The Rising Skyline YouTube video by Failure - Topic

This is likely what I will be listening to in my car for the next year. The bendy chords and harmonies remind me of acoustic Alice in Chains, but what an ominous ending.
music.youtube.com/watch?v=LetD...

How the visual brain can learn to parse images using a multiscale, incremental grouping process Author summary In our perception, image elements that belong to the same object are grouped by object-based attention. Object-based attention corresponds to an enhanced neuronal representation of the ...

How the visual brain can learn to parse images using a multiscale, incremental grouping process

journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...

The cognitive origins of geometry Geometry is often considered the paradigmatic model of abstract thought, with thinkers since at least Plato exploring its origins. A dominant hypothesis posits that a specialized, modular language of thought underpins our species’ unique geometric abilities. Challenging this view, I propose the Wanderers Hypothesis for Geometry, which suggests that human geometry is primarily rooted in navigation-like mental processes shared by humans and nonhuman animals and that these processes approximate Euclidean geometry. Drawing on infant studies, cross-cultural experiments, and cognitive modeling, I argue that humans access these primitive processes through natural language, enabling flexible application and supporting our capacity for formal learning. This perspective broadens our understanding of geometric cognition and the nature of the human mind.

Online Now: The cognitive origins of geometry

To accompany my textbook (Computational Foundations of Cognitive Neuroscience) and the class I taught this semester, I'm open-sourcing my lectures slides:
gershmanlab.com/lectures.html
I'll continue to update these as I improve them.

Neural trajectory plot showing neural activity moving through orthogonal corollary discharge and feedback signal subspaces

New preprint! 🧵🧪🧠

doi.org/10.64898/202...

Upshot: somatosensory cortex contains both feedback *and* intended movement signals (a.k.a. corollary discharge). These two signals exist orthogonally in neural space, flexibly allowing both fast state estimation and external perturbation detection. 1/

A monkey model of retinal ganglion cell degeneration Optic neuropathies due to heritable diseases are a common cause of blindness in humans, but limited therapies currently exist for the vision loss that occurs from them. One such condition is autosomal...

link.growkudos.com/1f6gc1c9x4w
#visionscience

Recurrent cortical networks encode natural sensory statistics via sequence filtering The visual cortex receives a stream of high-dimensional sensory input. The role of dense local, recurrent cortical connections in shaping responses to these inputs has been unclear. Here, we show that...

I think this is a super interesting paper from @markhisted.org and co:

www.cell.com/neuron/abstr...

My personal bet is that the phenomenon seen here would be different for some types of inter-laminar recurrence.

#neuroscience 🧪

Back to you: there's nothing wrong with taking a break when you're under the gun. I did for a while when my admin duties got too heavy.

We should review about 2-3 times the number we submit for the system to work. For many years I did about 20 / year, usually on weekends, but now I'm laiden with administrative duties and try to avoid weekend work...down to about your rate.

Neural circuits encode prior knowledge of temporal statistics - Nature Neuroscience This study shows that cerebellar circuits learn and encode prior probabilities of event timing. Cell-type-specific neural activity reflects environmental statistics and guides predictive motor behavio...

Our work on how neural circuits in the cerebellum encode prior probabilities led by Julius Koppen is out now in Nature Neuroscience www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Big thanks to Julius Koppen & the whole team! And dedicated to all of us who found inspiration in Bayesian theories of the brain!

Rapid concerted switching of the neural code in the inferotemporal cortex - Nature Face cells in the macaque inferotemporal cortex are initially able to detect faces and then rapidly switch to a face-specific neural code to discriminate between different face identities.

This looks like a significant discovery from Doris Tao's lab:

Rapid concerted switching of the neural code in the inferotemporal cortex
@nature.com

"..our findings indicate that there is a previously unknown mechanism for neural representation:.."

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

And this guy thinks he deserves a Nobel Peace Prize. If he actually goes through with his threats, he will be remembered along with Hitler, Mao and Stalin as one of modern history's worst Monsters.

Agree, the big grants benefit from a broad academic perspective (l did 2 yrs general biology + philosophy & anthropology, then 3yrs psych/physiology). They also require an understanding of the current political zeitgeist.

We are hosting two seminars next week:
Dr. Tirin Moore on April 8 and Dr. Carol Wilkinson on April 10. We hope you can join us.
#neuroscience
@jdcrawford.bsky.social
@stanforduniversity.bsky.social @connectedminds.bsky.social
@yorkuniversity.bsky.social
@jonathanamichaels.bsky.social

The reason I asked was because yesterday morning I saw someone being honored in a video get teary eyed, and got teary eyed myself, whereas the images produced a milder reaction. As a neuroscientist I'd like to know the mechanism. Someone who studies vision and emotion could do that...

I mean, is visual recognition enough, or does empathy require situational context?

When we recognize emotions, do we feel them to some extent, i.e, are the same neural circuits activated?

Perception and Memory Share the Same Brain Circuits, and the Line Between Them Is Collapsing - Daily Neuron Perception and memory rely on overlapping brain circuits, meaning what you see is partly constructed from what you've seen before.

Perception and memory rely on overlapping brain circuits, meaning what you see is partly constructed from what you've seen before. #cogsci #neuroscience #philosophy

dailyneuron.com/perception-a...

Super excited to see the first paper from my PhD out! 🐭 Very satisfying to get to build an interpretable model of how the brain does a thing. A nice palette cleanser in the current sea of LLMs and deep ML.

Human Gaze Behaviors Track Abstract Stimulus Categories Abstract. Categorization, or the ability to group stimuli according to behavioral relevance, is a cornerstone of abstract cognition. Neurophysiological studies in nonhuman primates have revealed that ...

Human Gaze Behaviors Track Abstract Stimulus Categories
doi.org/10.1162/JOCN...
#neuroscience

Final version: doi.org/10.1016/j.ne...

Need to move your antimatter? Just call 'Two Men and a Particle Accelerator' at 555-BOOM

Don't miss the Connected Minds Book Launch! March 26, 11 AM–2 PM at York. Three featured authors including Dr. Michael G. Sherbert discuss technology, society, and justice. Readings, moderated panel, audience Q&A, networking. Free event, open to the public. Register here: lnkd.in/ejc-QCgu

How do humans adapt their behavior in natural, uncertain environments? Open PhD position in the collaborative DFG Excellence Cluster “The Adaptive Mind” (theadaptivemind-excellencecluster.de)
Apply: www.career.tu-darmstadt.de/tu-darmstadt...

Congratulations! I know I'm getting old when the youngbloods are full profs.

Is That within Reach? fMRI Reveals That the Human Superior Parieto-Occipital Cortex Encodes Objects Reachable by the Hand Macaque neurophysiology and human neuropsychology results suggest that parietal cortex encodes a unique representation of space within reach of the arm. Here, we used slow event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate ...

Like this? pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

And now, a bad neuroscience joke:
Why did the action potential cross the corpus callosum? To get to the other hemisphere.

Sorry about that. It's not an encyclopedic review; it's a perspective piece built around Bianca's PhD.

Visuomotor experiments usually study how visual cues are integrated into the motor system, but rarely consider about how our task instructions are integrated into the plan. We address this question here using event related fMRI and graph theory analysis: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Figure 8: Cortical sites implicated in updating / integrating visual features across saccades.

The in-press version of our (@bbaltaretu.bsky.social) review 'Cortical Mechanisms for Transsaccadic Vision: Extrinsic and Intrinsic Feature Updating' is now available here: doi.org/10.1016/j.ne...