Melissa Franch, PhD

Could not agree more with the need for comparative cross species differences to serve as “informative constraints”…

“With enough evidence, researchers tend to accept cross-species differences, but they rarely use these differences to refine or revise theory”

Those of us who were totally confused by the new NIH biosketch requirements--turns out we were all probably doing it wrong?? (or at least I was). Our admin asked the ScienCV folks and made it into the FAQs.

This still has got to win a prize for most confusing and arbitrary instructions, ever.

Our paper is out in @natneuro.nature.com!

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

We develop a geometric theory of how neural populations support generalization across many tasks.

@zuckermanbrain.bsky.social
@flatironinstitute.org
@kempnerinstitute.bsky.social

1/14

Oscillatory traveling waves during visual entrainment in autistic and neurotypical adults https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.01.29.702587v1

Theta-gamma phase amplitude coupling serves as a marker of social cognition and visual working memory deficits in individuals with elevated autistic traits - Communications Psychology Social cognition is coordinated by interregional phase-amplitude coupling similar to visual working memory. This coupling could explain potential behavioral differences in social and visual working me...

Theta-gamma phase amplitude coupling serves as a marker of social cognition and visual working memory deficits in individuals with elevated autistic traits
www.nature.com/articles/s44...
#neuroscience

By the way, if you’re interested in working together on problems like this, I’m starting my lab at UCSF this summer. Get in touch if you’re interested in doing a postdoc! More info here: wj2.github.io/postdoc_ad (7/7)

A standard response to people who say “everything is everywhere” is that we just haven’t found the right question yet. Our response is, we should care about explaining function, not finding areas, and if the functions we are interested in aren't arealized, that’s important to know.

Rethinking the centrality of brain areas in understanding functional organization Nature Neuroscience - Parcellation of the cortex into functionally modular brain areas is foundational to neuroscience. Here, Hayden, Heilbronner and Yoo question the central status of brain areas...

New Perspective from myself, Sarah Heilbronner and @myoo.bsky.social . “Rethinking the centrality of brain areas in understanding functional organization” in Nature Neuroscience. 🧵

rdcu.be/eVZ1A

I’m thrilled to share the preprint with @sangkjyuson.bksy.social. It’s a fun example of applying dynamical systems approaches to social behavior, and the first two-author manuscript from Y-Lab.

Sangkyu has put together a well-written thread to walk you through the ideas (see below ⬇️)

Excited to announce a new book telling the story of mathematical approaches to studying the mind, from the origins of cognitive science to modern AI! The Laws of Thought will be published in February and is available for pre-order now.

Reduced rank regression for neural communication: a tutorial for neuroscientists Reduced rank regression (RRR) is a statistical method for finding a low-dimensional linear mapping between a set of high-dimensional inputs and outputs. In recent years, RRR has found numerous applica...

Bichan Wu (@bichanw.bsky.social) & I wrote a tutorial paper on Reduced Rank Regression (RRR) — the statistical method underlying "communication subspaces" from Semedo et al 2019 — aimed at neuroscientists.

arxiv.org/abs/2512.12467

FERAL: A Video-Understanding System for Direct Video-to-Behavior Mapping Animal behavior unfolds continuously in time, yet quantitative analyses often require segmenting it into discrete, interpretable states. Although manual annotation can achieve this, it remains slow, s...

Our preprint is out! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Peter Skovorodnikov and I are excited to present FERAL: a new video-understanding toolkit that maps raw video directly to behavior, no pose estimation required.
It works across species, from lab to field, and even in collective systems. (🧵1/n)

🎉 Our paper has been selected for a Neurips Spotlight:

“Scaling and Context Steer LLMs along the Same Computational Path as the Human Brain”

👥led by J Raugel, w/ S. Ascoli, Rapin & @valentinwyart.bsky.social

📄https://openreview.net/pdf?id=4YKlo58RcQ
📍 Hall C-E Poster #2006
🧵thread 👇

Auditory representations of words during silent visual reading Silent visual reading is accompanied by the phenomenological experience of an inner voice. However, the temporal dynamics and functional role of the underlying neural representations remain unclear. H...

New preprint!
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
As you are silently reading this, you may experience a little voice in your head. How is it represented in the brain, and what purpose does it serve? Our new study answers the questions.

Together with @adriendoerig.bsky.social and Radek Cichy.(1/8)

Automatic binding of basic sensory features requires consciousness https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2025.12.10.693567v1

From this preprint

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Dimensionality reduction may be the wrong approach to understanding neural representations. Our new paper shows that across human visual cortex, dimensionality is unbounded and scales with dataset size—we show this across nearly four orders of magnitude. journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...

Variations in neuronal selectivity create efficient representational geometries for perception Our visual capabilities depend on neural response properties in visual areas of our brains. Neurons exhibit a wide variety of selective response properties, but the reasons for this diversity are unkn...

In many brain areas, neuronal tuning is heterogeneous. But how does this diversity help behavior? We show how tuning diversity shapes representational geometry and boosts coding efficiency for perception in our new preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
(w/ @sueyeonchung.bsky.social&Tony Movshon)

NIH shut out hundreds of young scientists from funding to start their own labs Special Report: The NIH has shut out hundreds of young scientists from funding to start their own labs.

“The only reason I don’t have this funding is because my last name is Rodriguez.”

MOSAIC checked many of the boxes of the administration — but that didn't matter. It was terminated, and left grantees scrambling

Next installment of American Science, Shattered:

www.statnews.com/2025/12/08/t...

Specialized Representations of Value in the Orbital and Ventrolateral Prefrontal Cortex: Desirability versus Availability of Outcomes Rudebeck et al. show that the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC) make dissociable contributions to decision-making. The VLPFC, but not the OFC, is critical for upda...

When people, on occasion, DO careful lesions that spare white matter then tend to get VERY different results than classic lesion studies, for example, Broca's Area lesions sparing language, or this:

www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...

Lesions needs to be revisited because almost all lesions intrude on adjacent white matter. Lesions disrupt complex circuits, not areas. This problem was ignored until recently because it was believed, incorrectly, that white matter was largely composed of connections to adjacent gray matter.

How distributed is the brain-wide network that is recruited for cognition? - Nature Reviews Neuroscience Both localized and distributed views on the functional organization of the brain have been put forward. In this Perspective, Rosen and Freedman examine the degree to which these two views account for ...

Thoughtful review with some good recent historical perspective on the ongoing paradigm shift that is radically changing the way we think about what brain areas do.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝗯𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻 𝗻𝗲𝘁𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸𝘀?
Do they even exist...?
Join @lucinauddin.bsky.social who will present, followed by discussion in the Neuroscience & Philosophy Salon.
Open to all.
Date: Dec 9, 12pm EST-US
Register: umd.zoom.us/meeting/regi... (you need a zoom account which is free)
#neuroskyence

This is a really nice neural model for the Minimalist Program's central claim that the core language system (compositional syntax-semantics) provides instructions to distinct cognitive systems, and that these systems have their own unique 'interface conditions' for readouts.

Y’all are reading this paper in the wrong way.

We love to trash dominant hypothesis, but we need to look for evidence against the manifold hypothesis elsewhere:

This elegant work doesn't show neural dynamics are high D, nor that we should stop using PCA

It’s quite the opposite!

(thread)

Research statement for postdoc positions.
Any good resources on this? Samples people would be willing to share?
@neural-reckoning.org @kordinglab.bsky.social @gunnarblohm.bsky.social

Virtual reality as a tool for supporting autistic people. Exploring how VR can help us understand—and improve—the social experiences of autistic people.

Another #CRAEwebinar booked in! February seems a long way away, but you might want to sign up now to hear from @natecaruana.bsky.social on how VR can help us understand and improve the social experiences of autistic people.

Agreed! And I suspect we'll get there quicker if we all adopt an attitude of openness to heterodox ideas. Unfortunately, all too often in neuroscience whenever people have suggested ideas that are even a small step outside orthodoxy they're met with extreme hostility (I don't mean from you!).

As I see it, we're facing similar problems in brain research, including the biggest mysteries like understanding depression. We have a sense of what depression is and some crude scales to measure it; the end goal is the equivalent of thermodynamics. How will we get there? Epistemic iteration! 🤞

Summer Undergraduate Research Experience | HHMI The Cech Fellows Program is a paid, nine-week summer research experience empowering the next generation of scientific leaders.

@hhmi.org Summer Undergraduate Research Experience - #CechFellows named in honor of Prof Tom Cech
Deadline to apply: 12/22/2025
Spend 9 weeks in a paid, mentored biomedical research experience in an HHMI lab. See you next summer!!!
www.hhmi.org/programs/cec...