Thanks for sharing this, Bill — heartbreaking to see such beautiful ancient forests in danger... Truly appreciate you bringing this to light.

Fire Threatens Iran’s Ancient Forest, a World Heritage Site

These are among the oldest forests on earth, but they're running up against the new world of climate change--firefighting help badly needed!
www.nytimes.com/2025/11/23/w...

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

For our next UCL #NeuroAI online seminar, we are happy to welcome Dr Cian O’Donell @cianodonnell.bsky.social (@ulsteruni.bsky.social)

🗓️Wed 11 June 2025
⏰2-3pm BST

Talk title: 'Neurobiological constraints on learning: bug or feature?'

ℹ️ Details / registration: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/ucl-neuroa...

The architecture of the human default mode network explored through cytoarchitecture, wiring and signal flow - Nature Neuroscience The default mode network (DMN) is implicated in cognition and behavior. Here, the authors show that the DMN is cytoarchitecturally heterogeneous, it contains regions receptive to input from the sensory cortex and a core relatively insulated from environmental input, and it uniquely balances its output across sensory hierarchies.

Out in @natureneuro.bsky.social today 🥂

Cytoarchitecture, wiring and signal flow of the human default mode network

Combining 3D histology, 7T MRI, and connectomics to explore DMN structure-function associations

Led by Casey Paquola, @themindwanders.bsky.social & a terrific team of colleagues 🙏

How neurons make a memory Loosely packaged DNA might make these nerve cells better able to encode memories.

Nature

How neurons make a memory
www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Helpless infants are learning a foundation model Humans have a protracted postnatal helplessness period, typically attributed to human-specific maternal constraints causing an early birth when the brain is highly immature. By aligning neurodevelopme...

Do babies pretrain? www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

Stimulus history, not expectation, drives sensory prediction errors in mammalian cortex Predictive coding (PC) is a popular framework to explain cortical responses. PC states that the brain computes internal models of expected events and responds robustly to unexpected stimuli with predi...

This paper may be very important:

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

tl;dr: if you repeatedly give an animal a stimulus sequence XXXY, then throw in the occasional XXXX, there are large responses to the Y in XXXY, but not to the final X in XXXX, even though that's statistically "unexpected".

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Did a top NIH official manipulate Alzheimer's and Parkinson’s studies for decades? Agency announces research misconduct finding for neuroscientist Eliezer Masliah as scores of his papers fall under suspicion

Findings of scientific misconduct on a monumental scale by a prominent Alzheimer's researcher

www.science.org/content/arti...

Prefrontal and lateral entorhinal neurons co-dependently learn item–outcome rules - Nature The bidirectional loop circuit between layers 5/6 of the lateral entorhinal cortex and the medial prefrontal cortex encodes item–outcome associative memory in mice.

Evidence that entorhinal cortex and prefrontal cortex (in mice, sorry) work together to encode outcomes in associative learning:

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

Studying this kind of outcome monitoring is going to be critical to understand the losses at play in the brain!

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Contrastive Learning Explains the Emergence and Function of Visual Category Selectivity How does the visual system support our effortless ability to recognize faces, places, objects, and words?...

Contrastive Learning Explains the Emergence and Function of Visual Category Selectivity

kempnerinstitute.harvard.edu/research/dee...

Averaging is a convenient fiction of neuroscience But neurons don’t take averages. This ubiquitous practice hides from us how the brain really works.

some cool news - I've started a regular column at The Transmitter @thetransmitter.bsky.social

First column out now on that most convenient of all the fictions in neuroscience: averaging
thetransmitter.org/neural-codin...

This post led to a lot of people saying, "Well, is in-context learning really *learning*?"

I'd like to add to that confusing mix: Learning by thinking

www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

If I figure out something purely through self-reflection, is that "learning"? If not, why?

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Distributed representations of behaviour-derived object dimensions in the human visual system - Nature Human Behaviour Contier et al. show that dimensions are superior to categories at predicting brain responses to visual objects.

This paper from @martinhebart.bsky.social's lab is fantanstic: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

My takeaways:

1/ Clearly, semantic categories alone aren't enough to explain object perception or the neural system behind it.

#neuroscience #VisionScience

Paper title: Aligning Machine and Human Visual Representations across Abstraction Levels

What aspects of human knowledge are vision models missing, and can we align them with human knowledge to improve their performance and robustness on cognitive and ML tasks? Excited to share this new work (arxiv.org/abs/2409.06509) by @lukasmut.bsky.social! 1/10

1/ Here's a critical problem that the #neuroai field is going to have to contend with:

Increasingly, it looks like neural networks converge on the same representational structures - regardless of their specific losses and architectures - as long as they're big and trained on real world data.

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