This is one of my favorite optical illusions, because even when you know specifically HOW IT WORKS, it's still hard to make your brain believe it.
The image below is real-world video, but you're being tricked into believing it's an elaborate miniature by the DIORAMA EFFECT.
Let's talk about it.
A real character in one of my books would stick out like a sore thumb
(Mathematical art, I guess.)
Phase-shifting the Fourier transform of a regular 14-gon. Or equivalently: seven plane waves meeting at equal angles.
My linocut portrait of Hypatia in purple holding an astrolabe up to her eye with her left arm while her right rests on geometric diagrams on sheets of paper on her table. Astrolabe and table plus diagrams are bronze in colour. I’ve shown her with curly hair piled up on her head, in a loose tunic with sash. Behind her are two Doric columns and arch.
Another unknown birthday: Amongst the earliest recorded woman in #mathematics, Hypatia lived during the 3rd century AD in Alexandria, Egypt, which was part of the Roman Empire. 🧪🐡👩🏼🔬🧮 🔭 #histsci She was born at some time between about 350 & 370 & died in 415 C.E. She taught philosophy, #astronomy & 🧵
When and why do modular representations emerge in neural networks?
@stefanofusi.bsky.social and I posted a preprint answering this question last year, and now it has been extensively revised, refocused, and generalized. Read more here: doi.org/10.1101/2024... (1/7)
YES! Struggling with exactly this today morning. Me to google docs every other sentence:
🚨 New preprint!
Why do some insights from spikes translate to field potentials while others don't? In this paper we compare visual memory representations in spikes and LFPs to propose a general framework that answers this question.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
🧵 (1/10)
🧠🟦 🧠💻
Great review! The WaChR paper is super cool, and so is the idea of "restoring sight with light" (!)
Awesome post! I picked up the genentech book after seeing your recommendation earlier in the year and really enjoyed it!
Giving what we can has implemented a fun game where you spin a globe to see how your starting point in life would compare if you were reborn today, randomly somewhere on earth.
www.givingwhatwecan.org/birth-lottery
Bichan Wu (@bichanw.bsky.social) & I wrote a tutorial paper on Reduced Rank Regression (RRR) — the statistical method underlying "communication subspaces" from Semedo et al 2019 — aimed at neuroscientists.
arxiv.org/abs/2512.12467
In a future where the rich kids are being raised with a digital Cyrano beside them to sweet-talk their way into the best jobs, four friends train together for a battle to prove that other kinds of minds might still have the edge.
My new story “Understudies” in Clarkesworld.
Awesome, the effect is super strong! Do you know if there's an explanation for why we see this?
Woah, so strong! And like someone pointed out, I can see the brightness changes just by saccading up/down (even without the motion). Is there an explanation for why we see this?
New preprint! How can you remember an image you saw once, even after seeing thousands of them? We find a role for humble mid-level visual cortex in high-capacity, one-shot learning. doi.org/10.1101/2025.09.22.677855 🧵🧪1/
Super cool work!
Mirror manifolds: partially overlapping neural subspaces for speaking and listening www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09....
Great article - I remember reading in Newton's biography that he stuck a blunt-end knitting needle between his eyeball and the bone so he could press the back of his eyeball and see colours.
He clearly didn't have any students at that point in his career 🙂
Haha what an anecdote! Are you really committed to science if you're not willing to stick a needle in your eye...
This was inspired by Eero Simoncelli's lecture at a fantastic summer school on computational vision at cold spring harbor.
I wrote a post about how cool it is that scientists in the 1800s figured out that our color vision must arise from three types of cells just using clever behavioral experiments (a century before we recorded from the cones in the eye!)
adiatelic.substack.com/p/history-of...
#neuroskyence #SciComm 🧪
The rod:cone ratio in mice is 33:1, in humans (outside the foveola) is 15:1, but is 1:7 in the 13-lined ground squirrel (13LGS). How is this dramatic shift in the rod:cone ratio achieved?/2
Ooh great paper! Wonder why (rat) mPFC here doesn't contain irrelevant stimulus info ('early selection') but (monkey) PFC in the Mante-Sussillo style task has both ('late selection'). Reminds me of this reply by Flesch et al, discussing differences in irrelevant stimulus info in fMRI vs monkey PFC.
Awesome work from the Runyan lab!
These look beautiful!
Wow super cool Catrina!
on hearing any scientific explanation or theory put forward, "But sir, what experiment could disprove your hypothesis"; or, on hearing a scientific experiment described, "But sir, what hypothesis does your experiment disprove?"
John Platt - Strong Inference 1964 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
