1. I’m quite happy with this popular piece that Lee Dugatkin and I wrote recently. For the next two weeks it’s free to read on the American Scientist website.
17.02.2026 19:25
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1. I’m quite happy with this popular piece that Lee Dugatkin and I wrote recently. For the next two weeks it’s free to read on the American Scientist website.
Our paper is out in Science Advances!
What makes primate hands so dexterous?
We show that evolutionarily distinct spinal and cortical pathways work together to balance stability and flexibility, supporting remarkable primate hand control.
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Preach.
Beautiful to see! Great work!
Yes, of course, a model which can't process "artificial" stimuli the way natural visual systems do is also not a good model of the natural visual system!
Indeed. A model that cannot process natural stimuli is simply not a good model of the natural visual system...
3. Backyard brains ephys stim kit hooked up to a cockroach leg. Play james brown from an iphone. Our body is electric!
4. Driving a lego mindstorms car w/ EMG signals from a surface electrode on the biceps. Pseudo-BCI demo!
Did a lot of outreach at Northwestern with other grad students there for a yearly "brain fair". Some fun things I remember:
1. Optical illusions are always fun
2. Put a sheep brain from the butcher in a blender to show brains are mostly fat
🚨📜+🧵🚨 Very excited about this work showing that people with no hand function following a spinal cord injury can control the activity of motor units from those muscles to perform 1D, 2D and 3D tasks, play video games, or navigate a virtual wheelchair
By a wonderful team co-mentored w Dario Farina
I mean, they're clearly on strike...
But ultimately I don't have much of "horse in the race" here about what is low-D, what is high-D. The brain probably uses a range of dimensionalities and strategies and some tasks are going to take a lot more dimensions than, say, limb movements. It's all fun to think about :)
Some personal speculation: orienting geometry w.r.t. readout buys flexibility and helps composition from lower-D representation, manifolds can be labile and change between tasks/contexts based on inputs etc, a low-D surface could store arbitrarily many representations (see SueYeon's capacity work)
Yes this I agree with 100%! I agree that the low dimensionalities we've seen to date are likely because we collect data in simple/limited behavioral regimes and short timescales.
One of the reasons we wrote our recent perspective (www.nature.com/articles/s41...) was to try and argue that the talk around manifolds should be more about what it buys us conceptually as a framework, not about "is it low-D".
A simple bowl could be embedded in a 10^9 dimensional space. But naturally I don't think anyone argues "the brain is 10D" (or at they shouldn't).
I could imagine lots of reasons they'd be seen. Robustness, predictability of future possible states, etc. Maybe you don't even want it, it's just a necessary consequence of wiring billions of neurons up and getting a somewhat-stable solution.
I don’t have a strong opinion on what dimensionality brain activity should have. And dimensionality is just one aspect of manifolds. E.g., smoothness, which quite naturally fits with how we’d expect neural activity to transition between states
For this paper, it’s worth considering that structure in brain activity need not be linear…
Go work with Juan! I can vouch that this will be a very cool project.
Yes!
My CIHR committee was already at an 11% funding line last cycle (and I don't think it's the lowest)
Yes but thankfully it's only a small cut in the current plan (which is kind of a win given how bad it could have gone). But certainly worse than a sustained increase, given the increasing applicant pool.
www.science.org/content/arti...
That being said, investment is investment, and it all could be a lot worse! Having a government acknowledging scientific excellence as a priority is a good signal.
Fully agree. The unfortunate thing is that this is paired with cuts to federal research budgets. Importing highly competitive "big fish" while shrinking the pot for grants is not a great combo for the broader ecosystem... If Canada really wants to capitalize they need to think short and long term
🚨Job alert🚨
The lab has up to *3 postdoc openings* for comp systems neuroscientists interested in describing and manipulating neural population dynamics mediating behaviour
This is part of a collaborative ARIA grant "4D precision control of cortical dynamics"
euraxess.ec.europa.eu/jobs/383909
If you're interested in dynamical systems analysis for neuroscience, definitely check out @oliviercodol.bsky.social 's revised version of our RL paper! Very cool results in the new Fig 6, worth it regardless of if you saw our previous version or if it's all new.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
A big "get" for the Champalimaud! Excited to see what comes out of the Warehouse and the next phase of Juan's lab
Very excited and proud to share my postdoctoral research with @neurrriot.bsky.social looking at the context-specific encoding of social behavior 💃🕺 in hormone-sensitive, large-scale brain networks in mice!
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
#neuroskyence #compneurosky 🧪
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Of potential interest to those keen on motor control and/or multi-task networks. Congrats to Elom and Eric.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Thanks!
