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Posts by Kristine Heiney, PhD

This editorial discusses the critical value of human-generated scientific writing in the era of large language models (LLMs), arguing that writing is essential to structured thinking and research comprehension. 
Writing as Thinking: The act of writing structure's thoughts, sorting research data, and identifying the main message, unlike LLMs which may lack true understanding or accountability.
LLM Hallucinations: LLM-generated text requires rigorous verification because these models can produce incorrect information or fake references.
Human vs. AI Roles: While LLMs are useful tools for brainstorming, improving grammar, or overcoming writer's block, human researchers must maintain control to engage in the creative task of shaping a compelling narrative.

This editorial discusses the critical value of human-generated scientific writing in the era of large language models (LLMs), arguing that writing is essential to structured thinking and research comprehension. Writing as Thinking: The act of writing structure's thoughts, sorting research data, and identifying the main message, unlike LLMs which may lack true understanding or accountability. LLM Hallucinations: LLM-generated text requires rigorous verification because these models can produce incorrect information or fake references. Human vs. AI Roles: While LLMs are useful tools for brainstorming, improving grammar, or overcoming writer's block, human researchers must maintain control to engage in the creative task of shaping a compelling narrative.

Writing forces your brain to coordinate memory, reasoning, and meaning-making simultaneously.

Every time you write, you rewire toward clearer thinking. Every time you let an LLM do it, you rewire toward consumption.

2 months ago 211 82 5 7
Portrait picture of Roxana Zeraati. Photo:  Friedhelm Albrecht / University of Tรผbingen

Portrait picture of Roxana Zeraati. Photo: Friedhelm Albrecht / University of Tรผbingen

๐ŸŽ‰ @roxana-zeraati.bsky.social has been awarded the @klaus-tschira-stiftung.de Boost Fund!
Moving beyond short-term trials to naturalistic scenarios: Roxana will explore how we decide in changing environments.
๐Ÿ”— www.kyb.tuebingen.mpg.de/zeraati-tsch...
#DecisionMaking #ComputationalNeuroscience

3 weeks ago 41 6 0 1
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Episode #39 in #TheoreticalNeurosciencePodcast:
On modeling neural population activity with mean-field models โ€“ with Tilo Schwalger

theoreticalneuroscience.no/thn39

How can meanโ€‘field models be systematically derived from the underlying microscopic dynamics of individual neurons?

3 weeks ago 18 7 0 1
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๐—•๐—ฟ๐—ฎ๐—ถ๐—ป ๐—ฟ๐—ฒ๐—ฝ๐—ฟ๐—ฒ๐˜€๐—ฒ๐—ป๐˜๐—ฎ๐˜๐—ถ๐—ผ๐—ป๐˜€
For those in favor or against, it seems like a good one to discuss in the Neuroscience & Philosophy Salon!
#neuroskyence
doi.org/10.1038/s415...

4 weeks ago 86 21 4 1
Cosyne 2026 - Cosyne Tutorial: Comparative Analysis of Neural Population Codes
Cosyne 2026 - Cosyne Tutorial: Comparative Analysis of Neural Population Codes YouTube video by Cosyne Talks

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...

1 month ago 160 56 3 1
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โ€ชEver wondered how GABAergic interneurons shape cognition? The IN-CODE consortium's latest NeuroView article introduces a "population approach", shifting the focus from individual interneurons to cooperative networks. Dive into the future of interneuron research here: doi.org/10.1016/j.ne...

1 month ago 25 12 0 0
how does his brain do it ? #neuroscience #memory #sport Nelson Dellis 6x US memory champion
how does his brain do it ? #neuroscience #memory #sport Nelson Dellis 6x US memory champion YouTube video by Roselyne Chauvin

The 6x US memory champion โ€“ Nelson Dellis โ€“ can memorize a deck of cards in 40 seconds and knows the first 10K digits of pi.
To figure out how, he let us peak inside his brain. Here is what we learned in our precision brain mapping study www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

youtube.com/shorts/MryMq...

1 month ago 81 32 5 7

The Portuguese cuisine and sunny weather are a pretty big bonus though. Could have been good fuel for the ranting.

1 month ago 1 0 0 0

Friday:
Friedrich Schuessler - [2-138] Innate development of continuous attractor networks by molecular axon guidance systems

Saturday:
Simone Ciceri - [3-056] Planning and hierarchical behaviours in homeostatic optimal control

Marcus Boon - [3-088] Mechanical problem solving in mice

1 month ago 1 0 0 0

Thursday:
@denisalevi.bsky.social - [1-097] Representational drift as a correlate of memory consolidation

@sofiaepsilva.bsky.social - [1-179] BMI adaptations decompose into global and local learning dynamics

1 month ago 1 0 1 0
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๐Ÿ“๐Ÿ‡ต๐Ÿ‡น Excited for #cosyne2026! Come see my poster on Saturday if you want to talk drift.

My colleagues at @sprekeler.bsky.social's lab also have some great posters coming up:
#compneurosky

1 month ago 8 1 1 0
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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 โ€” from Bayesian brains to neural manifolds to LLMs โ€” and where it's heading next.

1 month ago 159 70 7 18
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Task learning increases information redundancy of neural responses in macaque visual cortex How does the brain optimize sensory information for decision-making in new tasks? One hypothesis suggests that learning reduces redundancy in neural representations to improve efficiency, whereas anot...

RIP redundancy reduction?

Beautiful work by Liu & colleagues showing that neural redundancy increases with learning, as predicted by a Bayesian model:
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

1 month ago 69 25 2 1

Grateful to @timothyoleary.bsky.social for hosting and mentoring me during many fun and fruitful visits to work on this project with him and his lab, and to my other co-authors for all the support along the way (Mรณnika, Michael, @stenichele.bsky.social @sprekeler.bsky.social)

1 month ago 2 0 0 0
Network graphs showing how neurons interact redundantly and synergistically. The redundant information graph is on the left in red and shows strong interconnection among the most stable neurons, in the upper right quadrant. The synergistic information graph is on the right in green and shows many connections connecting the most stable quadrant to the rest of the network.

Network graphs showing how neurons interact redundantly and synergistically. The redundant information graph is on the left in red and shows strong interconnection among the most stable neurons, in the upper right quadrant. The synergistic information graph is on the right in green and shows many connections connecting the most stable quadrant to the rest of the network.

We found that neurons that share more information with the population tend to exhibit more stable tuning. High-stability neurons form redundantly connected cliques, and connect synergistically to other lower-stability neurons. Have a look at the paper to learn more about redundancy and synergy!

1 month ago 2 0 1 0
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Information theoretic measures of neural and behavioural coupling predict representational drift Author summary Activity in the brain represents information about the outside world and how we interact with it. Recent evidence shows that these representations slowly change day to day, while memori...

Out now in @plos.org CB: doi.org/10.1371/jour...
Neural representations of tasks change over time, even in the absence of changes in task performance. But neurons change tuning at different rates. How does a neuron's stability relate to its interactions with the population?
#compneuro #neuroskyence

1 month ago 54 18 1 1
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Kristine's paper "Information theoretic measures of neural and behavioural coupling predict representational drift" is now available on PLOS Comp. Biology.

Link: doi.org/10.1371/jour...

This work was led by Kristine (former PhD student) while visiting University of Cambridge during her PhD.

1 month ago 7 3 1 0
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Theoretical neuroscience has room to grow Nature Reviews Neuroscience - The goal of theoretical neuroscience is to uncover principles of neural computation through careful design and interpretation of mathematical models. Here, I examine...

I wrote a Comment on neurotheory, and now you can read it!

Some thoughts on where neurotheory has and has not taken root within the neuroscience community, how it has shaped those subfields, and where we theorists might look next for fresh adventures.

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

8 months ago 151 52 8 3
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Stories of WiN

Letโ€™s talk @storiesofwin.bsky.social. Iโ€™m flattered to be among their profiles (coming soon) & I want to elevate the team behind this terrific effort. /1

www.storiesofwin.org

8 months ago 46 17 1 5