🎉 📜 NEW #PREPRINT !! 📜 🎉
Spearheaded by Adam Barrett we tried to tackle some of the challenges of IIT.
We confront aspects worth delving into, with an incredible team of collaborators, inc. Pedro Mediano, @frosas.bsky.social, Daniel Bor, Lionel Barnett, and @anilseth.bsky.social.
What makes brains (un)conscious? We provide new answers—and a universal mammalian blueprint for information processing—in a cross-species study of humans, macaques, marmosets & mice. Exploring convergent breakdown of integration in:
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Led by @loopyluppi.bsky.social
What are the main reasons for supporting categorical diagnoses? Sometimes I fear it may be legal: if the doctor follows a standardised hardcoded algorithm, it cannot be sued for negligence later… but I wonder if there actual medical reasons?
Join us for a postdoc @ the Donders Institute; application deadline March 24.
www.ru.nl/en/working-a...
The Mammalian Architecture of Information Integration🧠🧬
For #BrainAwarenessWeek, excited to share our latest work about #Neuroscience of #Consciousness in @nathumbehav.nature.com
www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🧵👇
Charles Bennett and Gilles Brassard have been named the winners of the A.M. Turing Award, one of the highest honors in computing, for their work establishing the foundations of quantum information theory. The award comes with a $1 million prize. www.quantamagazine.org/quantum-cryp...
Just out in @natneuro.nature.com! 🧠
“Competitive interactions shape mammalian brain network dynamics and computation”
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Is large-scale brain communication purely cooperative — or is competition a core organizing principle?
We built 🧠 models to find out: read on🧵👇
(Let me just say that I think I agree with all you are saying, but I’m trying to understand it better!)
If we take syntax as rules that say that only certain sequences of symbols (ie trajectories) are well-formed (ie actually take place), could one say that the regularities that arise due to the laws of physics impose some sort of syntax?
but, could a smart enough observer use a simple system to run any computation? Or do properties of “substrates” bound what they can be used for, computationally?
So, in this view the notion of “observer independent computation” would be an oxymoron?
Final version of this paper with Richard Watson is out!
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
"Machines all the way up and cognition all the way down: Updating the machine metaphor in biology"
(quite a bit different than the original preprint at osf.io/preprints/os...).
Ok I should read the paper then. Thanks for the clarification 🙏
I thought that this new paper was saying that not only pairwise mechanisms can generate some high order behaviour, but that they can generate all of them…
(… and hence reverse inference from behaviour to mechanisms is kind of cursed)
But maybe I’m misunderstanding the paper?
One of the points our paper touches is that one doesn’t need high order mechanisms to generate high order behaviour. For example, one can have statistical synergy with pairwise (but frustrated) Ising models
So the expressivity is only in terms of mechanisms and not related to behaviours?
Just read the abstract and intro and looks extremely interesting, congrats! One question: how are the arguments raised here related to the distinction between mechanism and behaviours discussed here? arxiv.org/abs/2203.12041
Happy to announce this new preprint!
In it, we use info decomp (ΦID) on fMRI in Alzheimer's and MCI to explore how info-dynamic representations change.
AD saw big decreases in synergy ('deductive' information) and increases in redundancy.
Check it out here:
👇
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
The key idea is mesa-optimisation: just as humans were shaped by a process of fitness maximisation but are not fitness maximisers themselves (we do other stuff, like listen to music), LLMs are shaped by next token prediction but that is not what they do
Hot take 🔥
Why math classes work well in uni? Not because that specific math will be useful later, but because solving hard problems makes you build instrumental skills, which enable you to solve other problems later in life
… and that is exactly why next token prediction works so well
Indeed, rather than fight against it, it seems life surfs on entropy 🏄
Could it be that the issue is not so much computability in principle, but that waves may be a way to increase the signal-to-noise ratio?
Tomorrow in Amsterdam I’ll be giving a talk about my most recent work on abstractions and world modelling
👇🏽👇🏽
DIEP seminar tomorrow 11am! 🪞
Join us to attend a talk by @frosas.bsky.social (lecturer at the University of Sussex) titled
“Mirroring the world: How symmetry shapes hierarchical beliefs” 🤼
Abstract & registration: ias.uva.nl/content/even...
See you there!
Why don’t neural networks learn all at once, but instead progress from simple to complex solutions? And what does “simple” even mean across different neural network architectures?
Sharing our new paper @iclr_conf led by Yedi Zhang with Peter Latham
arxiv.org/abs/2512.20607
There is a new Postdoctoral Research Associate position available in my group, to work on computational analysis of human neuroimaging workflows to develop robust, interpretable and scalable biomarkers of cognitive brain health.
Closing date 10th Feb 2026.
www.imperial.ac.uk/jobs/search-...
We also provide a roadmap for future directions organising research priorities into sequential stages.
Kudos to the awesome team brilliantly lead by Constanza Baquedano and Mar Estarellas! ✨
These benefits are not just fleeting states: longitudinal MRI studies suggest that cumulative greenspace exposure is linked to better white matter integrity and brain structure over time. Nature isn't just a luxury, but a scaffold for neurocognitive resilience
Across modalities, we found that nature shifts the brain into a distinct state via a “restorative cascade”: enhances sensory restoration and coherence, down-regulates stress circuitry, and fosters functional integration in self-related networks
Finally published:
“Your brain on nature: A scoping review of the neuroscience of
nature exposure”
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
A synthesis of multiple EEG, fMRI, and fNIRS studies to map the mechanisms behind the restoring effects of nature on the brain 🧠🌱
