There seems to be a broad perception across psychology and neuroscience that work shouldn't be "too technical" in order to reach the broadest possible audience. While I think we should strive for accessibility, I feel that this attitude can also be self-defeating: why are we dumbing down?

Come learn some programming with a healthy helping of critical thinking; something no genAI can take away from you :)

Also Prague is great fun ;)

Our latest publication grapples with how the brain could implement gradient descent by sending learning targets top-down, gating plasticity with dendritic inhibition, and updating synaptic weights with biologically observed learning rules like BTSP.

www.cell.com/cell-reports...

Poster banner from cosyne 2026

If you are into networks, development, and dynamics don't miss my poster [3-072] this afternoon at #cosyne2026

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Kant vindicated. 👀

22 years of Brain Science: what CoSyNe tells us about the evolution of Neuroscience Tracking the intellectual DNA of Computational and Systems Neuroscience through its flagship meeting

I tracked every keyword in 22 years of Cosyne abstracts to map how computational neuroscience evolved — from Bayesian brains to neural manifolds to LLMs — and where it's heading next.

As a fringe genre enthusiast I think Watchtower - Energetic Disassembly quite mathy and from the 80s. 🧮🤘

Vectorized instructive signals in cortical dendrites - Nature Mice learning a neurofeedback brain–computer interface task show neuron-specific teaching signals in cortical dendrites, consistent with a vectorized solution for credit assignment in the brain.

This paper on how the brain may do gradient descent is very cool: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

How can RNNs learn continuously without forgetting? 🧠
Our new preprint shows how a predictive learning rule organizes recurrent dynamics into orthogonal manifolds, reducing task interference.
Congrats Zihan @zihan-liu.bsky.social !
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

🧪🧠 New preprint: helping resolve a decades-long debate in synaptic plasticity

NMDA receptors are central to Hebbian learning. Yet for >30 years, the existence and function of presynaptic NMDA receptors have remained controversial.

📄 doi.org/10.64898/202...

1/6

… you need a cell of that type to read the code correctly. So the explanation is circular. Did I get this right?

Thanks for the reply. I am not arguing against your point by the way! I think what you wrote connects to my reply, right? Adding the part that the code supposedly explains differences. And (just to get your argument straight) the problem here lies in saying that the code describes a cell, but …

Learning sculpts orthogonal task manifolds for continual skill learning in recurrent networks www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02...

Fascinating! But could you expand a bit on the incoherence? Self-referentiality is not necessarily incoherent. Or is the argument that viewing the genomic code as a **complete** description of an organism is incoherent since it requires a cell of that organism to be „organism-correctly“ interpreted.

Zajzon, Bouhadjar, Fabre, Schmidt, Ostendorf, Neftci, Morrison, Duarte: SymSeqBench: a unified framework for the generation and analysis of rule-based symbolic sequences and datasets https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.24977 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.24977 https://arxiv.org/html/2512.24977

Retinotopy constrains the topology of neural manifolds in macaque visual cortex www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2025.12...

Point of no returns: researchers are crossing a threshold in the fight for funding With so little money to go round, the costs of competing for grants can exceed what the grants are worth. When that happens, nobody wins.

This report in Nature on the costs of competing for & administering scientific grants is shocking: "In other words, European taxpayers will have spent more on the funding process than on the funding itself, and the scientific ecosystem has been drained." www.nature.com/articles/d41... 🧪

SAVE THE DATE! On June 16-17, 2026, the NEST Initiative is excited to invite everyone interested in Neural Simulation Technology and the NEST Simulator to the NEST virtual Conference 2026. Registration and abstract submission will open soon!
nest-simulator.org/conference

0/10 Thanks for the interest in our preprint. Some takes say it negates or fully supports the “manifold hypothesis”, neither quite right. Our results show that if you only focus on the manifold capturing most of task-related variance, you could miss important dynamics that actually drive behavior.

Y’all are reading this paper in the wrong way.

We love to trash dominant hypothesis, but we need to look for evidence against the manifold hypothesis elsewhere:

This elegant work doesn't show neural dynamics are high D, nor that we should stop using PCA

It’s quite the opposite!

(thread)

Really impressive for the brain.
I am no expert but teeth look rather 🐱-ish 🤔

Plateau potentials are instructive signals for behavioral timescale synaptic plasticity in the neocortex Learning occurs via the adjustment of synaptic weights across a variety of timescales. The mechanisms supporting these processes, from single-shot to iterative learning, are unclear. The prevailing mo...

BTSP in V1
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

A study led by Cina Aghamohammadi is now out in ‪@natcomms.nature.com‬! We developed a mathematical framework for partitioning spiking variability, which revealed that spiking irregularity is nearly invariant for each neuron and decreases along the cortical hierarchy.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Undecided which workshop to attend at #BernsteinConference ?

We put together a stellar lineup for a satellite workshop on the effects of top-down signals on neuronal dynamics! 🧠✨📣

Join us tomorrow in room 0.101 !

bernstein-network.de/bernstein-co...

With @ackurth.bsky.social

On the first workshop talk (Monday), I'll make the case that everything might be everywhere when you decode, but that is not the end of the story: different regions have very different dynamics and encoding geometries.

This workshop is organized by @aitormg.bsky.social and @ackurth.bsky.social

Jonas Oberste-Frielinghaus, Anno C. Kurth, Julian G\"oltz, Laura Kriener, Junji Ito, Mihai A. Petrovici, Sonja Gr\"un: Synchronization and semantization in deep spiking networks https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.12975 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.12975 https://arxiv.org/html/2508.12975

Jakob Stubenrauch, Naomi Auer, Richard Kempter, Benjamin Lindner: Stochastic synaptic dynamics under learning https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.13846 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.13846 https://arxiv.org/html/2508.13846

The challenge of defining a neural population Our current approach is largely arbitrary. We need new methods for grouping cells, ideally by their dynamics.

Our current approach to defining neural populations is largely arbitrary. We need new methods for grouping cells, ideally by their dynamics, writes @markdhumphries.bsky.social

#neuroskyence

www.thetransmitter.org/systems-neur...

„What do you mean by ‘effect size’?”

Sensory responses of visual cortical neurons are not prediction errors Predictive coding is theorized to be a ubiquitous cortical process to explain sensory responses. It asserts that the brain continuously predicts sensory information and imposes those predictions on lo...

1/3) This may be a very important paper, it suggests that there are no prediction error encoding neurons in sensory areas of cortex:

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

I personally am a big fan of the idea that cortical regions (allo and neo) are doing sequence prediction.

But...

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