🧵 New preprint led by @bingbrunton.bsky.social, @elliottabe.bsky.social, @lawrencehu.bsky.social
We gave a worm brain control of a fly body and it walked
What did we learn? Nothing, other than deep reinforcement learning is effective
We call it the digital sphinx
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
New preprint from my lab! We study how reinforcement learning & selective attention interact. To do so, we built a set of models describing different ways that value & reward prediction error can modulate top-down attention. We compare model outcomes to monkey data from a color value learning task
The obvious answer here is that the student protest movement was broadly smeared as anti-semitic and aligned with terrorists, and a variety of institutions from government, media and the universities acted as if that smear was true, threatening, suspending, expelling and even deporting students.
One week left to apply - come join us in New York this July!
An opportunity for trainees in theoretical/computational neuroscience to discuss their research and meet their peers.
The US/Iran war and escalating rhetoric are already disrupting civilian life and academic infrastructure across the region. We drafted a letter in defense of academic life, and to mobilize concrete support for affected students, scholars, and collaborations. Please check Sepi’s message and sign.
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
Excellent opportunity!
Excited to share our recent review, which highlights algorithmic and implementational degeneracy in studies of cognition: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Apply for #FlatironCCN's Neural Data Analysis workshop at #FENS2026 before April 10! Learn more: https://www.simonsfoundation.org/event/ccn_fens2026/ #science #neuroscience
Another great opportunity for trainees in theoretical/computational neuroscience!
This is a great opportunity for grad students and postdocs to get hands-on experience with modern neural data analysis tools in Python
Curious about our Shenoy Undergraduate Research Fellowship in Neuroscience (SURFiN) program? Watch our webinar recording and apply by April 21: www.youtube.com/watch #science #neuroscience
Thrilled to share our new paper, which shows that the relative timing of cholinergic and dopamine release dynamically gates whether dopamine acts as an RPE for in vivo plasticity and reinforcement learning. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Neuroscience has become increasingly concerned with prediction, and machine learning with causal explanation, with each field adopting methods from the other, writes @gershbrain.bsky.social. Will this bring us closer to understanding neural systems?
www.thetransmitter.org/the-big-pict...
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/
Cosyne invited me to give a long tutorial (4 hours!) on methods to quantify differences high-d neural recordings across animals, brain regions, deep neural nets, etc.
The recording is up on youtube. I hope it inspires more research on this fundamental topic!
www.youtube.com/watch?v=n44x...
We are recruiting PhD students and postdocs at UIUC ECE interested in learning dynamics, spiking networks, and dynamical systems. Details:
rainerengelken.github.io/join/
Today I received a note from a grad student who lives in Tehran. Her note gives you firsthand experience of what it’s like to live in a city that is being bombed, and what it’s like to be young and feel despair about your future.
rezashadmehr.blogspot.com/2026/03/hope...
DNN models of the brain are getting bigger. Are we replacing one complicated system in vivo with another in silico?
In new work, we seek the *smallest* DNN models of visual cortex, balancing prediction with parsimony.
It turns out these compact models are surprisingly small!
rdcu.be/e5H8G
Psyched to announce our COSYNE workshop on social behaviors (Mar 17th, Cascais). We have a stellar lineup of speakers on topics from animal cooperation and aggression to the social dynamics of LLM agents.
Co-organized with Libby Zhang (Allen Institute + UW).
cosyne-social-behavior.github.io
I am totally pumped about this new work . "Task-trained RNNs" are a powerful and influential framework in neuroscience, but have lacked a firm theoretical footing. This work provides one, and makes direct contact with the classical theory of random RNNs:
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
We’re looking for a new Research Tech! Our research tech is heading to graduate school (very exciting!), which means we’re recruiting someone new to join our team. The position involves hands-on neuroscience research in a collaborative environment.
brandeis.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/Jobs/job/Bra...
This obviously very stupid but is it also smart? We’ll talk to some liars after this break.
The U.S. Senate must be clear: no war with Iran.
Excited to launch Principia, a nonprofit research organisation at the intersection of deep learning theory and AI safety.
Our goal is to develop theory for modern machine learning systems that can help us understand complex network behaviors, including those critical for AI safety and alignment.
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New preprint from the lab! Ábel Ságodi developed a theory of approximating dynamical systems that goes beyond finite time. #theoreticalNeuroscience
Follow @neurabel.bsky.social
Universal Approximation Theorems for Dynamical Systems with Infinite-Time Horizon Guarantees. . arxiv.org/abs/2602.08640
News from central Jersey: I'm running to represent New Jersey's 12th Congressional District.
By entering the fray, I hope to bring ideas of repairing our frayed republic. Not only to defend it in 2026, but to build something stronger, for generations to come!
samwang.substack.com/p/entering-t...
New paper out at PNAS: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
Revisiting the high-dimensional geometry of population responses in the visual cortex with @jpillowtime.bsky.social. The review took forever because a reviewer was doubtful our new estimator can infer eigenvalues beyond the rank of the data! (1/6)
Our new work is out in Science Advances. We show that neural activity in the striatum reflects not just cortical inputs, but also often-underappreciated thalamic inputs.
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
As tens of thousands across America protest the violence that ICE sows with impunity, federal agents shot and killed another person in Minneapolis today. ICE terrorizes our cities. ICE puts us all in danger. Abolish ICE.
