Header for my new publication (linked)
It’s published… the first manuscript from the Rich Lab is officially typeset and published!!!
What an absolutely surreal moment… that I’m going to try my best to enjoy while awaiting the results of a study section from last week 😅😅😅
journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...
New work w/ Zach Kelso and @madeleinecsnyder.bsky.social
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Our negative results on classical conditioning in planarian flatworms. This was surprising, given the long history of work (including sensational findings of memory transfer and retention through decapitation).
One of the things that has always bothered me about TV. Everything is fundamentally filtered through how a TV writer sees the world. It's a very...*particular* sort of worldview — only a very particular sort of person lives in LA and gets work as a TV writer — and once you see it you can't unsee it.
When an axon of cell A is near enough to excite a cell B and repeatedly or persistently takes part in firing it, some growth process or metabolic change takes place in one or both cells such that A's efficiency, as one of the cells firing B, is increased.
Now out in PNAS with @jaeyoungson.bsky.social, Alice Xia, @apaxon.bsky.social & @orielf.bsky.social. Medial temporal lobe encodes predictive representations of people's real-world social networks which afford them key advantages in social navigation. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... 🧵
Looking forward to presenting our work on the origin and flexibility of reward signals at the @arc-mpib.bsky.social next week!
🚨 Why can’t mammals regenerate limbs like frog tadpoles or salamanders?
In our new paper in @science.org , we show that species-specific oxygen sensing acts as a gatekeeper for initiating limb regeneration 🐭🐸
🔗 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... #EvoDevo
Amazing study and the coolest results (from my point of view!) is that LC norepinephrine neurons projecting to the frontal cortex encode reward prediction error
Do you want to use vibration stimuli in remote research studies? 👀 📳🤳🏼
Our latest paper in Behaviour Research Methods might be of interest to you!
Coauthors include: @kalvinroberts.bsky.social @peircej.bsky.social @multisensorylab.bsky.social
link.springer.com/article/10.3...
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
what's your ai strategy?
what's your quantum computing strategy?
what's your ww3 strategy?
what's your collapse of consensus reality strategy?
what's your restructuring of global supply chains strategy?
what's your pedophile billionaire cabal blackmail ring strategy?
"The cerebellar circuitry may be uniquely poised to learn the probability of events in the world and internalize these as prior knowledge." pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41946969/ The Bayesian little brain?
🚨 arxiv.org/abs/2604.06129
PoM: A Linear-Time Replacement for Attention with the Polynomial Mixer
This paper is the result of doing a lab-wide hackathon on an idea I've had for some time. Probably the paper with the highest number of authors I've ever done.
It's a CVPR Findings 26.
Thread 🧵👇
This wonderful collaboration, led by @idoba.bsky.social and co-supervised by me and @shaharnitzan.bsky.social, is now published in Translational Psychiatry (www.nature.com/articles/s41...).
We find that autistic individuals show more accurate and less biased credit assignment during an RL paradigm.
new proof of concept: ATProtoCall! video calling over atproto with just static files and no dedicated signaling or streaming infrastructure.
"The Brain, In Theory" is out today!
A short excerpt in The Transmitter @thetransmitter.bsky.social
www.thetransmitter.org/theoretical-...
I like how Anthropic is just obliquely releasing their work on recursive self-improvement.
If racism was a country: www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
“In addition, the return of more than 600,000 residents of southern Lebanon who evacuated northward will be completely prohibited south of the Litani until the safety and security of northern (Israeli) residents are ensured”
I liked this thread: bsky.app/profile/gui....
It highlights that the power of the platform is in the API access it exposes and controls.
The great thing about ATproto is that most of the data is freely accessible: posts, likes, follows. 🧵
But behind the scenes, Israeli officials have conveyed a more targeted message. In private calls to local leaders across southern Lebanon, Israeli military officials have assured several Christian and Druse communities that they could remain in the evacuation zone. They have pressed them, however, to force out any Lebanese from neighboring Shiite Muslim communities who have sought refuge among them as Israeli bombardment flatten Shiite towns, according to local Christian, Druse and Shiite leaders who spoke to The New York Times. The Shiites make up the majority of southern Lebanon.
So what this describes is ethnic cleansing www.nytimes.com/2026/04/01/w...
The alt text for this image is available upon reasonable request.
Majestic, well done @rickcarlsson.bsky.social
Stoked this is finally out! We ask: how can we simulate the brain from the bottom up? It's not sufficient to grab the connectome and wire it up in silico! We need 1) ultrastructure 2) (causal) calibration data 3) functional data. Then we can build a simulation compiler. 1/
Plots showing that within population fragments genetic diversity plummets following habitat fragmentation.
What is happening is that locally the species is actually becoming significantly _less_ genetically diverse, but the fragmentation disconnects parts of the species, which slowly diverge from each other.
The species-wide diversity masks the plummeting local diversity. Again, this is BAD.
This is BAD. If we monitor the genetic diversity of a species, we might be convinced that it's doing okay, when in fact it may continue to lose genetic diversity for a long time even without losing any more of its habitat!
Delighted to share our latest preprint: Julie Zhu identifies a surprising reason why the genetic architecture of brain-related traits is so different than other traits. Check it out!
The hardest part of science is posing the right question, not answering it.
New work from our lab spearheaded by the amazing @kaixiangzhuang.bsky.social offering a fresh look at the big five personality traits.
Super excited to see the first paper from my PhD out! 🐭 Very satisfying to get to build an interpretable model of how the brain does a thing. A nice palette cleanser in the current sea of LLMs and deep ML.
chart showing how scientists tested chatbot sycophancy
What I love about this paper on chatbot sycophancy is how they did their experiment, by comparing chatbot responses and human responses to Am I The Asshole threads on Reddit.
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
