this one - though I'm changing the title www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

Final figures on a ~decade preprint in the making coming together
about:blank#blocked

US researchers are advising students not to enter academia A survey of NIH-grantees in Massachusetts reveals delayed hiring in labs, layoffs, careers being pursued abroad and research scope reductions

US researchers are advising students not to enter academia.

"More than two-thirds of the researchers in Massachusetts... who responded to a survey conducted by The Boston Globe recommend their students consider careers outside academia."

#AcademicSky

www.chemistryworld.com/news/us-rese...

NIH Funds Still Not Getting to Researchers Congress approved a budget more than a month ago, but awards are lagging

Russell Vought's OMB is continuing to hold up funds at NIH.
www.medpagetoday.com/publichealth...

Can electrical microstimulation be used to steer cortical population activity on- and off-manifold? Our new preprint says yes — using data-driven control in macaque PFC. Joint work with @gbarzon.bsky.social, Anandita De, Isaac Moran, Conner Carnahan, and Luca Mazzucato.

if "measuring" the box was stabbing it with a knife...

eg. it's important to distinguish hub-wrt-other-brain-regions from hub-wrt-multiple-behaviors.

Building a little "synthetic network mapping" library to better understand what IRL SOTA methods are capable of *in theory*.

All I can think about is Jeff Bezos saying that he slashed jobs at the Washington Post — including those of foreign correspondents in the Middle East — based on "the data," and a few weeks later a whole war breaks out in the Middle East that these laid off folks would have covered as true experts.

Consider the ambient spaces of your layers

What do you think? Did the EEG on the left come from the white-matter voxels on the right?

s/ML/AI/g

Math, not Measurements Mathematical models impose accountability and transparency, and machine learning (ML) is a critical component of ethical DBS investigations moving forward.(40) ML is a tool, not a framework, that can help bridge theory with practice; but solid theory work is still necessary.(41)(42) What we see today is that DL is being used as a framework for DBS, its assumptions become our values and we then demand more and more data from our patients. Contemporary efforts in DBS are zealously pursuing ’big- data’ approaches, but these approaches put unnecessary burden on patients and the public

I aspired to this approach, in tandem with active conversations with on-the-ground clinicians, during my PhD.

Even talked about it in my 2018/2022 dissertations.

Invasive brain mapping identifies personalized therapeutic neuromodulation targets that suppress OCD network activity - Translational Psychiatry Translational Psychiatry - Invasive brain mapping identifies personalized therapeutic neuromodulation targets that suppress OCD network activity

Thrilled to share my very first publication, in Translational Psychiatry! 🧠🧪
We used invasive brain mapping to identify personalized neuromodulation targets for treatment-refractory OCD.
Read it here 👉 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

#OCD #DBS #Neuroscience #Research

Love this paper from last week - more soon

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

we now have the ability to type in your own 2d functions, and to "trace" a desired trajectory to find the field's path integral.

Got my old (2D) dynamics visualization tool up and running again - check it out here: github.com/virati/Visua...

I've been pretty critical of AI broadly, and I'm proud of that. But Claude Code is quite ridiculous while riding the subway...

Disease-specific models of physiology are like planet-specific models of gravity.

followup: searching for atomicity in soups of molecules may make sense if you're studying protein folding, but that search makes no sense if you're studying cognition/behavior.

Separability might be way easier for your problem-at-hand in a different layer/differential operator order.

What happens when we try to analyse a known control system/loop with IV->DV frameworks?

I'm guessing: not good things

Some loose thoughts about control theoretic neuromodulation
virati.github.io/blog/posts/c...

I think a lot of folks working on adaptive DBS don't realize they're working on a canonical control theoretic problem - without having any of the control theoretic background needed to solve it.

Deep Brain Stimulation Has Always Been Closed-Loop Avoiding inefficient and ineffective engineering

Timely reminder: DBS has never been "open loop".

medium.com/neuroenginee...

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

"if something doesn't tell you the answer, it doesn't tell you anything" spot the issue there.

The misleading manifold?

The current debate (decoding vs causal relevance)

and a toy example I gave in the thread below

got me thinking about a related issue: how decoding may reflect structure more than function.

🧵 1/5

The real question is: what should children and students learn? Math, spelling, reading, and especially reasoning! The goal of education isn't to spit out as much text as possible.

Contrasted with trying to reinvent your own approach to inference.