Emerson Harkin

What can rock-paper-scissors tell us about what I think that you think that I'm thinking? Check out this cool work to find out!

🤛🤛📄

Reproducibility challenge: How much of your paper could someone simulate for a lab journal club?

observablehq.com/d/95e1ff1680...

Isn't it more like "You can save so much money by using a shipping container vs air freight, but your stuff will arrive in 6mo instead of tomorrow"?

I meant to ask whether you've ever tried to get an LLM to generate bullet point summaries of human-written papers and compared those summaries with your "ground truth" initial outlines. Would a poor match point to unclear (human) writing?

Out of curiosity, have you ever tried passing the final text through an LLM to see how well you can recover the original bullet points? Like an autoencoder, but where the latent is way bigger than the input.

There's no worse feeling than writing a document that captures all of your key ideas with no fluff and being advised to "just flesh it out". Time to interpolate a few paragraphs, I guess...

I am excited to share my PhD work on head-direction cells recorded in the wild, now published in @science.org, where we recorded neurons in bats flying outdoors on an island.

doi.org/10.1126/sci...

With @ray-neuro.bsky.social, Shir Maimon, Liora Las, Nachum Ulanovsky and many others

New in @pnas.org: doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

We study how humans explore a 61-state environment with a stochastic region that mimics a “noisy-TV.”

Results: Participants keep exploring the stochastic part even when it’s unhelpful, and novelty-seeking best explains this behavior.

#cogsci #neuroskyence

This is one of the most outstanding examples of circuit understanding I've seen in a long time. The unification of theory and experiment is beautiful.

When Malcolm presented this in my lab, the audience was cheering at the end, and one person shouted (non-ironically) "You did it!"

What a beautiful result! Congrats on this work.

Sosa Lab

The Sosa Lab website is now live!
www.sosaneurolab.com

We will be seeking a postdoctoral researcher to join the growing team! If you are a rodent neuroscientist and interested in doing systems neuro work in the mountains 🏔️, please check out the "Join" page.

field matures.

Kuhn would have been writing around the time of H&H's squid axon experiments. I can't help but think that if he were writing today, he might say that ephys has matured --- but neuro as a whole, maybe not so much. Perhaps that's your point?

I just finished reading Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions and was astonished by his argument that fully precise definitions are 1) rare, especially early on, and 2) not necessary for progress. In his view, shared intuitions are more fundamental, and these only become codified as the 1/2

Agree to disagree Nature Chemistry - Science is about discovering new knowledge, so, logically, there will be disagreement. Shira Joudan contemplates how disagreements can be useful, and how to deal with them when...

A nice reminder about the importance of being critical and kind in science.

rdcu.be/eEzd7

So happy to see this work out! 🥳
Huge thanks to our two amazing reviewers who pushed us to make the paper much stronger. A truly joyful collaboration with @lucasgruaz.bsky.social, @sobeckerneuro.bsky.social, and Johanni Brea! 🥰

Tweeprint on an earlier version: bsky.app/profile/modi... 🧠🧪👩‍🔬

Looking forward to attending #CCN2025 for the first time and presenting the first steps of my postdoc project! If you’re interested in how learning the temporal structure of the environment affects foraging decisions and how we’re testing this in a naturalistic experiment come by poster B90, Wed.

So now every ChatGPT response will start like this?

"Your message addresses an important question and provides many nice insights. However, additional work is needed to make it fully convincing. Specifically, I have the following concerns:"

Serotonin drives choice-independent reconfiguration of distributed neural activity Serotonin (5-HT) is a central neuromodulator which is implicated in, amongst other functions, cognitive flexibility. 5-HT is released from the dorsal raphe nucleus (DRN) throughout nearly the entire f...

🚨Pre-print alert🚨

We stimulated serotonin with optogenetics while doing large-scale Neuropixel recordings across the mouse brain. We found strong widespread modulation of neural activity, but no effect on the choices of the mouse 🐭

How is this possible? Strap in! (1/9) 👇🧵

doi.org/10.1101/2025...

What a thoughtful and thought-provoking piece!

Top-down and bottom-up neuroscience: overcoming the clash of research cultures - Nature Reviews Neuroscience As scientists, we want solid answers, but we also want to answer questions that matter. Yet, the brain’s complexity forces trade-offs between these desiderata, bringing about two distinct research app...

Finally published:
“Top-down and bottom-up neuroscience: overcoming the clash of research cultures”
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Looking for ways to better understand different neuroscientific perspectives and enable productive collaborations

What do you think? If a 🛑 is represented in a forest and no behaviour is there to hear it, does it really make a sign?

Inspired by this thought-provoking thread from @neuralreckoning.bsky.social: bsky.app/profile/neur...

3. Slightly tangential: If we did a controlled experiment beforehand that involved randomly presenting a 🛑 while recording neural activity, we can say that the 🛑 *causes* the activity. 🧪 No need to use weasel words and say "activity correlates with 🛑".

🤓 My uninformed opinion:

1. We can say that a red octagon is represented.
2. If drivers usually stop, we can say a stop sign is represented even if this particular driver didn't stop this time.
3. (continued 👇)

I've been watching the debate over "representations" in neuroscience 🍿 and I wanted to suggest a thought experiment:

Suppose a driver sees a 🛑 and this causes vision neurons to spike in a characteristic way, but the driver blows through the intersection. Is the stop sign *represented* in the brain?

Congrats! So exciting to see this wonderful work in print.

Those water drops are looking 👌, btw

A multidimensional distributional map of future reward in dopamine neurons Nature - An algorithm called time–magnitude reinforcement learning (TMRL) extends distributional reinforcement learning to take account of reward time and magnitude, and behavioural and...

⏰ Check out this inspiring pair of articles from @paulmasset.bsky.social and Margarida Sousa! Some dopamine neurons care about rewards far in the future more than others, allowing the brain to learn the timing of future rewards.

Congrats to the authors! 🍾

🔓 links: rdcu.be/epxkE rdcu.be/epxkG

1/6 Why does the brain maintain such precise excitatory-inhibitory balance?
Our new preprint explores a provocative idea: Small, targeted deviations from this balance may serve a purpose: to encode local error signals for learning.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
led by @jrbch.bsky.social

In medicine, systematic reviews do the job of distilling a large body of literature into a clear take-home message. In neuro, systematic reviews are few and far between, and it feels like sometimes we use theory papers as the next best thing...

Thanks so much! I'm really glad you found it helpful.

Ugh… there’s also what I call messianic AI, the fantasy that AI will “solve” science. Treating science like a vending machine for solitons/profit & scientists as human cogs replaceable by machinery. But Science is a living culture of critical discussion, mentorship, shared community values &methods.