammals enough like ourselves to feel that I could understand what their lives would be like, and yet different enough to make it a sort of adventure and exploration to see what they were doing.” 🐋🌱🧪 #HistSTM

New preprint alert: "Mapping the abstraction of song representations from perception to autobiographical memory", led by @rcassanocoleman.bsky.social, with @kellyjakubowski.bsky.social. osf.io/preprints/ps...

🚨 Out now in TICS How can language models help cognitive science? @ruimata.bsky.social & I outline 5 uses: mapping research fields, formalizing theories, cleaning up constructs & measures, predicting behavior across tasks, and capturing environmental variation. 🔗 doi.org/10.1016/j.ti...

At long last, I’m excited to share our latest preprint on the cortical topography of mental imagery! Building on the tethering hypothesis of brain evolution, we examined the spatial layout of imagery-driven neural activities to know how visual, auditory, tactile & multisensory imagery is organised.

Very excited to share my second postdoc, now out in Science Advances! We used targeted snRNA-seq to profile four major subnuclei of the primate across three species (including humans). 1/13 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Transcriptomic diversity of amygdalar subdivisions across humans and nonhuman primates

Specialized cell types and links to psychiatric disorders are revealed by genetic mapping of primate amygdala neurons.

science.org

Interesting new paper on cellular memory - link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Of what is “cellular memory” the name? Perspectives across the life sciences - Biology & Philosophy

In contemporary life sciences, memory is increasingly attributed well beyond its paradigmatic uses in psychology and cognitive science.Immunological and epigenetic memory are among the best-known unco...

link.springer.com

The brain uses a lot of energy. But it's not using that energy all the time and at the same intensity. It's not just more neuronal activity = more energy. There is also a lot of background process demending energy. 🧪 Link: https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-026-10646-6​

New preprint! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Nearly a decade after starting the project, the first major results from our comparative connectomics work is online! Comparing the head direction circuits of the central complex in bees, ants and flies, recapitulating >300million years of evolution.

Come and join our replication initiative in visual neuroscience! Low bar for entry, ideal for anyone from a Master’s student looking for a thesis to faculty who want to get back to the bench. 🤓 re-vision-initiative.org

re:vision | Replication Initiative for Visual Neuroscience

Test whether published visual-neuroscience findings (NSD, THINGS, etc.) generalize to broadly-sampled natural images using the LAION-fMRI (LfMRI) 7T dataset.

re-vision-initiative.org

@re-vision-init.bsky.social · 4d ago

(1/6) Do our visual neuroscience findings actually replicate? And do they generalize beyond the datasets they were found in? We've lauched re:vision, a community-driven initiative to answer these questions, and we are looking for scientistis to participate. re-vision-initiative.org

The Neuroscience Department at UC Berkeley is hiring an Asst Professor in Computational Neuro. All areas of computational/theoretical neuro are welcome. Deadline Oct 30. Join our neuroscience community! aprecruit.berkeley.edu/JPF05446 #AcademicJobs #Neuroscience #NeuroJobs

Assistant Professor - Computational Neuroscience - Department of Neuroscience

University of California, Berkeley is hiring. Apply now!

aprecruit.berkeley.edu

Finally out in @natneuro.nature.com! A forgotten memory isn't always gone. We show that forgotten memories persist as silent memory traces, can be recovered by reminders, and can even be reconstructed into false memories. Excited to finally share this work! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Reminder: two weeks are left to apply for the PhD and postdoc positions in my lab. See more info here www.aesthetics.mpg.de/en/career/jo...

If you are interested in nervous system evolution you may want to read our review with Kei Jokura on nerve nets: "Revisiting nerve nets: functional organization and evolutionary implication" https://link.springer.com/article/10.1038/s44318-026-00879-w […] [Original post on biologists.social]

Reminder: Only 8 days left to apply! Join our lab at the Ernst Strüngmann Institute as a Technical Assistant. From training rats to assisting with wireless brain recordings, you'll contribute firsthand to our research on how the brain navigates the world. 🔗 esi-frankfurt.de/career/techn...

📣New paper! How does the sleeping brain help us to integrate new experiences while managing memories from the past? For his PhD work, @sabbaspoor.bsky.social recorded hippocampal ensembles in freely moving monkeys and found something unexpected. 🧵1/n www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🧪🧠📈👩‍🔬#OpenAccess

Experience reorganizes content-specific memory traces in macaques - Nature Neuroscience

In macaques, old memories, relative to new ones, are supported by more stable and interconnected cell assemblies. New-biased and old-biased assemblies reactivate during overnight sleep and can sometim...

nature.com

How does the brain represent the value of knowledge? In our paper--out now at Nature Neuroscience--we identify a representation of intrinsic information value within neural population structures in the orbitofrontal cortex in mice. www.nature.com/articles/s41593-026-02377-y #neuroskyence 🧠🧪 (1/8)

Representations of the intrinsic value of information in mouse orbitofrontal cortex - Nature Neuroscience

Mice are motivated to seek information of no extrinsic value. Recording neural activity in orbitofrontal cortex reveals a representation of the value of information that is distinct from the value of ...

nature.com

My postdoc is coming to an end, so I'm looking for work! Let me know if you, or anyone you know, wants to hire a philosopher of biology/cognition with a knack for cross-disciplinary work, a focus on autonomy + agency, and experience writing for the broader public (10+ yrs in sci/tech journalism).

After a long break, I’m back to long-form blogging! The first population atlas of the human vagus gives us an extraordinary wiring map. But what do the wires actually do? I connect it to new mouse psychophysics, organ-targeted ultrasound and our human findings. www.the-ecg.org/2026/07/29/v...

The vagus has a map. Interoception still needs a model.

The first population-level atlas of the human vagus nerve has arrived. But a map of the wiring does not tell you what the wires are saying -- on va...

the-ecg.org

Cortical gray matter myelin cuts energy cost of spike propagation without increasing conduction velocity www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Cortical gray matter myelin cuts energy cost of spike propagation without increasing conduction velocity | PNAS

Myelin is a hallmark of vertebrate nervous systems, yet its roles in central axons remain elusive. Using optical and electrical recordings from thi...

pnas.org

New paper alert! In this paper we were interested to formally test some of the assumptions made by computational psychiatrists - assumptions about parameter recoverability, reliability and validity. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

The recoverability, reliability, and generalizability of reward processing parameters and relation to mental health symptoms | Psychological Medicine | Cambridge Core

The recoverability, reliability, and generalizability of reward processing parameters and relation to mental health symptoms - Volume 56

cambridge.org

***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

💡What makes some ideas spring to mind while others we have to reach for? We built an #NLP #fMRI #MachineLearning framework to find out. New study from our lab, led by @kaixiangzhuang.bsky.social out in @natcomms.nature.com 🧵 🔗 www.nature.com/articles/s41... #CognitiveNeuroscience #Fudan #ISTBI

🚨 new lab preprint! Research from @gordonfeld.bsky.social during his DFG personal fellowship to my lab many moons ago: Global structure of new relational knowledge networks is represented in retrosplenial complex, and node-distance in hippocampus www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

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!

Another great work from @ckerren.bsky.social showing how hippocampal ripples drive memory retrieval.

Casper Kerrén@ckerren.bsky.social · 2w ago

Excited to finally share our new paper in @natcomms.nature.com: Hippocampal ripples initiate cortical dimensionality expansion for memory retrieval www.nature.com/articles/s41... With @s-michelmann.bsky.social and @doellerlab.bsky.social

Happy to say our head-direction-cell-in-3D is finally out! doi.org/10.1038/s420... Confirms that the brain's compass uses a dual-axis rule (like an iphone does) to maintain a constant estimate of horizontal heading even when the head is not horizontal. Blogpost explanation here: shorturl.at/9VdGM

Yale is hiring in developmental psychology (open rank )! We're especially interested in complementing and broadening our area, including via somewhat less traditionally central such as cross-cultural and comparative approaches. Feel free to reach out with questions!

We are looking for a postdoctoral researcher who wants to innovate at the intersection of cognitive science, neuroscience, and machine learning. 📍Munich 📅Flexible start: 10/2026–03/2027 ⏳Full consideration by 14/08/2026 💼Funded for 2 years, extension possible Discover, grow, collaborate, eat cake.

1/ What can resting-state neuroimaging offer cognitive and translational neuroscience🧠? Turns out: a lot! 🧵 Long in the making, short in the reading: “Unlocking spontaneous cognition in the age of data science" is out now in @natrevneuro.nature.com rdcu.be/ftWBh

Unlocking spontaneous cognition in the age of data science

Nature Reviews Neuroscience - Spontaneous brain activity is experimentally unconstrained. Embracing this freedom unlocks rich opportunities beyond task-based and naturalistic paradigms, the...

rdcu.be

Gotta love this view!! ✨