@antoniocbscosta
PI @ Paris Brain Institute - Diving into dynamical systems, statistical mechanics and inference to understand organism scale movement behavior. Postdoc positions available! http://antonioccosta.github.io
Unravelling the structure of behavioral variation from data
Don’t miss this week’s entry in the NITMB Seminar Series! Featuring @antoniocbscosta.bsky.social, INSERM CRCNPI at @institutducerveau.bsky.social
Join us at NITMB or online on Friday, March 13th
www.nitmb.org/nitmb-semina...
📢Super cool meeting to come in spring 2026 @intcha.bsky.social📢!! Very happy to be talking there and looking forward to the new dimensions in the scientific discussions!!
The next year's edition of IntCha will be in Cargese, Corsica. Join us for a week of sun and sea, surrounded by interdisciplinary early career researchers! Deadline for applications is soon, but feel free to reach out if you have any questions!
intcha26.sciencesconf.org
Let's share @etlunsford.bsky.social's work : to survive, animals avoid drifting involuntarily in their environment. While humans rely on visual & vestibular cues, birds & fish need to sense complex flow changes of the external fluid (air/water) around them to select motor actions. How do they do?(1)
It was great fun chatting with Avaneesh Narla about the physics of behavior across species, and its implications for neuroscience, ecology and evolution. Check out his "Kugelblitz" podcast for great science content!
open.spotify.com/episode/0pMC...
I'd add this paper as well, as it precedes the other work: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
How to put all complexity in a single drawing? Here's my take, with catastrophes (the folded surface), ecosystems, computation (Turing Machine), turbulence, collective intelligence, nonlinear dynamics and chaos, evolution, viruses, networks and time. And a little touch of Santa Fe NM
Fungi made Earth’s land liveable by building networks that released nutrients locked in primordial rock and supplied those nutrients to plant roots
https://go.nature.com/41lvtBg
When animals deploy motor strategies to navigate and adapt to changing environments and their own experiences, their behavior is highly variable across multiple timescales and from one animal to another. Using high-fidelity Markov models of behavior, we reveal the main modes along which zebrafish generate motor strategies in different environments. We uncover essential principles underlying navigation and reveal that an individual’s past experience, or its current inner state alters preferences for long-lasting motor strategies. This study sets the stage for general approaches to dissect the origin of variability of navigation among individuals. --- To reveal structure in individual variability, we build Markov models of action sequences that bridge across timescales and enable the comparison of behavioral phenotypes among individuals. Applied to zebrafish responding to diverse sensory cues, we uncover a hierarchy of long-lived motor strategies, dominated by changes in orientation distinguishing cruising versus wandering. While fish cruise in the light, they wander in response to aversive stimuli, or in search for appetitive prey. As our method encodes the behavioral dynamics of each individual fish in the transitions among coarse-grained motor strategies, we use it to uncover a hierarchical structure in the phenotypic variability that reflects exploration–exploitation trade-offs. The major source of variation among fish is driven by prior or immediate exposure to prey that induces exploitation phenotypes. A large degree of variability not explained by environmental cues unravels hidden states that override the sensory context to induce contrasting exploration–exploitation phenotypes. Altogether, by extracting the timescales of motor strategies deployed during navigation, our approach exposes structure among individuals and reveals internal states tuned by prior experience.
Individuality is fascinating. We found how to quantify variability among individuals by identifying long-lasting motor strategies during navigation. Work of Dr. Gautam Sridhar and Dr. Antonio Costa in collab with João Marques @daniobrain.bsky.social out today in #PNAS ! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...