The Orange Cat Brain Atlas is here. 🧠🐈
Today, we published the first comprehensive cellular map of the orange cat brain. The new atlas reveals a single, specialized neuron responsible for behaviors like staring at walls, knocking objects off tables, and the 3am "zoomies."
In today's #cosyne2026 poster session [2-146] I will be presenting joint work w/ the Ocker lab on transition rates between up/down states in spiking networks. We show in theory & sims that EI networks have more transitions than pure E networks, even if firing rates are the same in both nets!
Are you at #cosyne2026 and looking for a postdoc position? CATNIP = Neural Dynamics Lab is hiring! catniplab.github.io/postdoc-hiri...
I guess we still haven't explored them enough
Theory/Computational post-doc position at the Allen Institute. This is a unique opportunity to do theory in a community deeply embedded in data.
alleninstitute.submittable.com/submit/33511...
Congrats to Ayesha!
This paper has now been published in PRX Life! journals.aps.org/prxlife/abst...
In this work I developed a scaling theory for spiking neural populations using a renormalization group approach -- the 1st, to my knowledge, applied to models of spiking neurons. See the thread for a brief summary.
My department is joint college of arts & sciences and school of medicine, so there are two links -- ok to apply to both if not sure which is the right fit.
Neurobiology and Behavior at Stony Brook University (90 min to NYC) is hiring 3 positions in experimental neuro. Any area (systems, molecular, etc) is welcome.
Please spread the word!
apply.interfolio.com/170252 (arts & sciences)
apply.interfolio.com/170698 (school of medicine)
Very few PhD students finish within 4 years. But international students will need to do that if US proposed visa rules change go through.
Sound reasonable to you?
Fed register is accepting comments for next month. Details at the link & comment button
www.federalregister.gov/documents/20...
The results in the paper are based on a stochastic field theory formalism, following co-senior author Gabe Ocker's 2023 paper journals.aps.org/prx/abstract.... In ongoing work we are using this path integral formalism to estimate the rates of metastable transitions between active states!
Just published! "Metastability in networks of stochastic integrate-and-fire neurons," Paliwal, Ocker, & Brinkman, Phys. Rev. E 111, 064402
We showed that a stochastic spiking network with rectified power-law response functions has 2 active states & when stochasticity enhances vs suppresses activity
There is lots more to do, like investigating the roles of synaptic heterogeneity, synaptic plasticity and learning, and more. But I hope this paper provides a solid foundation for the field to explore these directions in models commonly used in theoretical neuroscience.
7/n, n = 7.
An effect like this inhibitory tuning could be a potential explanation for the fact that some exp't studies find mean-field behavior while others observe anomalous scaling. (Though there are other possible explanations as well).
6/n
To the order of approx I work to, the spectrum of the synaptic connections is the key. If the maximum eigenvalue is an outlier, mean-field scaling holds. In the nets I study inhibition can move this outlier to the bulk spectrum, and anomalous scaling may emerge.
5/n
One of the main challenges in applying RG methods to neural populations is the fact that neurons are not arranged in crystalline lattices, for which RG works well
I relax this restriction by studying nets w/ homogeneous modes and random connections (& nets that can be reduced to these)
4/n
So far, lots of exp't data has been interpreted as consistent with criticality, but theory has been limited to simulations or re-interpreting models from physics as coarse-grained models of neural activity.
This is the first (afaik) RG theory applied to a model of spiking neurons.
3/n
Context: proponents of the "critical brain hypothesis" argue that it benefits computation for a neural circuit to be tuned close to a critical point -- a boundary between different phases of activity.
Directed perc = silent <-> active states
Ising = async <-> low/high firing states
2/n
Some weekend reading for my fellow theoretical neuroscientists: an updated preprint on my Renormalization Group analysis of spiking networks! arxiv.org/abs/2301.096...
Key results:
in vitro = directed percolation
in vivo = Ising model
Inhibition can tune from mean-field to anomalous scaling
1/n
My student Jacob Crosser (looking for postdoc positions!) will be presenting poster 3-067 at #cosyne2025! We investigate a model of estimating responses to perturbations to disambiguate whether spiking networks are critical or just inheriting signatures of criticality from external input.
