This work was inspired by @tomerullman.bsky.social's “illusion illusion” paradigm (arxiv.org/abs/2412.18613) where VLMs mistake illusion-like images for genuine optical illusions. In both cases, models respond to what a problem looks like rather than what it actually requires.🔮

The Illusion-Illusion: Vision Language Models See Illusions Where There are None

Illusions are entertaining, but they are also a useful diagnostic tool in cognitive science, philosophy, and neuroscience. A typical illusion shows a gap between how something "really is" and how some...

arxiv.org

How do we see rectangles when we never see rectangles?

🚨PREPRINT ALERT!🚨 I’m delighted to share new work from Yau Lab @bcmneurosci.bsky.social addressing thermotactile interactions. What happens when your hands get cold? A common experience is for your sense of touch to be impaired by coldness. 1/n

Frozen Hands Close-Up

ALT: Frozen Hands Close-Up

static.klipy.com

This paper is absolutely wild and amazing. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Homing pigeon navigation relies on superparamagnetic macrophages under overcast conditions

Birds use a variety of navigational strategies, including the geomagnetic field, especially when other cues are not available, such as under overcast or nocturnal conditions. Magnetite particles in th...

science.org

Wow, (bird) vision is awesome!

Quanta Magazine@quantamagazine.org · 3mo ago

Inside bird eyes is a strange and mysterious structure called the pecten oculi. It looks like a pancake flipper, or maybe a radiator. Some 350 years after anatomists first described it, biologists finally figured out its purpose. www.quantamagazine.org/how-the-bird...

A very interesting piece by @henryconklin.bsky.social et al. on how brains and LLMs acquire abstract, meaningful internal representations by compressing the information they receive. Similar ideas in my book "How we learn"! henryconkl.in/posts/i-am-a... Full paper: henryconkl.in/posts/llms-a...

i am, myself, a lossy compression – h

a companion piece to our ICLR 2026 Paper: Learning is Forgetting: LLM Training As Lossy Compression

henryconkl.in

New paper from the lab! "Plasticity and language in the anaesthetized human hippocampus" www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Plasticity and language in the anaesthetized human hippocampus - Nature

In the hippocampus, complex processing of sensory stimuli occurs even in the unconscious state.

nature.com

Kindly use this new word where useful (with Rishikesh Narayanan) maux (v): to maximize an auxiliary attribute while losing sight of original goals. (e.g. A coffee shop is mauxing when it revamps its ambience and stops making good coffee)

Preprint alert! We've done the first ever wireless brain recordings from the high-level visual & motor regions (IT/PMv/PFC) in monkeys engaged in natural behaviors as well as during controlled screen-based tasks. Read below for a lay summary and the link for details! 1/8

Prediction without understanding sustained astronomy through a thousand years of epicycles, writes @tonyzador.bsky.social. AI is now offering neuroscience the same deal. #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/machine-lear...

Can AI do neuroscience without understanding?

Prediction without understanding sustained astronomy through a thousand years of epicycles. Artificial intelligence is now offering neuroscience the same deal.

thetransmitter.org

A computational theory of Aha! moments! New paper explaining why Aha! moments occur & why they feel so good. TLDR: They are a form of meta-cognitive prediction errors i.e. they occur when we surprise ourselves about our own abilities! @rachitdubey.bsky.social www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Preprint alert! We've done the first ever brain recording simultaneously from IT & PMv in two monkeys interacting socially in natural setting! Dynamic tracking of social variables in simultaneous brain recordings of socially interacting monkeys www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Hey, I wrote a thing about AI in astrophysics ergosphere.blog/posts/the-ma...

Either you know you are a neuroscientist, or you don't. Either way, apply to join our lab before March 31 2026! :-)

SP Arun@sparuniisc.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Please circulate widely! Open positions at the Vision Lab, Centre for Neuroscience, Indian Institute of Science (IISc) sites.google.com/site/visionl... How to Apply: forms.gle/vWa1PwUrcpWf... Deadline : March 31 2026

www.forbes.com/sites/scottt...

Are Humans The Only Primates With White Eyes? An Evolutionary Biologist Explains The Research

The whites of your eyes are not an accident. They are, scientists now believe, one of the most sophisticated social communication tools in the animal kingdom.

forbes.com

Is mental imagery a single process? Our meta-analysis of 46 fMRI studies suggests not. We find a key divide between object imagery (visualizing an object in rich detail) and spatial imagery (mentally transforming objects). This split mirrors the ventral and dorsal streams of vision

Please circulate widely! Open positions at the Vision Lab, Centre for Neuroscience, Indian Institute of Science (IISc) sites.google.com/site/visionl... How to Apply: forms.gle/vWa1PwUrcpWf... Deadline : March 31 2026

Today I received a note from a grad student who lives in Tehran. Her note gives you firsthand experience of what it’s like to live in a city that is being bombed, and what it’s like to be young and feel despair about your future. rezashadmehr.blogspot.com/2026/03/hope...

Hopeless in Tehran

Essays on neuroscience

rezashadmehr.blogspot.com

What's My JND? 0.0046 Can you beat it? www.keithcirkel.co.uk/whats-my-jnd...

What's My JND?

Find your Just Noticeable Difference in colour perception. How small a colour difference can you actually see?

keithcirkel.co.uk

Humanoid robots can run, crawl, and sort objects in flashy demos. So why can’t they reliably climb stairs or open doors? @johnpavlus explains:

Why Do Humanoid Robots Still Struggle With the Small Stuff? | Quanta Magazine

The last decade has seen vast improvements in humanoid robots, but graduating to widespread use might require going back to the fundamentals.

quantamagazine.org

Join us in Woods Hole for Methods in Computational Neuroscience (MCN) at MBL (July 24–Aug 21). Four weeks of computational + systems neuroscience, hands-on training, and close interaction with an exceptional faculty.

@stefanofusi.bsky.social · 5mo ago

The deadline for applying to the Methods in Computational Neuroscience summer course at MBL in Woods Hole is approaching (March 16)! An exciting course with an amazing lineup of lecturers in a beautiful location www.mbl.edu/education/ad...

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

Come to IISc for open day, when all departments showcase fun demos!

Here's a striking visual illusion - the 9 purple dots. Focus your eyes on the top left dot. That one is more purple than the others, right? Now try another dot... that one becomes the purple one! pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41744429/

Proud of my colleague Doug Weber for bringing in a much needed reality check to this discussion on the promise of brain implant tech. Story: www.statnews.com/2026/02/26/b... Archive: archive.today/jsk0t @cmu-neuroscience.bsky.social

Fantastic post by Colin Raffel, "We Are Over-Indexing on Paper Acceptance," drafted in May 2021 (!) but only posted now. The more things change.. Last sentence: "If you want to judge a researcher’s quality, the only meaningful way is to read their papers and judge for yourself."

Why do children struggle to recognise objects in cluttered scenes more than adults? Our new paper looks at the development of visual acuity and crowding across childhood, and the way the visual system fine tunes our ability to see detail: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Like someone said on the thread, thanks. I hate it 😏

Kevin Mitchell@wiringthebrain.bsky.social · 6mo ago

The strongest version of this illusion I’ve seen! Absolute head-wrecker!

Bots have made their way to Prolific experiments. Our lab has stopped online testing of adults entirely now for this reason - we want to know if what we study is real. Probably data collected 2-3 years ago are ok, but moving forward we just can't know. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

The best nerdy valentine poem ever 😏

Yourqueerprof@drcompton.bsky.social · 6mo ago

#heartday #myfavorite