I didn’t expect a short video about an octopus to stay with me this long.
At first, it looks like a simple, almost playful interaction. But the more you watch, the more something deeper emerges: a learning process unfolding between two completely different forms of intelligence.
🧵 1/
The complete morphology of a single LC-NE neuron.
First off, these cells are gigantic. This one, for example, has >72 cm of axon! To our knowledge, it’s the longest neuron ever fully reconstructed. I leave it to the reader as an exercise to estimate the length of a human LC neuron. 5
This preprint is about this! THIS!! Mindblowing.
New preprint from my lab! We study how reinforcement learning & selective attention interact. To do so, we built a set of models describing different ways that value & reward prediction error can modulate top-down attention. We compare model outcomes to monkey data from a color value learning task
What do #neuromodulators do in the #brain? Two recent papers give new insights:
@nishantjoshi.bsky.social shows they do not only reshape individual cellular properties, but also the architecture linking them, thereby expanding the computational repertoire.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Oh wow, Anthropic accidentally leaked Claude Code and it’s been cloned and made public github.com/instructkr/c...
Thrilled to share our new paper, which shows that the relative timing of cholinergic and dopamine release dynamically gates whether dopamine acts as an RPE for in vivo plasticity and reinforcement learning. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Statistical Rethinking 2026 is done: 20 new lectures emphasizing logical and critical statistical workflow, from basics of probability theory to causal inference to reliable computation to sensitivity. It's all free, made just for you. Lecture list and links: github.com/rmcelreath/s...
Cortical circuits are often thought to be specialized, but the same large-scale activity patterns can arise from different circuit architectures. In other words, different instruments can play the same tune, and the same instrument can sometimes play different tunes.
www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...
Here's a lovely #blueprint on a new study from our lab led by @royeyono.bsky.social.
tl;dr: it implies that there may be interneurons whose role is to normalize credit assignment signals during learning.
#neuroscience 🧪
(1/n) Presenting our NeurIPS’25 work at #cosyne2026 poster 3-109
We introduce a flexible framework to infer how animals learn new decision-making tasks from scratch without assuming REINFORCE/Q-learning.
Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2509.04661
Joint w/ @vgeadah.bsky.social and @jpillowtime.bsky.social
Really neat work by Fountas and colleagues at UCL:
arxiv.org/abs/2603.04688
They propose that consolidation reflects a form of "predictive forgetting" that aids generalization.
I tracked every keyword in 22 years of Cosyne abstracts to map how computational neuroscience evolved — from Bayesian brains to neural manifolds to LLMs — and where it's heading next.
Out now in @plos.org CB: doi.org/10.1371/jour...
Neural representations of tasks change over time, even in the absence of changes in task performance. But neurons change tuning at different rates. How does a neuron's stability relate to its interactions with the population?
#compneuro #neuroskyence
New in the BMJ: Our study of 600,000 people found GLP-1 drugs associated with 50% fewer substance-related deaths, 39% fewer overdoses, and reduced addiction risk across alcohol, opioids, cocaine, cannabis, and nicotine.
www.bmj.com/content/392/...
With this one in print, I think I finally earned that PhD... 😅
Presented for the first time at the cosyne when the world ended (March 2020). I'll bring over a summary thread from twitter when it was still twitter...
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
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
1/14
Huge water consumer, destroying the planet with CO2 emissions, mostly a negative for their consumers. Something must be done. Yes, that’s right, it’s time to do something about cows.
The supplementary videos for this preprint are fantastic. Some wild examples of decoding the animal's attentional focus and/or intent
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
People have been looking at "AI & brains" through the lens of LLMs/transformers. But what latent diffusion? (think text-to-image/video platforms such as Midjourney).
**Class conditioned latent diffusion and semantically cued hippocampus share a remarkably similar computational architecture...**
Are AI agents ready for the workplace? A new benchmark raises doubts.
techcrunch.com/2026/01/22/a...
A few days ago, I stood in the graveyard of an 1100 year old church, getting damper and damper in the drizzling rain.
A woman walked into the graveyard, waved, said hello, and, as we had previously arranged, handed me a paper bag full of human bones.
The life of a churchwarden is a strange one...
What is wild to me is the defense, BY THE NEURIPS BOARD, that fabricated citations do not mean "the content of the papers themselves [is] necessarily invalidated"
It does. It very much does. What do you think citing other work is for? What do you think writing a paper is for? What do you *think*?
if i could make you read ONE (1) single post to improve your understanding of the challenges of social science in general it would be this one from @markfabian.bsky.social about wellbeing science specifically
profmarkfabian.substack.com/p/airing-my-...
As I often write in my newsletter, the future of AI doesn't exist yet; we are building it right now, and every policy and regulatory choice counts.
To learn more about pro-human policies, rules, and rights, join 88,800+ subscribers here: www.luizasnewsletter.com
Proud to have contributed to @jiaxuanqi.bsky.social's masterpiece out @nature.com! She shows that dopamine transients track the learned quality of song during juvenile learning and that dopamine release is driven not just by VTA firing, but by a local cholinergic mechanism! (1/x)
How does the brain replay memories during sleep?
Excited to share our new preprint, the outcome of an extensive effort led by Johannes Niediek, showing that reactivation of human concept neurons reflects memory content rather than event sequence.
Engram — separate the factual info from the weights, dedicate more weights to reasoning instead of fact lookup
They store facts outside the main NN layers and perform lookups during inference via n-grams.
This benefits not just knowledge, but also reasoning, bc fewer weights are dedicated to facts
Interesting read on how chunking can emerge directly from #synaptic dynamics: by temporarily suppressing groups of items via synaptic augmentation, #WorkingMemory can retrieve up to 8 items despite a base capacity of only 4.
