Daeyeol Lee

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...

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.

a Caribbean reef octopus camouflaged

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!

This paper completely nails an age old theory, leading to a clear law describing the strength of conditioned associations.

elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre...

Congrats, Nicole! Well-deserved.

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...

Hippocampal relay for remote planning from Brian, Albert Lee’s group!
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

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.

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...

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/

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...

Beyond Newtonian causation in neuroscience The traditional mechanistic framework must give way to a richer understanding of how brains actually generate behavior over time.

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...

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...

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...

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

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-...

Dynamical Systems in Neuroscience: The Geometry of Excitability and Bursting Explains the relationship of electrophysiology, nonlinear dynamics, and the computational properties of neurons, with each concept presented in terms of bo

direct.mit.edu/books/monogr...

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.

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...

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.

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...

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.

Poor image quality introduces systematic bias into large neuroimaging datasets, new study of ABCD data shows.

By Natalia Mesa

www.thetransmitter.org/spectrum/poo...

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...

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...

Happy 107th Birthday, Brenda Milner! Her contributions to neuropsychology shaped the way we understand the human brain. From surviving two world wars and two pandemics, to paving the way for future generations of researchers, Milner’s legacy continues. @mcgill.ca @cusm-muhc.bsky.social

Xiao-Jing Wang outlines the future of theoretical neuroscience Wang discusses why he decided the time was right for a new theoretical neuroscience textbook and how bifurcation is a key missing concept in neuroscience explanations.

In this “Brain Inspired” episode, Paul Middlebrooks and Xiao-Jing Wang discuss how neuroscience has changed over the past 50 years, and how Wang believes modern theoretical tools will lead to a new era of “cross-levels mechanistic understanding.” Listen now: www.thetransmitter.org/brain-inspir...

Brain–Behavior Differences in Premodern and Modern Lineages of Domestic Dogs Although domestic dogs were the first domesticated species, the nature of dog domestication remains a topic of ongoing debate. In particular, brain and behavior changes associated with different stage...

Domestication of dogs induced the expansion of the neocortex and reduction in size of subcortical structures:

www.jneurosci.org/content/45/2...

Reminds me of a theory I once heard that humans basically self-domesticated themselves.

Discovering cognitive strategies with tiny recurrent neural networks - Nature Modelling biological decision-making with tiny recurrent neural networks enables more accurate predictions of animal choices than classical cognitive models and offers insights into the underlying cog...

Thrilled to see our TinyRNN paper in @nature! We show how tiny RNNs predict choices of individual subjects accurately while staying fully interpretable. This approach can transform how we model cognitive processes in both healthy and disordered decisions. doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Null and Noteworthy: Neurons tracking sequences don’t fire in order Instead, neurons encode the position of sequential items in working memory based on when they fire during ongoing brain wave oscillations—a finding that challenges a long-standing theory.

The neurons that encode sequential information into working memory do not fire in that same order during recall, a finding that is at odds with a long-standing theory. Read more in this month’s Null and Noteworthy.

By @ldattaro.bsky.social

#neuroskyence

www.thetransmitter.org/null-and-not...

Spared spatial imagery solves the puzzle of aphantasia

Short new piece on aphantasia just out in TiCS: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... Key idea: aphantasia often involves a lack of *visual-object* imagery (explaining subjective reports & objective correlates) but selectively spared *spatial* imagery (explaining preserved task performance).

Wonderful to see this piece out!

I really think we as a field are converging on a unified account of the hippocampus as a modality agnostic, task-relevant, sequence prediction machine.

I bet that within the next decade we will have a complete computational model of the hippocampus. 🧠📈 🧪

Out today in @nature.com: we show that individual neurons have diverse tuning to a decision variable computed by the entire population, revealing a unifying geometric principle for the encoding of sensory and dynamic cognitive variables.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...