I’m so glad someone covered this story. Brian is an amazing scholar and person who I’ve been blessed to be able to get to know, even a little. What happened to him is awful

Protect Academic Life in Iran We, the undersigned academics and researchers from around the world, express our profound concern over recent military strikes on Iran, the retaliatory responses, and the reported impact on civilian l...

Academic friends,
It's beyond heartbreaking to watch what's unfolding in Iran & the region.
A few of us drafted an open letter calling for protection of civilians & of educational, research, medical & cultural institutions.

Please read & sign if you agree:
sites.google.com/view/protect...

#IranWar

Addressing degeneracy in rodent studies of cognition In order to relate neural dynamics to cognitive computations, it is critical to determine whether subjects are employing behavioral strategies that ac…

Excited to share our recent review, which highlights algorithmic and implementational degeneracy in studies of cognition: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

I had a great time talking to Meenakshi about my trajectory through neuroscience!

Tune in for electric fish, imaging the hypothalamus, and trying to find a path in theory that stays relevant to the brain. Also, my early phd experiences of trying to do science when real life rears its head.

If you're interested in computational approaches, the Savin lab at NYU (among others) will be offering projects using statistical methods & reinforcement learning, and connecting theory and big data. #compneuro

Wonderful opportunity for a year-long, PAID undergraduate research assistantship in neuroscience labs near you! No prior research experience expected. #neuroskyence

www.simonsfoundation.org/grant/shenoy...

Hopeless in Tehran Essays on neuroscience

Today I received a note from a grad student who lives in Tehran. Her note gives you firsthand experience of what it’s like to live in a city that is being bombed, and what it’s like to be young and feel despair about your future.

rezashadmehr.blogspot.com/2026/03/hope...

I am looking for a theory/computational POSTDOC position in EU or east coast US. I am interested in how learning and plasticity shape population dynamics & representational geometries & how these changes are reflected in behavior.

If you are at #COSYNE2026 & interested, hit me up in Whova, not here

I'm unfortunately stuck in India but Cristina Savin will present the poster. Feel free to reach out if you have more questions!

Cosyne schedule, Saturday, March 14, 1.15pm to 4.15pm, Poster number 3-161, Dynamics-based alignment across sessions reveals latent neural computation

Recurrent circuit with spiking measurements on two days. On the left, a 2D flowfield shows bistable dynamics and sample latent trajectories underlying the population activity.

Want to match neural representations from different days and get more trials for analyses? Interested in multi-scale neural dynamics in decision variability?
Visit our #cosyne2026 poster today afternoon (Sat)!
3-161: Dynamics-based alignment across sessions reveals latent neural computation

Biology is just bonkers and I love it

New preprint from the lab! Ábel Ságodi developed a theory of approximating dynamical systems that goes beyond finite time. #theoreticalNeuroscience
Follow @neurabel.bsky.social

Universal Approximation Theorems for Dynamical Systems with Infinite-Time Horizon Guarantees. . arxiv.org/abs/2602.08640

Super cool!
Was wondering if this work by @chaichinta.bsky.social would be relevant to think about the GS spiking?
www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1...

Thrilled to finally share this work! 🧠🔊

Using a new reinforcement-free task we show mice (like humans) extract abstract structure from sound (unsupervised) & dCA1 is causally required by building factorised, orthogonal subspaces of abstract rules.

Led by Dammy Onih!
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

(11/11) In this new normal, costs are individually adjusted to a consumer’s maximum threshold and wages to a worker’s minimum floor.
The next time you see a price, know that it may not reflect what the item is worth—but what the algorithm believes *you* are worth.

(1/11) If you live in NY, you’ve probably started seeing a new warning: “THIS PRICE WAS SET BY AN ALGORITHM USING YOUR PERSONAL DATA.” This mandatory disclosure went into effect late last year, and it’s the first attempt by a US state to grapple with a new generation of surveillance pricing.

Oo looks super relevant for something I'm puzzling over myself, will definitely give this a read. Congrats!

New paper out at PNAS: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
Revisiting the high-dimensional geometry of population responses in the visual cortex with @jpillowtime.bsky.social. The review took forever because a reviewer was doubtful our new estimator can infer eigenvalues beyond the rank of the data! (1/6)

I truly enjoyed writing this profile. Eva's personal trajectory from the clinic to academia highlights the ongoing importance of《fundamental science》for tackling mental health and addiction. Science enables the shift from "labels" to "mechanisms" and leads to more tailored, powerful approaches.

Thank you for the great summary, @thetransmitter.bsky.social, and the shout-outs from scientists we admire. There is so much we don’t know about how sex hormones modulate behavior and we’ll keep exploring!

Another nail in the coffin for PCA?

- doesn’t linearize, distorting similarity metrics
- is biased by temporal jitter across epochs
- may miss important dimensions for transient amplification

If you think there is a state space, use a state space model!

Feedback control of recurrent circuits imposes dynamical constraints on learning Neural activity has been observed to lie on low-dimensional manifolds, constraining what behaviors are easier or harder to learn. We propose that beyond this geometric constraint, learning on fast tim...

Looking forward to reading the paper! Struggled with the same mismatch for a long time. In this paper, we showed that looking at underlying dynamical subspaces is going to give us different answers than reducing dim with PCA, eg. for understanding learning variability
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Note: this has a computational scientist track! It’s for you, too, math nerds!

Different learning algorithms achieve shared optimal outcomes in humans, rats, and mice Animals must exploit environmental regularities to make adaptive decisions, yet the learning algorithms that enabels this flexibility remain unclear. A central question across neuroscience, cognitive science, and machine learning, is whether learning relies on generative or discriminative strategies. Generative learners build internal models the sensory world itself, capturing its statistical structure; discriminative learners map stimuli directly onto choices, ignoring input statistics. These strategies rely on fundamentally different internal representations and entail distinct computational trade-offs: generative learning supports flexible generalisation and transfer, whereas discriminative learning is efficient but task-specific. We compared humans, rats, and mice performing the same auditory categorisation task, where category boundaries and rewards were fixed but sensory statistics varied. All species adapted their behaviour near-optimally, consistent with a normative observer constrained by sensory and decision noise. Yet their underlying algorithms diverged: humans predominantly relied on generative representations, mice on discriminative boundary-tracking, and rats spanned both regimes. Crucially, end-point performance concealed these differences, only learning trajectories and trial-to-trial updates revealed the divergence. These results show that similar near-optimal behaviour can mask fundamentally different internal representations, establishing a comparative framework for uncovering the hidden strategies that support statistical learning. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. Wellcome Trust, https://ror.org/029chgv08, 219880/Z/19/Z, 225438/Z/22/Z, 219627/Z/19/Z Gatsby Charitable Foundation, GAT3755 UK Research and Innovation, https://ror.org/001aqnf71, EP/Z000599/1

paper🚨
When we learn a category, do we learn the structure of the world, or just where to draw the line? In a cross-species study, we show that humans, rats & mice adapt optimally to changing sensory statistics, yet rely on fundamentally different learning algorithms.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Who wore it better? Our new paper shows that rat OFC supports Bayesian inference of hidden states! With neural correlates of inferred state transitions at the level of single neurons and population-level latent factors. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Estrogen modulates reward prediction errors and reinforcement learning - Nature Neuroscience Dopamine encoding of reward prediction errors naturally fluctuates over females’ reproductive cycles with estrogenic signaling due to reduced expression of dopamine reuptake proteins.

Thrilled to share our new paper, out now in @natneuro.nature.com, uncovering how estradiol, the most potent estrogen, modulates reinforcement learning and reward prediction errors across biological levels. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

#blueprint 1/7

a man wearing a white shirt and tie smiles in front of a window ALT: a man wearing a white shirt and tie smiles in front of a window

I've been waiting some years to make this joke and now it’s real:

I conned somebody into giving me a faculty job!

I’m starting as a W1 Tenure-Track Professor at Goethe University Frankfurt in a week (lol), in the Faculty of CS and Math

and I'm recruiting PhD students 🤗

Love this!

Amazing news, congratulations!!

*10y ago oops