Out now in @plos.org CB: doi.org/10.1371/jour...
Neural representations of tasks change over time, even in the absence of changes in task performance. But neurons change tuning at different rates. How does a neuron's stability relate to its interactions with the population?
#compneuro #neuroskyence
New in the BMJ: Our study of 600,000 people found GLP-1 drugs associated with 50% fewer substance-related deaths, 39% fewer overdoses, and reduced addiction risk across alcohol, opioids, cocaine, cannabis, and nicotine.
www.bmj.com/content/392/...
With this one in print, I think I finally earned that PhD... 😅
Presented for the first time at the cosyne when the world ended (March 2020). I'll bring over a summary thread from twitter when it was still twitter...
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
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
Huge water consumer, destroying the planet with CO2 emissions, mostly a negative for their consumers. Something must be done. Yes, that’s right, it’s time to do something about cows.
The supplementary videos for this preprint are fantastic. Some wild examples of decoding the animal's attentional focus and/or intent
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
People have been looking at "AI & brains" through the lens of LLMs/transformers. But what latent diffusion? (think text-to-image/video platforms such as Midjourney).
**Class conditioned latent diffusion and semantically cued hippocampus share a remarkably similar computational architecture...**
Are AI agents ready for the workplace? A new benchmark raises doubts.
techcrunch.com/2026/01/22/a...
A few days ago, I stood in the graveyard of an 1100 year old church, getting damper and damper in the drizzling rain.
A woman walked into the graveyard, waved, said hello, and, as we had previously arranged, handed me a paper bag full of human bones.
The life of a churchwarden is a strange one...
What is wild to me is the defense, BY THE NEURIPS BOARD, that fabricated citations do not mean "the content of the papers themselves [is] necessarily invalidated"
It does. It very much does. What do you think citing other work is for? What do you think writing a paper is for? What do you *think*?
if i could make you read ONE (1) single post to improve your understanding of the challenges of social science in general it would be this one from @markfabian.bsky.social about wellbeing science specifically
profmarkfabian.substack.com/p/airing-my-...
As I often write in my newsletter, the future of AI doesn't exist yet; we are building it right now, and every policy and regulatory choice counts.
To learn more about pro-human policies, rules, and rights, join 88,800+ subscribers here: www.luizasnewsletter.com
Proud to have contributed to @jiaxuanqi.bsky.social's masterpiece out @nature.com! She shows that dopamine transients track the learned quality of song during juvenile learning and that dopamine release is driven not just by VTA firing, but by a local cholinergic mechanism! (1/x)
How does the brain replay memories during sleep?
Excited to share our new preprint, the outcome of an extensive effort led by Johannes Niediek, showing that reactivation of human concept neurons reflects memory content rather than event sequence.
Engram — separate the factual info from the weights, dedicate more weights to reasoning instead of fact lookup
They store facts outside the main NN layers and perform lookups during inference via n-grams.
This benefits not just knowledge, but also reasoning, bc fewer weights are dedicated to facts
Interesting read on how chunking can emerge directly from #synaptic dynamics: by temporarily suppressing groups of items via synaptic augmentation, #WorkingMemory can retrieve up to 8 items despite a base capacity of only 4.
With some trepidation, I'm putting this out into the world:
gershmanlab.com/textbook.html
It's a textbook called Computational Foundations of Cognitive Neuroscience, which I wrote for my class.
My hope is that this will be a living document, continuously improved as I get feedback.
Just published my review of neuroscience in 2025, on The Spike.
The 10th of these, would you believe?
This year we have foundation models, breakthroughs in using light to understand the brain, a gene therapy, and more
Enjoy!
medium.com/the-spike/20...
Andrej Karpathy @karpathy X.com l've never felt this much behind as a programmer. The profession is being dramatically refactored as the bits contributed by the programmer are increasingly sparse and between. I have a sense that I could be 10X more powerful if I just properly string together what has become available over the last ~year and a failure to claim the boost feels decidedly like skill issue. There's a new programmable layer of abstraction to master (in addition to the usual layers below) involving agents, subagents, their prompts, contexts, memory, modes, permissions, tools, plugins, skills, hooks, MCP, LSP, slash commands, workflows, IDE integrations, and a need to build an all-encompassing mental model for strengths and pitfalls of fundamentally stochastic, fallible, unintelligible and changing entities suddenly intermingled with what used to be good old fashioned engineering. Clearly some powerful alien tool was handed around except it comes with no manual and everyone has to figure out how to hold it and operate it, while the resulting magnitude 9 earthquake is rocking the profession. Roll up your sleeves to not fall behind.
Andrej Karpathy is worried about keeping up with software engineering practices
Where is the story in a book?
Seven feel-good science stories to round up 2025. All too often we forget to celebrate the positives
🧪
#AcademicSky
www.nature.com/articles/d41...
Ok, this is nuts. Once you see it you cannot unsee it. Do you see it?
(OP @drgbuckingham.bsky.social )
I’ve been hearing two things:
- People are happy they can ask questions quickly without judgment or looking for the Right Person to ask in the office.
- People are unhappy that nobody asksthem questions, because that is how they get to know colleagues and win their trust.
Completely agree. And if I can make a self-promoting plug here, we have a nice table in this paper trying to separate some of these ideas out. The brain is very information-efficient (bits/ATP), while still being very expensive in energy consumption (ATP/sec).
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Plot showing metabolic rate and brain size vs. body mass. Warm-blooded animals expend an order of magnitude more energy and have brain sizes an order of magnitude larger
Soapbox time: the problem with metabolic efficiency arguments in neuroscience is that they often confuse energy efficiency with energy expenditure. Biological systems are optimized for energy efficiency, but that does NOT imply they are optimized for low energy expenditure 🧵 1/
Joint modelling of brain and behaviour dynamics with artificial intelligence
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Breaking News Doctor who supplied Matthew Perry with ketamine before deadly overdose sentenced to 30 months in prison
As a Doctor Who fan, I had to read and then re-read this.
I am a comma stan.
More press on our recent Behavioral and Brain Sciences article:
#philsci #cogsky #CognitiveNeuroscience
@phaueis.bsky.social
aktuell.uni-bielefeld.de/2025/11/24/t...
A neat perspective on what makes RL for LLMs tractable
