This must be a typo... He meant "better album cover", right?
AJfromBrooklyn@ajfrombrooklyn.bsky.social · 2d agoI dare anyone to come up with a worse album cover than this.
Blake Richards
@tyrellturing.bsky.social
Researcher at Google and CIFAR Fellow, working on the intersection of machine learning and neuroscience in Montréal (academic affiliations: @mcgill.ca and @mila-quebec.bsky.social).
AJfromBrooklyn@ajfrombrooklyn.bsky.social · 2d ago
The final version of our amygdala dopamine paper is out! BLA dopamine dynamically tracks emotional salience and not value or reward prediction error. Congrats to Dr. Megan Brickner!! www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Basolateral amygdala dopamine transmits emotional salience - Nature Communications
The basolateral amygdala dopamine system has received little attention. Here, authors show that BLA dopamine plays a unique role in learning, by encoding the emotional salience of sensory cues to supp...
nature.com
The next time a climate change denier comes at you with that excuse:
Canadians overwhelmingly demand wealth tax after Kevin O’Leary says it will make him move away
Canadians overwhelmingly demand wealth tax after Kevin O’Leary says it will make him move away
OTTAWA - Pollsters report a split among Canadians over the idea of higher tax on the assets of wealthy individuals, though support skyrockets after noting that Kevin O'Leary has vowed that he will res...
thebeaverton.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
📣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
The brain’s sensorimotor-association axis may emerge as a result of competing sets of genetic blueprints—a dynamic process described in a paper published this month. By Holly Barker www.thetransmitter.org/spectrum/cor...
Cortical territories compete in developmental space race
Sensory and association regions are established through a reciprocal process, according to a new model of cortical development.
thetransmitter.org
🎉 *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!🧵
The Cognitive Computational Neuroscience conference is starting soon! And we're back in NYC, celebrating 10-ish years of conferencing. Let us know your reflections on CCN's past for our special Back2NY event And remember to share the work your presenting and learning about with the #CCN2026 hashtag
Angela Radulescu@angelaradulescu.bsky.social · 4w agoSome things get better with age. Like CCN... and Knicks basketball. 🧠🏀 As we return to New York and celebrate 10 years of @cogcompneuro.bsky.social , we'd love to hear your thoughts on how CCN has evolved. Share them in our pre-conference survey: shorturl.at/c19lJ
The nice people at Psychopharmacology provided a link to our review: 'The mystic trip: how psychedelic research fell for mysticism'. It's view only but that's ok for starters? Link: rdcu.be/fub8q Time to get over the MEQ?
The mystic trip: how psychedelic research fell for mysticism
rdcu.be
How do you "see" with electric eyes? How does collective behavior emerge from individual interactions? Nocturnal weakly electric fish evolved to do this, but studying naturalistic social behavior is very hard. Our solution? Virtual 'fish' 🤖🐟⚡ 📄 arxiv.org/abs/2511.08436
I've said it before: AI is a litmus test for tasks. If people are often using AI to do something, then chances are, that something was actually just some administrative/bureaucratic stuff that we would ideally just get rid of anyway. (With some exceptions, see, e.g. homework for students.)
Scott McGrath@smcgrath.phd · last wk.An analysis of 15 million Gemini interactions shows only 3% of occupations use the model for most of their tasks. Rather than automating ourselves away, we're mostly just offloading low-expertise chores to keep the complex, non-routine cognitive work for ourselves.
An analysis of 15 million Gemini interactions shows only 3% of occupations use the model for most of their tasks. Rather than automating ourselves away, we're mostly just offloading low-expertise chores to keep the complex, non-routine cognitive work for ourselves.
Despite AI hype, Google's data shows workers aren't automating themselves away
Analysis of 15 million real AI interactions finds most tasks at most jobs are unaffected.
arstechnica.com
“Nor is appeasement, which some Trump whisperers counsel, a way to avert that awful choice. Saying yes just invites more [demands] until full submission has been established. Giving in gracefully is a less theatrical way of arriving at the same destination.” Good advice for many domains.
Steve Lloyd@steve001.bsky.social · last wk.Gift article. Chrystia Freeland is understood up here as a centrist cold calculator. American friends - those not enamoured with MAGA or the in-progress termination of your democracy - should have a look. ‘You Aren’t Going to Like What Comes After America’ www.nytimes.com/2026/07/28/o...
Super cool paper here, showing that the cerebellum has a credit assignment mechanism solving the weight transport problem and giving every P-cell the right error signal! But, could the neocortex be the same? Could it possibly be hard-wired like this? I suspect not... Mystery to solve! 🧠📈 🧪
Reza Shadmehr@rezashadmehr.bsky.social · last wk.If an action results in error, each neuron requires an individualized teaching signal that guides change in its output. This is the credit assignment problem of learning. Are there neurons in the brain that can compute such a sophisticated teaching signal? Yes. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
If an action results in error, each neuron requires an individualized teaching signal that guides change in its output. This is the credit assignment problem of learning. Are there neurons in the brain that can compute such a sophisticated teaching signal? Yes. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Climbing fibers encode the gradient of a loss function for the cerebellum
Neurons in the brain are often many synapses away from motoneurons, yet if a movement results in error, each distant neuron needs a teacher that considers its specific contribution to production of th...
biorxiv.org
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
Okay, at the risk of getting yelled at here, my reaction is, who cares? Like, whoever this happened to consented to having their cells used for scientific research. Why does it matter if they end up being used for organoids to study neural computation? The article doesn't give a good answer, IMO.
Nature@nature.com · last wk.People who give tissue samples for biomedical research might have no idea that their cells are being used for biocomputers go.nature.com/4x61sE6
Huge, important job. Comms and leadership at NIH. Please apply. This is public service. “…responsible for planning, directing, and executing nat’l health and research communication efforts…” Civil service SES position. Please share- this one is important for NIH. hr.nih.gov/careers/open...
Replay of procedural #memory is independent of the #hippocampus doi.org/10.1038/s415...
Replay of procedural memory is independent of the hippocampus - Nature Neuroscience
Thompson, Rollik and colleagues show that, during sleep, the brain replays procedural memories in the striatum independently of the hippocampus. Replay content was shaped by prior reward and error out...
doi.org
Just realized that when you connect to an external connection on Slack, your icon is whatever your icon is in the workspace you added the channel to. I added the #NeurIPS2026 SAC channel to my internal lab Slack. So, yeah, visually, I'm Alyssa Edwards for all the other NeurIPS SACs now. 😅💄
Thousands of highly qualified students in Gaza who have received admission to universities in other countries are not being allowed out of Gaza to pursue their studies. Unacceptable! www.instagram.com/p/Da5g0YqNueo/
I am *thrilled* to share this review in @currentbiology.bsky.social out today, by yours truly, @myoo.bsky.social, @michalk.bsky.social, Taro Toyoizumi, @tyrellturing.bsky.social, @taylorwwebb.bsky.social, & @hakwan.bsky.social www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... 🧵👇
Looking to the brain to improve energy efficiency of AI
Modern artificial intelligence (AI) systems have achieved remarkable capabilities, but at an extraordinary energy cost. Training and running large-sca…
sciencedirect.com
Real question: Is the persistent myth that Mexican food causes diarrhea basically just a result of American tourists getting sick from the water when travelling there? ("Montezuma's Revenge", is it?)
lowtax speedrun enjoyer@rickywlmsbong.bsky.social · 3w agoeveryone is making jokes about taco bell causing diarrhea as a thing they do regularly and i really have to wonder what on earth y’all are getting there
And for our own contribution to the theme issue: Oliver Warrington and I show that the dentate gyrus encodes prediction errors during learning of perceptual predictions. This finding complements our previous work showing a transition from errors to predictions during learning (Aitken & Kok 2022). 🧠🟦
Dentate gyrus encodes prediction errors during learning of perceptual predictions
Abstract. The hippocampus is involved in learning predictive associations, responding to prediction errors as well as representing predictions of future in
royalsocietypublishing.org
Peter Kok@peterkok.bsky.social · 4w agoThe hippocampus sits at the interface of perception & memory, allowing us to link past, present, & future through its role in generating predictions. Excited to share this theme issue in @royalsociety.org's Philosophical Transactions B, co-edited with @barense.bsky.social & @mariamaly.bsky.social
You also don't have to do an editor's job of deciding if a paper "fits" or is "impactful enough" for their journal, because you're a scientist and not a marketing agent for the publisher.
Timothy O'Leary@timothyoleary.bsky.social · 4w agoDear peer reviewers everywhere: sometimes we feel pressure to find issues with a submission as a demonstration of diligence. But we have to recognise this is a mistake: picking random and sometimes incoherent holes in research add confusion, generates unnecessary work and encourages defensive