If even Luiz freaking Pessoa is affected by the job scarcity in humanities then we are truly doomed.

We believe visual neuroscience is undergoing a paradigm shift — and the Beyond Binding exchange in @TrendsCogSci makes it visible. Five papers, excellent critics, and a discussion that sharpened and nuanced our argument. Thread 👇

Compact deep neural network models of the visual cortex Nature - Parsimonious deep neural network models can be used for prediction of visual neuron responses.

DNN models of the brain are getting bigger. Are we replacing one complicated system in vivo with another in silico?

In new work, we seek the *smallest* DNN models of visual cortex, balancing prediction with parsimony.

It turns out these compact models are surprisingly small!

rdcu.be/e5H8G

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

I love the lecture anecdotes you share here. Have you ever considered posting recordings of the lectures online (e.g., Youtube)? I bet they’d be incredibly popular.

UCL NeuroAI Talk Series A series of NeuroAI themed talks organised by the UCL NeuroAI community. Talks will continue on a monthly basis.

We are excited to have Dr. Tim Kietzmann from Osnabrück University for our next seminar! This will be an in-person plus online seminar!

🗓️Wed 11 March 2026
⏰2-3pm GMT

Talk title: NeuroAI - the synergy between machine learning and neuroscience

Registration: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/ucl-neuroa...

Wiring efficiency be damned! Fascinating work showing CA1 place cells are fully nontopographical to maximize combinatorial power and storage capacity of the hippocampal map.

We're almost at the end of the year, and that means an end-of-year review! Send me your favorite NeuroAI papers of the year (preprints or published, late last year is fine too).

Curriculum learning is the way!

Developmental science holds a lot of potential for the neuro-to-AI direction.

bsky.app/profile/timk...

Introducing CorText: a framework that fuses brain data directly into a large language model, allowing for interactive neural readout using natural language.

tl;dr: you can now chat with a brain scan 🧠💬

1/n

Falling asleep follows a predictable bifurcation dynamic - Nature Neuroscience Li et al. propose a conceptual framework to study the phenomenon of falling asleep based on electroencephalogram data. They show that a tipping point marks the brain’s nonlinear wake-to-sleep transiti...

My co-authors have yet to move to Bluesky, so I'm pleased to announce our latest work has just been published in @nature.com Neuroscience. Amazing work led by Junheng Li, revealing that falling asleep follows a predictable bifurcation pattern #neuroskyence #sleep
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Semantic Tuning of Single Neurons in the Human Medial Temporal Lobe The Medial Temporal Lobe (MTL) is key to human cognition, supporting memory, emotional processing, navigation, and semantic coding. Rare direct human MTL recordings revealed concept cells, which were ...

🚨Preprint: Semantic Tuning of Single Neurons in the Human Medial Temporal Lobe

1/8: How do human neurons encode meaning?
In this work, led by Katharina Karkowski, we recorded hundreds of human MTL neurons to study semantic coding in the human brain:

doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Recurrence affects the geometry of visual representations across the ventral visual stream in the human brain The specific roles of feedforward and recurrent processing in human visual object recognition remain incompletely understood. In this neuroimaging and computational modelling study the authors isolate...

By utilizing the visual backward masking paradigm, this study aimed to disentangle the contributions of feedforward and recurrent processing, revealing that recurrent processing significantly shapes the object representations across the ventral visual stream.
journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

I've been arguing that #NeuroAI should model the brain in health *and* in disease -- very excited to share a first step from Melika Honarmand: inducing dyslexia in vision-language-models via targeted perturbations of visual-word-form units (analogous to human VWFA) 🧠🤖🧪 arxiv.org/abs/2509.24597

OK, time for a CCN runup thread. Let me tell you about all the lab’s projects present at CCN this year. #CCN2025

the Bayesian Models of Cognition book can teach you a lot about intuitive physics, e.g.:

I think the paper is referenced in the first two paragraphs of the Methods

Complex negative emotions induced by electrical stimulation of the human hypothalamus Stimulation of the ventromedial hypothalamic region in animals has been reported to cause attack behavior labeled as sham-rage without offering information about the internal affective state of the an...

(buried in a reply, but) This is mind-blowing & deserves a post. Scroll to "video" in this article to watch what happens when the human hypothalamus is stimulated: it's a combo of embarrassment/shame and intense body sensations emanating from the heart. WOW.

www.brainstimjrnl.com/article/S193...

Many people think of the brain as a hierarchical system, and in many ways it is. But there is also a lot of non-hierarchical processing going on. Check out this pre-print where we review and propose functional roles for the different long-range connections in the neocortex 🧠

Exciting new preprint from the lab: “Adopting a human developmental visual diet yields robust, shape-based AI vision”. A most wonderful case where brain inspiration massively improved AI solutions.

Work with @zejinlu.bsky.social @sushrutthorat.bsky.social and Radek Cichy

arxiv.org/abs/2507.03168

Now out in Nature Human Behaviour @nathumbehav.nature.com : “End-to-end topographic networks as models of cortical map formation and human visual behaviour”. Please check our NHB link: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Can seemingly complex multi-area computations in the brain emerge from the need for energy efficient computation? In our new preprint on predictive remapping in active vision, we report on such a case.

Let us take you for a spin. 1/6 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

These Strange New Minds Stunning advances in digital technology have given us a new wave of disarmingly human-like AI systems. The march of this new technology is set to upturn our economies, challenge our democracies, and r...

I am a bit bashful about sharing this profile www.thetimes.com/uk/technolog... of me in @thetimes.com, but will do so because it kindly refers to my new book which is coming out in early March. www.penguin.co.uk/books/460891.... The tech titans pictured seem to be decoration (and not my co-authors)

Tim's ML4CCN lecture was the highlight of my semester. It introduced me to the NeuroAI space and showcased how promising this line of work truly is! His passion for the field and the way he structured the lecture made it super inspiring.

Also glad our "DistractedV4" meme got a few chuckles :D