Sara A Solla

A unifying perspective on neural manifolds and circuits for cognition - Nature Reviews Neuroscience Neural manifolds can shed light on how heterogeneous neuronal population activity drives neural computations, but linking these insights to the underlying neuronal connectivity is challenging. Engel a...

“A unifying perspective on neural manifolds and circuits for cognition” from Langdon, Genkin, and Engel 2023

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

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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...

(1/2)

VMH SF1 neurons are the gift that keeps on giving. They control defensive behaviors! elifesciences.org/articles/6633 copulatory behaviors! www.cell.com/neuron/fullt... exercise-induced improvements in endurance! www.cell.com/neuron/fullt... Such overachievers.

Jorge Jaramillo: Postdoctoral fellows in computational neuroscience at the University of Chicago

Come be our colleague! The Center for Neural Science at NYU is accepting applications at the Assistant Professor level in computational neuroscience and/or neural engineering apply.interfolio.com/182074

A tribute to David MacKay “I didn’t know David personally but was a great admirer of his work.” “David seemed to have infinite patience.” “He treated the audience with respect, trusted them with complexity, and showed that r...

The tribute to David Mackay has attracted only around 60 signatures.

Let's change this!

He wrote one of the best textbooks ever written, "Information theory, inference and learning algorithms", not to mention incredible seminal and influential work in that area.

docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Apply by May 7 for two early-career #neuro workshops at Janelia! Featuring joint sessions to foster collaboration between theory & experiment. 🧠 🤝

Theoretical Neuroscience→ janelia.news/THE26

Mechanistic Cognitive Neuroscience→ janelia.news/CNW26

@ratecoding.bsky.social @jvoigts.bsky.social

Thank you thank you thank you to all my coauthors, @sasolla.bsky.social , @mayankmehta.bsky.social , bluesky-less John Disterhoft, any and all people who gave feedback, and the NIH FOR SUPPORTING THIS RESEARCH!!

Would love any questions/complaints/feedback :)

they beginning of the end! ephys 4 lyfe!

Place cells in CA1 lack topographical organization of firing locations | PNAS Topography is a well-described and well-known concept for cortical organization in primary sensory and motor cortices of mammalian brains. Similar ...

A half-century old question may have its final answer. Using high-resolution #Mini2P microscopes, we find no evidence of local topography in #PlaceCells. Place fields of neighbouring cells are no more similar than those of randomly selected cells. 🧠🗺️ Out now in @pnas.org www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

New preprint out 🎉

What happens to the hippocampal “place code” when an animal is actively engaged in a task?

The answer surprised us (and might surprise you too!).

Let's dive in ⬇️

Link:
"Hippocampal trace coding dominates and disrupts place coding" www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Mathematical Methods in Computational Neuroscience Summer school in Eresfjord, Norway (July 8th - 26th, 2024)

Applications are now open for the summer school: 𝐌𝐚𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐦𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐥 𝐌𝐞𝐭𝐡𝐨𝐝𝐬 𝐢𝐧 𝐂𝐨𝐦𝐩𝐮𝐭𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐥 𝐍𝐞𝐮𝐫𝐨𝐬𝐜𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐞

🧠 Apply before March 15: www.compneuronrsn.org

📍 Located in beautiful Eresfjord 🇳🇴
🗓️ Between July 6-24

Supported by the @kavlifoundation.org
In collaboration with @kavlintnu.bsky.social

I recommend this school to anyone interested in computation in the brain - it receives excellent reviews year after year, it is highly interactive and social, and the setting is remarkable.

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...

The image at left is of Galileo's birthplace in Pisa -- on plain looking 4-story pink apartment building. On the right his is ornate baroque tomb in Basilica di Santa Croce in Florence. Pix by me, 2009.

Happy 462nd Birthday to Galileo Galilei, born #OTD in 1564 -- a crucial figure in the early stages of what we now call the scientific revolution. Here are photos that I took in 2009 of his (rather humble) birthplace in Pisa, and his ornate tomb in Florence: #science #history #histsci

Are you doing ephys in humans? Come do neuroscience with us!

Fellows-to-Faculty Awardee Sama Ahmed Studies the Neuroscience of Multitasking Simons Foundation Fellows-to-Faculty alumnus Sama Ahmed spoke with the foundation about his experiences with the fellowship.

At @uwpsychology.bsky.social, former Fellows-to-Faculty awardee Sama Ahmed studies the neurobiology of multitasking: https://www.simonsfoundation.org/fellows-to-faculty-awardee-sama-ahmed-studies-the-neuroscience-of-multitasking/ #neuroscience

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...

US Senate passes bill to boost federal science spending after White House sought major cuts The U.S. Senate voted on Thursday to approve billions of dollars in funding for federal science agencies, rejecting deep cuts proposed by President Donald Trump in space and other areas.

Wow! Yay! The Senate just rejected Trump’s proposed science cuts, voting 82–15 to boost funding for NOAA, NASA, and the NSF. The bill already passed the House 397–28. Strong bipartisan support for science still exists.

Thank you Vishal Mathur for choosing “What Is Intelligence?” as your favorite read from 2025! I really enjoyed our conversation for @hindustan-times.bsky.social last October on how prediction is fundamental to intelligence.

Brain Balls Scientists can now grow tiny, human brain balls. They’re useful, but are they alive?

I talked to @latif.bsky.social at @radiolab.bsky.social about brain organoids for their new episode. Listen here: radiolab.org/podcast/brai...

Are you a journalist looking to deepen your understanding of complex systems?

Join the 2026 CSSS Journalism Fellowship at SFI, offering a space to study complexity alongside researchers and reflect on science communication from within the field.

Apply by Feb. 4, 2026
santafe.edu/journalism-f...

Texas A&M, Under New Curriculum Limits, Warns Professor Not to Teach Plato

Gift link.

A Network of Biologically Inspired Rectified Spectral Units (ReSUs) Learns Hierarchical Features Without Error Backpropagation We introduce a biologically inspired, multilayer neural architecture composed of Rectified Spectral Units (ReSUs). Each ReSU projects a recent window of its input history onto a canonical direction ob...

Move over ReLU 🚀
Meet **ReSU** (Rectified Spectral Unit): a biologically inspired, self-supervised unit for learning from dynamical data. A backprop-free multilayer ReSU network learns predictive features and recapitulates *Drosophila* vision.
To appear at AAAI: arxiv.org/abs/2512.23146

Thanks for the invitation to participate in your lively Computational Neuroscience Podcast! It is followed by so many of us in the community.

Episode #36 in #TheoreticalNeurosciencePodcast: On low-dimensional manifolds in motor cortex – with Sara Solla @sasolla.bsky.social

theoreticalneuroscience.no/thn36

Manifold analysis has changed our thinking on how cortex works. One of the pioneers of this modelling approach explains.

Applications open for SFI’s 2026 GWCSS program, a 2-week workshop for Ph.D. students and early-career scholars to explore complex systems and computation, collaborate on challenges, and advance their research with support from SFI faculty.

Apply by Feb 4, 2026
www.santafe.edu/gwcss

Portrait of Marina Vance, a scientist, sitting in a Colorado grassland.

The @nytimes.com Lost Science series continues. Here's my Q&A with a scientist who was studying how wildfire smoke threatens human health when the EPA decided that her research was no longer a funding priority. Gift link: nyti.ms/4jhpw14

Easy action to do right now 👇 You don't need to be in earth sciences; just let them know you value high quality research and recognize how important it is to the country.

CCBS Seminar: “What does the neuron do? A self-supervised dynamical model for neuroscience and AI" YouTube video by Brown University

Delighted to talk at Brown about our self-supervised neuronal algorithm for modeling biological circuits—and challenging backprop along the way. Thanks to @leokoz8 for the kind invitation! youtu.be/AF3Uhrm__U4?...