Excited to be co-organising a #cosyne2026 workshop with Alison Comrie on 'algorithms for learning from scratch'! With a great line-up of speakers, we'll be tackling the question of what processes enable naive biological & artificial agents to adapt to new situations. Info here: tinyurl.com/4u8enf7k
News from central Jersey: I'm running to represent New Jersey's 12th Congressional District.
By entering the fray, I hope to bring ideas of repairing our frayed republic. Not only to defend it in 2026, but to build something stronger, for generations to come!
samwang.substack.com/p/entering-t...
Americans still have more confidence in scientists than many other groups in society
Full survey results show American public have high levels of confidence in scientists while revealing some partisan differences (including on how to fund science), but statements asserting lost trust should be read instead as intentional efforts to degrade trust.
www.pewresearch.org/science/2026...
NIH funding underlies all of these advances--support fundamental science, and the bridge from there to the clinic 🧪
I am calling for a complete and total boycott of the Mercator projection in all news stories about Greenland until every member of the American public has seen this
Can humans & animals really use internal maps to take shortcuts?
Tolman famously said yes - based largely on his Sunburst maze.
Our new review & meta-analysis suggests evidence is far weaker than you might think.
🧵👇 doi.org/10.1111/ejn....
@uofgpsychneuro.bsky.social @ejneuroscience.bsky.social
🧠 New year, new preprint!
Why does motor learning involve multiple brain regions? We propose that the cortico-cerebellar system learns a "map" of actions where similar movements are nearby, while basal ganglia do RL in this simplified space.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
What is the computational role of dendritic excitations? Byung Hun Lee and team mapped voltage dynamics throughout the dendritic trees of CA1 pyramidal neurons in mice navigating in virtual reality. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
NYE fireworks < neurons expressing iGluSnFR3!
Developed at our Janelia Research Campus, iGluSnFR3 is a fluorescent sensor designed to rapidly detect & image glutamate — our brains' main chemical messenger — allowing researchers to observe (dazzling) neural communication as it happens. 🎆
Playground
Wild Dark Shore
Moonbound
Great article and thanks for writing. FWIW I think it is also worth pointing out the exciting pace of DBS innovations for therapies driven by basic neuroscience.
“Basic neuroscience hasn’t produced new drugs.” 💊
Not true - zuranolone (PPD), suzetrigine (pain), gepants (migraine), and more... were born out of a long arc of studies in the lab.
I wrote a Perspective on why this matters. @thetransmitter.bsky.social
www.thetransmitter.org/drug-develop...
Schematic of how ER-EPG plasticity enables the bump of activity in EPGs to accurately track visual cues. As a fly makes a counter-clockwise turn (top to bottom) it will view visual cues (e.g. the sun) from a new angle and the EPG activity bump (red) will swing clockwise around the network by integrating self motion signals with these visual inputs. When the fly faces a different angle, distinct visual ER neurons are active. Plasticity forms a trough of weak synapses (large circles - strong synapses, small circles - weak synapses) that allow ER neurons with distinct visual tuning to move the EPG bump via disinhibition.
*First preprint from our lab* !!!!!
How does the brain learn to anchor its internal sense of direction to the outside world? 🧭
led by Mark Plitt @markplitt.bsky.social & Dan Turner-Evans, w/ Vivek Jayaraman:
“Octopamine instructs head direction plasticity” www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Thread ⬇️
Adam Kampff’s passion for understanding and explaining the world was unmatched. Living by example and not ever compromising on his dreams, Adam was uncanny in making people realize they can learn and understand anything and everything. Keep his dream alive!
In his own words: tinyurl.com/ye29csw3
An awesome figure illustrating key aspects of hippocampal encoding and replay during continuous behavior ; from great work by Brian Lustig and co www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
🚨 Last chance to apply for participation for BonnBrain 2026! 🚨
We have very few slots left (attending with or without presentation) and will select the last participants early next week.
Apply before December 15th to be considered!
bonnbrain.de
It was a wonderful inspiration teaching an early Champalimaud course with Adam many years ago. Watching him assemble a sophisticated data acquisition rig in an afternoon and basking in his incredible joy and excitement for discoveries to come. Rest in peace Adam.
Happy birthday Tom Waits ♥️
Just to say I very much agree at least with the general perspective you are offering.
Which greatly refined a proposal in some prior work that generative models are needed to explain behavior well www.nature.com/articles/s41...
I am very much in favor, we just put out a recent preprint thinking about learning to navigate from the perspective of generative models of trajectories www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Join us for Fall 2026. In our group, you can run studies from human behavior and neuroimaging, to large-scale NHP ephys, and join them up with a robust computational foundation. Bonus: you can help build the reading list.
Major reductions in science funding across the board - important to have detailed data. Includes big cuts in fellowships that are a critical mechanism for developing young talent in US graduate school programs.
www.nytimes.com/interactive/...
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/
A touching piece by Tatiana Schlossberg www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...
+1. LLMs have taught me two things about myself. More of my thought is prob search like than I appreciate. And more of my language use turns on good sounding statistical structure than I realized. “Poetics” in Weathersby’s terminology. I do hope in both cases it is less than _all_ of what I do…
Fascinating. I appreciate the detailed description. I agree modern LLMs are amazing and the work here is really interesting. The last bit: There are different ways to think, a subset resemble search imo. A few things you say above do feel like search over existing code (eg must be in numpy not Jax)
It sounds like the prompts were to do curve fitting so any repo on GitHub curve fitting with stretched exponentials could be in search, right? One could imagine the LLM making a mistake that is useful. Like curve fitting for “imaging” (data) being scored as related to “images” or “vision”
I would also imagine GitHub has many repos with Python code for fitting stretched exponentials. Seems reasonable given prompts it searches over repos and tries out programs that already exist? I don’t think “applied in neuroscience” means anything to an llm - part of its strength in a way.
Right there are papers that say nonlinearity should be a free parameter in vision tuning curves + many Wikipedia etc entries on various functional forms ; I was interested in your intuition having so thoughtfully interacted with the LLM/training. Agreed that this is often what progress is. Thanks!
