What Physical ‘Life Force’ Turns Biology’s Wheels? | Quanta Magazine The bacterial flagellar motor is finally understood after 50 years. In its workings, columnist Natalie Wolchover finds the essence of life.

www.quantamagazine.org/what-physica...

Categorization is ‘baked’ into the brain - Nature Reviews Neuroscience Categorization, the grouping of objects, living organisms, actions or events into equivalence clusters, is fundamental to adaptive behaviour. In this Perspective, Barrett and Miller discuss evidence t...

Categorization is ‘baked’ into the brain — a Perspective by Lisa Feldman Barrett & Earl K. Miller

@lisafeldmanbarrett.com @earlkmiller.bsky.social

#neuroscience #neuroskyence

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

Delighted to share our discoveries about one of the brain's neurotransmitter systems:
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Together with colleagues at the @alleninstitute.org, we have learned a lot about a tiny cluster of neurons in the brainstem locus coeruleus (LC) that releases norepinephrine (NE). 1

TDLM-Resting-State Simulation How sensitive is TDLM really? Can we actually find replay when we know it is present?

Can we really measure replay in humans using MEG with current methods? In our most recent paper we simulated replay under realistic conditions via a novel hybrid approach with astonishing results.

we're delighted that it has now been published @elife.bsky.social!
elifesciences.org/articles/108...

An annoyance of admins?

Neural circuits encode prior knowledge of temporal statistics - Nature Neuroscience This study shows that cerebellar circuits learn and encode prior probabilities of event timing. Cell-type-specific neural activity reflects environmental statistics and guides predictive motor behavio...

Neural circuits encode prior knowledge of temporal statistics

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

1/N: Dear colleagues, I would like to share a new paper on the subiculum, part of my PhD with the Neural Computation Group @andrejbicanski.bsky.social @mpicbs.bsky.social . We present “A theory of subicular function and generalized vector coding” that we call Disco. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

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...

How anesthetics destabilize the brain: scientists stumble upon common mechanism A common mechanism used by three anesthesics could lead to a universal anesthesia-delivery system to monitor patients more effectively.

I'm not so sure we "stumbled" on it.
How anesthetics destabilize the brain: scientists stumble upon common mechanism
www.biotechniques.com/biochemistry...
#neuroscience

Explore live radio by rotating the globe Explore live radio by rotating the globe.

Your periodic reminder that there is a website that lets you listen to local radio stations anywhere in the world

This is honestly one of the coolest inventions ever, imo. Global access to hyper-local imagined communities

Our digital sphinx shows that DRL is so powerful that it finds a solution even when the constraints are completely wrong: worm brain, fly body, zero cellular and circuit compatibility.

Give it a target behavior, it fits. It doesn't care about biology

Code: github.com/Brunton-Lab/DigitalSphinx2026

Google Has a Secret Reference Desk. Here's How to Use It. 40 Google features to find exactly what you need, the alternative search engines that do things Google won't, and the reference desk framework underneath all of it.

This is a great list of techniques for getting real information out of a Google search and avoiding AI slop and paid results.
(One thing not included is that if you add "-ai" to a search, you block the AI summary) cardcatalogforlife.substack.com/p/google-has...

Matching sounds to shapes: Evidence of the bouba-kiki effect in naïve baby chicks Humans across multiple languages spontaneously associate the nonwords “kiki” and “bouba” with spiky and round shapes, respectively, a phenomenon named the bouba-kiki effect. To explore the origin of t...

This is pretty wild research, worth watching their videos.

"Matching sounds to shapes: Evidence of the bouba-kiki effect in naïve baby chicks"

Amazing that certain sound-shape matching is conserved across birds and humans

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/....

Why the Brain Consolidates: Predictive Forgetting for Optimal Generalisation Standard accounts of memory consolidation emphasise the stabilisation of stored representations, but struggle to explain representational drift, semanticisation, or the necessity of offline replay. He...

Really neat work by Fountas and colleagues at UCL:
arxiv.org/abs/2603.04688
They propose that consolidation reflects a form of "predictive forgetting" that aids generalization.

1/N: Dear cognitive map fans, I’d like to share a model I’ve been working on for a while (clearing backlog :). I show how a vector navigation architecture (VNA) and a “positional inference network” (PIN) can build Universal Cognitive Maps (UCMs) for abstract spaces.

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Now out in Hippocampus. Fei Wang‘s model of Trace Vector Cells and intra-subiculum processing, consistent with know effects in CA1.

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/share/CPZPYM...

New paper alert! 🚨

We found that the brain's compass is remarkably stable at two scales

1️⃣ the system maintains its internal organization for weeks
2️⃣ It "remembers" its orientation for weeks, even after a single visit

This may be key to how the brain aligns its other maps.

Paper: rdcu.be/e3waP

'Nicknamed the “bone collector,” it builds a disguise from insect cadavers it scrounges from a spiderweb, covering its body with these spider-meal leftovers—and occasionally engaging in cannibalism.'

www.scientificamerican.com/article/carn...

Human brain cells on a chip learned to play Doom in a week Neuron-powered computer chips can now be easily programmed to play a first-person shooter game, bringing biological computers a step closer to useful applications

Move over LLMs, it's time for wetware DOOM

www.newscientist.com/article/2517...

The strongest version of this illusion I’ve seen! Absolute head-wrecker!

Illustration of the hypothesized flows of information between perception, memory and cognitive control in a conceptual model of working memory. Stimuli attributes are processed to varying degrees of abstraction and parts of these representations can be loaded into working memory under the guidance of cognitive control. Familiar stimuli such as the letter B activate visually abstract representations while less familiar stimuli are limited to sensory representations. Information can be shifted both up and down levels of the perceptual hierarchy to build either more or less abstract representations of either perceived or imagined stimuli. Working memories can be shifted into or out of the hierarchy as needed.

We recently published a theoretical review about how compositional and generative mechanisms in working memory provide a flexible engine for creative perception and imagery.

Pre-print:
osf.io/preprints/ps...

Paper: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

A ‘cocktail’ recipe for brain cells — Harvard Gazette Stem cell biologists discover how to regenerate type damaged in ALS, spinal cord injuries

Rays of hope for neural regeneration--science for the win!
news.harvard.edu/gazette/stor...

🧨 Preprint alert
Is it easier to find a ball than a shoe? The answer lies in how variable we think these objects are in the real-world. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

w/ the amazing @dkaiserlab.bsky.social & @luchunyeh.bsky.social 🦄

🧵1/8

The Good Research Code Handbook This handbook is for grad students, postdocs and PIs who do a lot of programming as part of their research. It will teach you, in a practical manner, how to organize your code so that it is easy to...

Discovered @patrickmineault.bsky.social's excellent Good Research Code Handbook today, which was always awesome, but is even more necessary as more scientists consider integrating coding agents into their workflows.

goodresearch.dev

The hippocampal map has its own attentional control signal!
Our new study reveals that theta #sweeps can be instantly biased towards behaviourally relevant locations. See 📹 in post 4/6 and preprint here 👉
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
🧵(1/6)

Episodic memory facilitates flexible decision-making via access to detailed events - Nature Human Behaviour Nicholas and Mattar found that people use episodic memory to make decisions when it is unclear what will be needed in the future. These findings reveal how the rich representational capacity of episod...

Our experiences have countless details, and it can be hard to know which matter.

How can we behave effectively in the future when, right now, we don't know what we'll need?

Out today in @nathumbehav.nature.com , @marcelomattar.bsky.social and I find that people solve this by using episodic memory.

1000 Hurts Psychophysics is a human-facing science with interventions arguably more robust than medicine.

Psychophysics is a human-facing science with interventions arguably more robust than medicine.

I’m very happy to share the latest from my lab published in @Nature

Hippocampal neurons that initially encode reward shift their tuning over the course of days to precede or predict reward.

Full text here:
rdcu.be/eY5nh

With some trepidation, I'm putting this out into the world:
gershmanlab.com/textbook.html
It's a textbook called Computational Foundations of Cognitive Neuroscience, which I wrote for my class.

My hope is that this will be a living document, continuously improved as I get feedback.

I Tried to Be the Government. It Did Not Go Well. My five-month quest to monitor the weather, track inflation, and inspect milk for harmful microorganisms

if you want a long read that involves udders, a hot air balloon, and some extremely dubious data on egg prices, the story I’ve been working on for the last few months where I tried to single-handedly take on every government function myself is now online! www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...