Kevin Mitchell @wiringthebrain.bsky.social talks to Timothy Behrens @behrenstimb.bsky.social about which neural systems the field has genuinely cracked. #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/computationa...
Success stories from computational neuroscience
Kevin Mitchell talks with Timothy Behrens about ring attractors, the role of innate structure, and an expanded view of cognitive maps.
thetransmitter.org
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
Indeterminism and the physics of open neural dynamics www.cell.com/trends-open/... - the brain is not a deterministic system
Made an AI-curated primate ephys literature database covering ~10000 papers with recording brain regions and target functions. Maybe useful for something. okazawagouki.github.io/NHPLit/repor...
Our new paper is out in Neuron! www.cell.com/neuron/fullt... How does the brain decide how much of the past to use when making decisions? In rapidly changing environments, recent experiences matter more; in stable environments, longer histories are useful.
Adaptive reorganization of history encoding in the retrosplenial cortex supports flexible decision-making strategies
Zhang et al. show that mice flexibly adjust how past experiences guide choices in fast- and slow-changing environments. Retrosplenial cortex neurons display a wide range of history-integration timesca...
cell.com
The cat’s focus and curiosity 😂 TT: Nika_Zubra youtu.be/LNlkBMtstJE?...
Want a dataset to test ideas on neural basis of decision making or how areas interact as we make choices? Check out our data published today @rudebecklab.bsky.social. >16,000 single neurons from 22 anatomically confirmed areas in macaques performing a decision task. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Dataset of cortical and subcortical single neuron activity during value-based tasks in macaque monkey - Scientific Data
Scientific Data - Dataset of cortical and subcortical single neuron activity during value-based tasks in macaque monkey
nature.com
fs.blog/the-antilibr... The Antilibrary: The Hidden Value of Unread Books The legendary Italian writer Umberto Eco had over 50,000 books in his private library. When asked why so many, he had this to say: "It is foolish to think that you have to read all the books you buy..."
The Antilibrary: The Hidden Value of Unread Books -
The antidote to overconfidence is our relationship with knowledge. The antilibrary is the solution according to Nassim Taleb.
fs.blog
Thrilled to finally share this work! 🧠🔊 Using a new reinforcement-free task we show mice (like humans) extract abstract structure from sound (unsupervised) & dCA1 is causally required by building factorised, orthogonal subspaces of abstract rules. Led by Dammy Onih! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
biorxiv.org
New Neuroscience Masters Degree at Johns Hopkins The M.S. degree in Neuroscience is a full-time in-person program consisting of intensive coursework followed by 12 months of laboratory research. The application deadline is May 15, and more information is available at neuroscience.jhu.edu/graduate/51
In collaboration with @timmytimmytimmytim.bsky.social, @johndmurray.bsky.social, and Max Shinn, we characterized temporal and spatial scales of rs-fMRI during development and aging.
SfN Journals@sfnjournals.bsky.social · 7mo ago#JNeurosci: Using fMRI, Bero et al. found that the temporal and spatial scales of resting-state cortical activity in humans steadily decrease with age, except that both peak during early adolescence in some regions of the prefrontal cortex. https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0577-25.2025
Meet the Caribbean reef octopus. They're known to change color in 0.3 seconds and squeeze through openings the size of their beak! They're problem-solvers & and one of the biggest octopus out there! #ocean #animals #scuba #photography #nature
Some exciting opportunity for NeuroAI research at Johns Hopkins!
Johns Hopkins Data Science and AI Institute@hopkinsdsai.bsky.social · 7mo agoJoin us in advancing data science and AI research! The Johns Hopkins Data Science and AI Institute Postdoctoral Fellowship Program is now accepting applications for the 2026–2027 academic year. Apply now! Deadline: Jan 23, 2026. Details and apply: apply.interfolio.com/179059
This paper completely nails an age old theory, leading to a clear law describing the strength of conditioned associations. elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre...
Dmitri Petrov@petrovadmitri.bsky.social · 8mo agoAll right it’s time for the annual “please tell us about one (or a few if you are ambitious) paper from 2025 that really impressed you and why we should all read it“! Go! If you tell us how it changed your view of the world and what makes it so powerful and consequential It would be excellent.
Hippocampal relay for remote planning from Brian, Albert Lee’s group! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Signatures of remote planning in hippocampal replay
During brief, intermittent “replay” events, hippocampal activity can express navigational trajectories disconnected from both when and where they originally occurred. While replay biased toward immedi...
biorxiv.org
We tend to think of neurons as either excitatory or inhibitory, but some neurons chemically inhibit their downstream targets while electrically exciting their neighbors. What is gained by having an inhibitory neuron excite its neighbor? www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Thank you for having me on BrainInspired, Paul @braininspired.bsky.social! It was such an honor to be on my favorite show—a rare place where we can leisurely talk about manifolds, latent circuits, power laws, and other esoteric ideas, and still be taken seriously in knowing they are all real.
Paul Middlebrooks@braininspired.bsky.social · 8mo agoAre manifolds real? Are latent circuits real? Tatiana @engeltatiana.bsky.social uses one, infers the other, and says yes to both. Also, how timescales are different and the same across the entire brain... braininspired.co/podcast/226/
Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences at Johns Hopkins is inviting applications for 3 open-rank tenured/tenure-track positions in (1) Behavioral Neuroscience, (2) Cognitive Neuroscience, and (3) Cognitive Psychology. pbs.jhu.edu/about/jobs/
Jobs | Psychological & Brain Sciences
Tenured/Tenure-track position in Cognitive Psychology Open Date Dec 01, 2025 Salary Range or Pay Grade The expected academic base salary range for this position is $110,000- $144,500 (Assistant Profes...
pbs.jhu.edu
Birds are both intelligent and incredibly agile, yet they are quite small. How do they achieve this with their little brains? They have twice as many neurons per brain mass than mammals, including primates. www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1...
I’m super excited to finally put my recent work with @behrenstimb.bsky.social on bioRxiv, where we develop a new mechanistic theory of how PFC structures adaptive behaviour using attractor dynamics in space and time! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Thanks to @pessoabrain.bsky.social and @thetransmitter.bsky.social for featuring our paper and to @aliyarumana.bsky.social and Peter Tse for engaging so generously with the ideas! 😊 www.thetransmitter.org/the-big-pict...
Beyond Newtonian causation in neuroscience
The traditional mechanistic framework must give way to a richer understanding of how brains actually generate behavior over time.
thetransmitter.org
I am excited to announce that the Johns Hopkins University Solomon H. Snyder Department has become an interdivisional department between the School of Medicine and the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, unifying neuroscience research and education across the university. hub.jhu.edu/2025/09/15/j...
How does the brain decide? 🧠 Our new @nature.com paper shows that neural activity switches from an 'evidence gathering' to a 'commitment' state at a precise moment we call nTc. After nTc, new evidence is ignored, revealing a neural marker for the instant when the mind is made up. rdcu.be/eGUrv
Transitions in dynamical regime and neural mode during perceptual decisions - Nature
Simultaneous recordings were made of hundreds of neurons in the rat frontal cortex and striatum, showing that decision commitment involves a rapid, coordinated transition in dynamical regime and neura...
nature.com
Great to have another paper with @chazfirestone.bsky.social @ianbphillips.bsky.social and the brilliant Hanbei Zhou out! In this paper we demonstrate that stimuli within events are perceived further apart in time — an event-based analog of “object-based warping”. psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-...
It was an honor to write this, but also great fun. A chance to look back at the classics, and think about the path forward. #Physics is a beautiful human endeavor. journals.aps.org/prxlife/abst...
Emergence of Brains
This review traces how ideas from statistical physics evolved into foundational models of neural computation, shaping modern AI and culminating in the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics.
journals.aps.org
Neural manifold properties can help us understand how animal brains deal with competing and multifaceted information, execute flexible behaviors and reuse common computations, writes @mattperich.bsky.social. #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/neural-dynam...
Neural population-based approaches have opened new windows into neural computations and behavior
Neural manifold properties can help us understand how animal brains deal with complex information, execute flexible behaviors and reuse common computations.
thetransmitter.org
Poor image quality introduces systematic bias into large neuroimaging datasets, new study of ABCD data shows. By Natalia Mesa www.thetransmitter.org/spectrum/poo...
Poor image quality introduces systematic bias into MRI data
Analyses that include low-quality MRI data underestimate cortical thickness and overestimate surface area, according to new work from the ABCD Study.
thetransmitter.org
If you’ve ever tried to cram for an exam, you know that it’s easier to memorize something if you learn the information in shorter, spaced-out sessions. These dynamics are as relevant to each individual cell’s existence as they are to ours. Claire Evans reports: www.quantamagazine.org/what-can-a-c...
What Can a Cell Remember? | Quanta Magazine
A small but enthusiastic group of neuroscientists is exhuming overlooked experiments and performing new ones to explore whether cells record past experiences — fundamentally challenging what memory is...
quantamagazine.org
