To accompany my textbook (Computational Foundations of Cognitive Neuroscience) and the class I taught this semester, I'm open-sourcing my lectures slides:
gershmanlab.com/lectures.html
I'll continue to update these as I improve them.

🧠 the Digital Brain Project is now live:

$5M total · up to $500k per selected team

Let's open-source the modeling of the human brain brain activity!

➡️Apply on: digitalbrainproject.org

A mathematical theory of evolution for self-designing AIs As artificial intelligence systems (AIs) become increasingly produced by recursive self-improvement, a form of evolution may emerge, with the traits of AI systems shaped by the success of earlier AIs ...

New preprint, on a very different topic: a mathematical theory of evolution for self-designing AI.

AI is increasingly designed by AI. What systems might emerge after generations of self-designing AIs competing for computing resources? ↓

arxiv.org/abs/2604.05142

New preprint! 🧠
How do RNNs learn abstract rules from sequences, independent of specific stimuli?

By Vezha Boboeva, with Alberto Pezzotta & George Dimitriadis

"From sequences to schemas: low-rank recurrent dynamics underlie abstract relational representations"
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Just posted an update of this study, where we show how the receptive fields of number-encoding neural populations shift and rescale with the prior — "distributed range adaptation" — in line with (dynamic) efficient coding, and predictive of behavior. Check it out!
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Traveling waves across scales: Different mechanisms but same canonical computation? The review proposes a novel mechanistic distinction between first- and second-order traveling waves that subserves a same canonical computation by ordering neuronal processing to impose a computationa...

🚨New publication!
I am extremely happy to share this new review article in elife on #Traveling_Waves!

@erc.europa.eu
@upcite.bsky.social

elifesciences.org/articles/106...

More broadly, it explores how trade-offs between representational and processing efficiency may shape both human cognition and AI systems 🤖🧠

📄 Read it here: proceedings.mlr.press/v320/karami2...

This lecture note brings together several theoretical ideas on how natural intelligence balances flexibility and efficiency, including:
🔹 the relational bottleneck as a mechanism for abstraction
🔹 the rational boundedness of cognitive control
🔹 an information-theoretic perspective on Miller’s law

Check the lecture notes I contributed to: a lecture note from Analytical Connectionism 2024

“A Computational Basis of Natural Intelligence” (PMLR, Analytical Connectionism 2024), based on lectures by Jonathan D. Cohen.

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

Applications are now OPEN for 13 PhD fellowships in the Doctoral Programme in Cognitive and Brain Sciences at CIMeC, University of Trento, Italy!

📅 Deadline: May 7, 2026
🧠 Research fields: brain, neuroscience, cognition, language, neuroimaging, vision and more.

ℹ More info
🔗 phd.unitn.it/drcimec/

He is basically saying he will be performing euthanasia on Iranians

He is threatening to end a civilisation tonight and then says God bless the people of Iran

I put forward an alternative to the language-of-thought hypothesis for geometry, the Wanderers Hypothesis for Geometry: Human geometry may originate from the interaction between ancient, navigation-like mental processes that approximate Euclidean geometry and our human capacity for natural language.

Sharif University in Tehran was just bombed

Founded in 1965, it is one the most elite science and engineering institutions in the world. Alumni include the mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani, first woman to win the Fields Medal

Here is the list of other alumni

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...

New preprint "A cortical semantic space integrating fractions and integers"
We used 7T fMRI during number comparison to map the adult cortical representation of small integers 0-5 and basic fractions. Those abstract symbolic concepts are mapped in parietal cortex.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Wanna do neuroscience in Paris but can't find interesting lab?

Want to come do a sabbatical but don't know who to collaborate?

Check this webpage aggregating ~all the neuroscience labs (+200) in Paris.

⚠️only the information of 'verified' profiles is reliable⚠️

Please retweet 🙏

parisneuro.fr

JOB ALERT: PhD opening in my lab!

@cimecunitrento.bsky.social
in Italy, as part of an Italian FIS3 starting grant.

The project will use advanced analysis methods of MEG data to investigate how our world's naturalistic hierarchical structure facilitates predictive neural processing.

100+ year old Pasteur Institute in Tehran was a premier infectious disease research institute and vaccine manufacturer

It is a reason Iranian kids like me born in 60s had access to measles vaccines soon after they were developed in the west

Rubble and ruins -- Iran Pasteur Institute in Tehran, bombed by US-Isreal

Rubble and ruins -- Iran Pasteur Institute in Tehran, bombed by US-Isreal

Rubble and ruins -- Iran Pasteur Institute in Tehran, bombed by US-Isreal

Rubble and ruins -- Iran Pasteur Institute in Tehran, bombed by US-Isreal

Pasteur Institute of Iran, founded in 1920 now destroyed by Israel-US bombing😞

It played a pivotal role in developing vaccines & public health services, for over a century, now gone😞

A few days ago a pharmaceutical plant was bombed, accused of making anesthetic fentanyl

#War
#PasteurInstituteIran

Knowledge Mapper An interactive tool that maps out everything you know. Answer questions and watch your personalized knowledge map take shape.

Curious what a representation of "everything" you know might look like? Wonder how you might fill it in?

Check out our demo and paper (led by @paxt0n4.bsky.social and now out in @natcomms.nature.com ), or read on to learn more!

Demo: context-lab.com/mapper/
Paper: www.doi.org/10.1038/s414...

My lab is hiring a software engineer to support our #NeuroAI research: careers.epfl.ch/job/Lausanne.... Please consider applying if you want to build out the infrastructure enabling models of the human brain & mind (e.g., www.Brain-Score.org). We will start screening applications this week 🧠🤖

AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is far more worrying LLMs-gone-rogue dominated coverage, but had nothing to do with the targeting. Instead, it was choices made by human beings, over many years, that gave us this atrocity

My latest:

New preprint: our lab’s first Alzheimer’s paper! “Loss of neuronal population organization links pathology to behavior in a model of Alzheimer's disease”
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 🧪🧵1/

Clarifying the conceptual dimensions of representation in neuroscience - Nature Reviews Neuroscience Appeals to representation are widespread, despite neuroscientists’ uncertainty about what kind of findings count as evidence for such claims. In this Perspective, Pohl and colleagues develop a unified...

Clarifying the conceptual dimensions of representation in neuroscience — a Perspective by Stephan Pohl, Edgar Y. Walker, David L. Barack, Jennifer Lee, Rachel N. Denison, Ned Block, Florent Meyniel & Wei Ji Ma

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

How (and Why) to Organize a Conference in the Global South (guest post) - Daily Nous Conferences provide valuable opportunities to academics and can influence disciplinary agendas. But scholars have unequal access to conferences, often owing to where such conferences are held and the ...

Great guest post at @dailynous.com (Full disclosure: one of the authors is a former student whom I admire greatly.) One of the many ways in which academia systematically excludes people from the Global South is by hosting prestigious events only in rich countries->
dailynous.com/2026/03/10/h...

Please circulate widely!

Open positions at the Vision Lab, Centre for Neuroscience, Indian Institute of Science (IISc)
sites.google.com/site/visionl...

How to Apply:
forms.gle/vWa1PwUrcpWf...
Deadline : March 31 2026

Representation Biases: Variance Is Not Always a Good Proxy for Importance A central approach in neuroscience is to analyze neural representations as a means to understand a system's function, through the use of methods like principal component analysis, regression, and repr...

Pleased to share that our paper "Representation Biases: Variance is Not Always a Good Proxy for Importance" is now out as Theory/New Concepts paper in eNeuro!
www.eneuro.org/content/13/3... 1/

Reassessing Number-Detector Units in Convolutional Neural Networks www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03...

Like many things about AI, this mainly reveals and amplifies an existing quirk of the system. Professors are supposed to both do the best research (and as much of it and as fast as possible) while also working nearly 100% with trainees, whose growth & interests need to be prioritized.

bombs falling to plant democracy! , but instead fertilising despair and taking lives… writing right after hearing that a few days ago bombs landed some 50 m from my father’s office ….