Fabrizio Musacchio

Linking neural manifolds to circuit structure in recurrent networks Dimensionality reduction methods are widely used in neuroscience to investigate two complementary aspects of neural activity: the distribution of sing…

Excited to share our new paper to be published in Neuron!

With Valentin Schmutz @bio-emergent.bsky.social and Wulfram Gerstner @gerstnerlab.bsky.social, we explore how circuit structure in RNNs shapes network computation and single-neuron responses.
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

fMRI connectivity is dominated by recurring high-amplitude BOLD events (CAPs, QPPs)
But what originates these events? Many think neuromodulation is the culprit. Our new work offers a simpler take: cortico-cortical dynamics alone can generate CAP-like events! doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1013995
🧵1/n

How does the brain generalize past experiences without confusing memories? 🧠

Our lab's newest preprint reveals a fundamental division of labor between the cortex and cerebellum that solves this problem. (Check out the cortex-cerebellum video below! 👇) 🧵

I am totally pumped about this new work . "Task-trained RNNs" are a powerful and influential framework in neuroscience, but have lacked a firm theoretical footing. This work provides one, and makes direct contact with the classical theory of random RNNs:
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

NEW: #Kempner researchers develop a mean-field theory of task-trained RNNs that bridges random and learned connectivity—and find macaque motor cortex is best captured by an intermediate, task-specific recurrent structure.
Read the blog post 👇
🔗 bit.ly/47f3Ldl

Dissociable dynamic effects of expectation during statistical learning Neural responses during statistical learning reveal dissociable dynamic effects of expectation, supporting the opposing process theory within trials while demonstrating contrasting effects across tria...

🚨New paper alert 🚨

Using EEG and decoding analyses we find dynamic effects of expectation during statistical learning, both within and across trials 🧠

@auksz.bsky.social @fedemar.bsky.social
Caspar Schwiedrzik

elifesciences.org/articles/103...

Recurrent cortical networks encode natural sensory statistics via sequence filtering The visual cortex receives a stream of high-dimensional sensory input. The role of dense local, recurrent cortical connections in shaping responses to these inputs has been unclear. Here, we show that...

Recurrent cortical networks encode natural sensory statistics via sequence filtering

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

#compneuro #neuroskyence

The generalized Hierarchical Gaussian Filter

elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre...

#stats #cogpsy

🚨Preprint! “Bayesian surprise tracks the strength of perceptual insight” - Work with @lindedomingo.bsky.social & @gonzalezgarcia.bsky.social

Ever wondered what factors influence the subjective experience of suddenly understanding a previously unclear input?

Click below:
doi.org/10.64898/202...

A sepia toned, seated portrait of mathematician Georg Cantor in his early twenties. His wavy hair is swept back and he has a curly beard and thin mustache. Cantor wears a dark jacket and white shirt, with a tie in a bow at this neck.

Mathematician Georg Cantor was born #OTD in 1845. He is the founder of set theory and developed the concepts of cardinal and transfinite numbers.

These shocking results led his former professor Kronecker to call him a "corrupter of youth."

Image: Oberwolfach Photo Collection

#DynamicsClub in March: 𝗥𝗶𝗰𝗵𝗮𝗿𝗱 𝗚𝗮𝘀𝘁 @rgast.bsky.social will share his work on neural heterogeneity and network function (PMID: 38198531, 41475350) pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41475350/

March 6 (Friday) at 11am PT / 2pm ET
Join us in person at UCLA or on Zoom: lingyunxiong.github.io/DynamicsClub/

📢 iBehave Seminar: Dr. Tommaso Patriarchi (Univ. of Zürich)

🧠 Next-gen tools to visualize neuromodulators in the brain

📅 Mar 4, 16:30 | 📍 Univ. of Cologne @unicologne.bsky.social | 💻 Zoom: iBehave@uni-bonn.de

Don’t miss this insight into cutting-edge neuroscience!
#Neuroscience

Finally getting on top of new papers and god there are so many good ones. This from Lykken, Kanter, @edvardmoser.bsky.social & @m-bmoser.bsky.social is brilliant. Neuropixels showing differential phase shifts across grid modules drive place cell remapping. Elegant grid-to-place transformation story.

Experimenting with an AI-curated neuroscience feed. It scans the entire firehose in real time, prefilters for neuro/cogsci keywords, then a local LLM scores each post for scientific substance. A ranking algorithm blends that quality score with engagement to surface the best discussion. Try it out!

These reviews on neural manifolds are super relevant to today’s world of large-scale population recordings. How do we link circuits, population geometry, dynamics, and function?

“A neural manifold view of the brain” from Perich, Narain, and Gallego 2025

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

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This paper has now been published in PRX Life! journals.aps.org/prxlife/abst...

In this work I developed a scaling theory for spiking neural populations using a renormalization group approach -- the 1st, to my knowledge, applied to models of spiking neurons. See the thread for a brief summary.

In a new #ICLR2026 paper we provide an algorithm for semi-analytically constructing un-/stable manifolds of fixed points and cycles of ReLU-based RNNs:
openreview.net/pdf?id=EAwLA...

These manifolds provide a skeleton for the system’s dynamics, dissecting the state space into basins of attraction.

How heterogeneity shapes dynamics and computation in the brain No two neurons are the same, yet models often treat neural populations as pools of identical and interchangeable elements. Here, Dahmen et al. highlight recent theoretical advances that reveal the imp...

At the Bernstein Conference 2024, Jeremie Lefebvre and I organized a workshop on the computational consequences of neural heterogeneity. Now, slightly more than a year later, we funneled the emerging discussions into a perspective piece: www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...

📊 This paper by Crameri et al. (2020) shows why #color choice in figures matters.

Rainbow 🌈 & red–green 🛑❇️ colormaps distort gradients, create artificial boundaries, & exclude readers with #ColorVision deficiency. They quantify visual error & argue for perceptually uniform, #CVD friendly colormaps👍

Photo of Jocelyn Bell Burnell in front of a radio telescope dish in the 1960s. She is a white woman with dark hair.

#OnThisDay, 24 Feb 1968, Jocelyn Bell Burnell - along with her male supervisor and three other men - published a paper confirming the discovery of pulsars. She had built the array, picked up the signal and argued it was not an anomaly.

#WomenInHistory #OTD #History #WomensHistory 🗃️

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Frontiers | Cross-population amplitude coupling in high-dimensional oscillatory neural time series Neural oscillations have long been considered important markers of interaction across brain regions, yet identifying coordinated oscillatory activity from hi...

The brain oscillates and we should figure out why. Development of new analytics will be key:
Cross-population amplitude coupling in high-dimensional oscillatory neural time series
www.frontiersin.org/journals/com...
#neuroscience

Two-photon calcium imaging at 24,000 lines/s, with the resonant axis spanning 4x what other systems can do. Inertia-free. Diffraction-limited. No tradeoffs. Che-Hang Yu developed a 4x angle multiplier for laser scanning. His paper is out today: opg.optica.org/optica/fullt... 1/n #fluorescenceFriday

A PhD thesis attached to a wall by a 29.5 cm long nail.

Traditionally, PhD theses are nailed to a wall at the university library 3 weeks before the dissertation. Here's Sara Nesbit-Östman's PhD thesis about the bow shock of Mars, attached to the wall at @umeauniversitet.bsky.social, using an unusually long nail.

the-unflappablewolf Who would you trust more? total stranger in a star trek shirt? 94.5% total stranger in a star wars shirt? 5.5% 99.421 Stimmen • Verbleibende Zeit: 2 Tage 23 Stunden thebaconsandwichofregret No exaggeration, the vote split on this poll is hysterical.

No but this is entirely correct

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

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Can we predict a thought before it happens?

To know what one neuron will do next, you have to know what the entire brain is doing right now.

In our latest @kempnerinstitute.bsky.social Deeper Learning blog, @duranrin.bsky.social introduces POCO, a tool paving the way for adaptive neurotechnology.

Really cool work — learning over sequential experiences that contain the embodied cue of viewpoint as well as visual inputs, can give rise to human-like 3D shape perception!

Vectorized instructive signals in cortical dendrites - Nature Mice learning a neurofeedback brain–computer interface task show neuron-specific teaching signals in cortical dendrites, consistent with a vectorized solution for credit assignment in the brain.

This paper on how the brain may do gradient descent is very cool: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Calcium spikes know which way the wind blows!

Lily Nguyen and I wrote a dispatch on this fascinating work led by Itzel Ishida+@sethisachin.bsky.social+Gaby Maimon!

authors.elsevier.com/a/1mfk53QW8S...

𝗔𝘁𝘁𝗿𝗮𝗰𝘁𝗼𝗿 𝗱𝘆𝗻𝗮𝗺𝗶𝗰𝘀 𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗯𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻
Looks like a very cool paper about the dynamics of large-scale networks in the mouse brain.
Starting to be all about dynamics!
journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...
#neuroskyence