A masterpiece by a beloved team! Congratulations 🎉@danielavalerio.bsky.social

Schematic of theta waves and gamma packets recorded from the mouse visual cortex

How does the visual cortex coordinate neural activity over spatial and temporal scales? We found broad θ waves organize local γ bursts and spiking, forming a flexible spatiotemporal code to multiplex feedforward/feedback signals. Now out in full @natcomms.nature.com: doi.org/10.1038/s414... 🧵

Nested spatiotemporal theta–gamma waves organize hierarchical processing across the mouse visual cortex - Nature Communications In this study, the authors reveal how the mouse brain uses a nested spatiotemporal motif to support hierarchical visual processing: broad theta traveling waves sweep across cortical layers and areas t...

Theta and gamma waves work together to link higher-level expectations with incoming visual signals. Cognition is rhythm.

Nested spatiotemporal theta–gamma waves organize hierarchical processing across the mouse visual cortex
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
#neuroscience

Linking neural manifolds to circuit structure in recurrent networks Neural population activity can be described either by low-dimensional dynamics on neural manifolds or by single-neuron selectivities. Using a theoretical approach, Pezon et al. relate these two statis...

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...

cOMPaRatiVe cOGNitiONHumans share acousticpreferences with other animalsLogan S. James1,2,3,4* Sarah C. Woolley 1,2, Jon T. Sakata1,2,Courtney B. Hilton5,6, Michael J. Ryan3,4, Samuel A. Mehr5,7,8Many animals produce courtship sounds, and receivers prefersome sounds over others. Shared ancestry and convergentevolution may generate similarities in preference across speciesand underlie Darwin’s conjecture that some animals “havenearly the same taste for the beautiful as we have.” In this study,we show that humans share acoustic preferences with a rangeof animals, that the strength of human preferences correlateswith that in other animals, and that humans respond fasterwhen in agreement with animals. Furthermore, we foundgreatest agreement in preference for adorned, ancestral, andlower-frequency sounds. humans’ music listening experiencewas associated with preferences. These results are consistentwith theories arguing that biases in processing sculpt acousticpreferences, and they confirm Darwin’s century-old hunchabout the conservation of aesthetics in nature

out now in Science: @loganjames.bsky.social collected pairs of sounds in 16 species where we *know* which sound is more attractive (to that species)

he played them to ppl on themusiclab.org, asking, in each pair, which was nicer. humans agreed w other animals

doi.org/10.1126/science.aea1202

Next session of #IRCA Aphantasia Online Talk #19 is next Tuesday the 10th March at 11am (CET/Paris), by Derek H. Arnold @visnerd.bsky.social (University of Queensland).
Title: The hopeless quest for a reliable objective metric of visual imagery.
More details here: jianghao-liu.github.io/irca/

The "publish or perish" culture must perish. Scientists need time to think.

We just published our Slow Science Manifesto, where we argue that huge changes are needed in the way we fund, publish, and evaluate science.

Read more and sign here: www.slow-science.com

Our bilingualism paper is now published in PNAS. We used fMRI to compare semantic brain representations in English-Chinese bilinguals. Semantic representations are largely shared across languages, but finer-grained differences modulate how meaning is represented.
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Lucina Q. Uddin - Brain dynamics and flexible behaviors

Monday, March 9, 2026 - Paris Brain Institute

We've posted a new fMRI study of semantic relations (has-part, is-a, made-of, etc.), a key aspect of language. We find that relations are represented in the same brain regions as are other semantic concepts, though voxels tend to be selective for only one relation or another.
doi.org/10.64898/202...

Beyond metaphor: quantitative reconstruction of Waddington landscape and exploration of cellular behavior Abstract. Originally proposed as a conceptual metaphor, the Waddington landscape was used to illustrate the directional nature of embryonic development and

Beyond metaphor: quantitative reconstruction of Waddington's landscape and exploration of cellular behavior academic.oup.com/bib/article/... - really nice review of how big data and new computational methods and reviving an old conceptual framework

https://sites.google.com/view/irca-conference-2026/home

📢We're thrilled to announce the first-ever #IRCA Conference on #Aphantasia!
Call for abstracts is open, deadline: 17 April 2026
sites.google.com/view/irca-co...
This 3-day interdisciplinary conference aims to consolidate current knowledge and draw a future plan for aphantasia research.

Have you ever asked yourself, how insect brains represent places? And whether insects do have place cells? Then move to Germany this summer and start your PhD in my lab. We conduct tetrode recordings from bumblebees that freely forage laboratory mazes. 🧠🐝#BeeSpace @erc.europa.eu @neuroethology.org

neuroscience data often has a many-to-many data structure, e.g relationships across regions, which is hard to visualize. (connected edge graphs = chaotic & not that useful honestly 🙃)

treating time as an extra dimension like here looks pretty cool! @ this 'crawling seed' movie

#VisualizationInspo

Bioinspired adaptive pupil reflex based on liquid-metal shape-shifters for machine vision A bioinspired eye mimics pupil reflexes with shape-shifting liquid metal to adapt to illumination for robust vision.

A new #ScienceRobotics study describes a #bionic eye that can simulate irregular pupils such as a cat’s vertical pupil for precise focus while hunting and a toad's heart-shaped pupil for improved depth perception. https://scim.ag/4auJjWP

The Brain Resilience Study protocol: Building a dataset of the biological and sociocultural factors affecting brain health in older adults Dementia arises from a complex interplay of biological, psychological, and sociocultural factors. However, previous large-scale studies have largely f…

Here is the link to our "The Brain Resilience Study protocol," an ongoing project through the @sfuneuro.bsky.social

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

The misuse of colour in science communication - Nature Communications The accurate representation of data is essential in science communication, however, colour maps that visually distort data through uneven colour gradients or are unreadable to those with colour vision...

Keep science accessible 🧪

From cells to companies: Study shows how diversity scales within complex systems A new study in PNAS introduces a mathematical model that quantifies how different systems, from cells to organizations, diversify and specialize as they grow. The study finds that while systems vary i...

A new study by SFI and MIT researchers shows that as systems grow, from cells to governments, the pace of adding new functions steadily slows. Though they vary in how much they invest in novelty, once new functions exist, subsequent growth follows a universal pattern known as sublinear growth.

Scientific lectures: Lucina Q. UDDIN | Paris Brain Institute Speaker : Lucina Q. UDDIN, department of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences director brain connectivity and cognition laboratory director center for neuroscience & human behavior university of cali...

On se voit à Paris! 🧠 parisbraininstitute.org/agenda/scien...

if love is the answer, what is the question?

Manifolds, Dendrites, and the Geometry of Neural Computation The population doctrine—the view that populations, not individual neurons, constitute the fundamental unit of computation—has been gaining ground for years.

New Journal Club: Neural manifolds are maturing from visualization trick to biological claim. But if population activity lives on low-dimensional manifolds, what constrains the geometry?

Interested in cortical wave dynamics? Check out our review on the physics, physiology, and psychology of cortical waves led by J Cruddas with @jchrispang.bsky.social, out now in
@cp-neuron.bsky.social:

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

DEADLINE REMINDER!

Abstract submissions for #ASSC29 in Santiago close on February 12, 2026 (11:59 PM PT).

Don’t miss it!

theassc.org/assc-29/subm...

@theassc.bsky.social

One of my favorite facts: neurons and skin cells are 'cousins'.

Intelligence is a phenomenon that lives at boundaries. The semipermeable cell membrane is where the ball got rolling.

I wrote an essay riffing on this idea.

yohanjohn.com/axispraxis/f...

main goal for this year: find a new job! 🙂

looking for a role with fun & complex technical challenges & within a great community. my main expertise is in signal processing/EEG/MEG, but topic-wise I am quite flexible.

science/industry both great! starting mid-year. nschawor.github.io/cv

Postdoc position in Paris: come help develop new generation human brain computer interfaces ⚡🧠💻

Interested? Contact me if you have experience with machine learning (e.g. simulation-based inference, RL, generative/diffusion models) or dynamical systems.

See below for + details and retweet 🙏

Developing Concepts for Neuroscience: A Philosophical Toolkit Whether and how concepts should be developed depends on the phenomena that neuroscientists aim to describe, classify, and explain. These epistemic goals shape when introducing novel terms like “defau...

Paper on developing concepts for neuroscience now published open access:

doi.org/10.1111/ejn....

We argue that the success and failure of concepts fundamentally depends on epistemic goals.
#cogsky #neuroskyence #cognitiveneuroscience #philsky #philsci #philosophysky #cogsci

a few that I remember now:
- The Hodge's Harbace Handbook
- Language, Music, and the Brain
- Theoretical Neuroscience: Computational and Mathematical Modeling of Neural Systems
- Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos
- A New View from the Thalamus
- A Foray Into the Worlds of Animals and Humans

Can we ever truly understand animal languages—and even communicate with other species? Recent advances in artificial intelligence, especially large language models, have reignited the belief that this dream may soon be within reach. www.cell.com/current-biol... @odedrechavi.bsky.social

Investigating the methodological foundation of lesion network mapping - Nature Neuroscience The lesion network mapping method links diverse brain lesions to similar functional brain networks, reflecting general brain organization rather than disorder-specific circuits.

Are connectome-based network mapping methods and the >200 papers that have used it invalid?

New paper out in
@NatureNeuro
says YES. nature.com/articles/s41...

I have concerns about this new paper's methods and conclusions, but am biased. What do others think?