March issue @brain1878.bsky.social with winning article in Brain Essay Competition by @oharealex.bsky.social considers if it is technologically feasible for machines to achieve human-level intelligence, and philosophically plausible for them to possess consciousness
academic.oup.com/brain/articl...
Honoured to have been selected as the winner for the Brain @brain1878.bsky.social 2025 Essay Competition! I look forward to developing these ideas in future work.
academic.oup.com/brain/articl...
Excited to be presenting work on topological communities in the human connectome with a poster at the @institutocajal.bsky.social next week! A collaborative effort, masterminded by @brigan.bsky.social!
🚨🚨🚨DOPAMINE 2026!
Abstract submission closes on December 1st!
#Sevilla #Dopamine 👇🏻
dopaminesociety.org/abstracts/
A very good read if you want to learn everything there is to know about dopamine. Take a look at chapter 4!
www.sciencedirect.com/handbook/han...
This is intetresting, paper argues that dopamine also encodes "action prediction errors", i.e. differences between actions you predict you will make and actions you do, regardless of reward. Could be used to reinforce habits for repetitive voluntary behaviours:
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
🧠📈 🧪
Respectfully, do we really want to leave the millennia-old problem of demarcation in the "hands" of an LLM? In principle, it is a convenient way to improve efficiency and remove bias, but in practice, IMHO, I don't think we're there yet (neither in terms of defining rules or trusting LLMs)
'Untangling the multifaceted VTA responses to stress'
by Urszula Skupio, Alexander Harris & Abigail Polter
@ampolter.bsky.social @dralexharris.bsky.social
www.cell.com/trends/neuro...
'What would it take to prove that a chronic infection is a causal agent in Alzheimer’s disease?'
by Randy Brutkiewicz, Wei Cao, David Morgan, Roberta Souza Dos Reis, Vidyani Suryadevara, Auriel Willette, Sara Willette, Season Wyatt-Johnson & Michael Duggan
www.cell.com/trends/neuro...
Avatars who appear to be sick entering the peripersonal space in virtual reality are anticipated by multisensory–motor areas, activate the salience network, and trigger activation of innate lymphoid cells, mirroring responses seen in actual infections
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Many thanks to the organizers and participators for another excellent informative conference on mathematical neuroscience. Now looking forward to the OCNS conference in Florence next month!
When I first heard of chronotypes in passing conversation, my first thought was "this is surely pseudoscience". Ever since I discovered this is not the case, I have been absolutely fascinated by this subject which goes a long way in explaining individual differences in productivity and work routines
Looking forward to exhibiting a novel computational model of dopamine at the ICMNS '25 conference in Barcelona next week! www.crm.cat/internationa... #ICMNS25 #Neuroscience
Our work, out at Cell, shows that the brain’s dopamine signals teach each individual a unique learning trajectory. Collaborative experiment-theory effort, led by Sam Liebana in the lab. The first experiment my lab started just shy of 6y ago & v excited to see it out: www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...
Looking forward to exhibit some work on synaptic dopamine dynamics at the OCNS conference in July this year! ocns.memberclicks.net/cns-2025_quick #OCNS25 #Neuroscience @cnsorg.bsky.social
Excited to be exhibiting a novel computational model of dopamine at the ICMNS '25 conference in Barcelona! www.crm.cat/internationa... #ICMNS25 #Neuroscience
AGI is not a hard sell -- it provides the fundamental selling point of religion without requiring belief in the mystical, only faith in (pseudo)science and technology. A (digital) afterlife and the promise of immortality. Tech bros are the new prophets, AGI the deity. Kurzweil and Bostrom started it
Well well, as I suspected, you smart folks on Bluesky are unanimous in calling out this nonsense. (And N is pretty big in this informal survey!) And yet still these tech bros are given big platforms to spout this stuff, and the media (and some governments) love it. So we have a problem here, right?
🧠✨ Symposia submissions are NOW OPEN for Dopamine Meeting 2026! @DopamineSociety
📍Sevilla, Spain
📅 Open: May 1, 2025
⏳ Deadline: June 16, 2025
Spread the word — don’t miss out!
#Dopamine2026
dopaminesociety.org
Unthinkable just 10 years ago:
Almost 3/4 of the EU’s electricity in 2024 was from renewable energy sources and nuclear.
Gas and coal electricity generation is at record low levels.
I'm excited to share that the last chapter of my PhD thesis is now published in Nature! 🍾
What drives serotonin neurons? We think it's the expectation of future reward and --- critically --- how fast this expectation is increasing. 📈
doi.org/10.1038/s415...
1/6
This looks really helpful, although TBH I'm surprised (sort of) to find the LLM community is debating the equivalent of whether simulated water is wet, or simulated black holes will suck the researchers in. Why would "I can simulate ToM responses" be interpreted as "I can create an AI with ToM"?
An #astrocytic ensemble that emerges in the nucleus accumbens upon activity during cue-motivated behaviors and is essential for modulating cue-reward associations 🧪🧪
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Full-on eugenics, in its most rabid, racist form is oozing its way back into mainstream discourse.
Nature research paper: An opponent striatal circuit for distributional reinforcement learning
https://go.nature.com/41a7Snf
The case for proper scientific study of unidentified flying and subsea objects. Whatever you think of that, this long paper is full of fascinating case histories.
www.arxiv.org/abs/2502.06794
Dopamine-serotonin push-pull balances reward seeking and caution. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Happy to comment on this cool study in mammals and the parallels with our own work in #Drosophila!
www.thetransmitter.org/learning/dop...