Predictive coding of reward in the hippocampus - Nature Calcium imaging of mouse hippocampal neurons while mice learn a reward-based task over several weeks provides insight into the evolution of the hippocampal reward representation during extended period...

Beautiful paper out now from @mhyaghoubi.bsky.social and @markbrandonlab.bsky.social :

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

#prediction #neuroscience 🧪

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Follow us on instagram for live updates of what’s going on at COSYNE 2026 www.instagram.com/cosynemeetin...

Neural Tuning for Ordinal Processing: Convergent Patterns in Human Brains and Artificial Networks Processing ordinality, i.e., the rank of an item in a series such as 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc., is a fundamental skill shared by humans and animals. While humans often use symbolic sequences like numbers or...

Neural Tuning for Ordinal Processing: Convergent Patterns in Human Brains and Artificial Networks
www.jneurosci.org/content/46/9...
#neuroscience

Going to Cosyne? There will be a "Biologically-inspired Artificial Intelligence: Challenges and Opportunities" workshop on Monday 16th! 🧠

Exciting lineup of speakers alongside the opportunity to present your #NeuroAI poster, more info on program & poster signup below!

#compneuro #neuroscience

We're organising a #Cosyne workshop on biologically-inspired AI on Monday 16th with @achterbrain.bsky.social! 🧠
We've got an incredibly exciting array of speakers, and you have the possibility to sign up to present your poster on
#NeuroAI!
More info below ⬇️
#compneuro #neuroscience #neuroskyence

Collective dynamical regimes predict invasion success and impacts in microbial communities - Nature Ecology & Evolution Predicting invasion outcomes in microbial communities is challenging. Here the authors demonstrate that these outcomes in both theoretical and experimental microbial communities can be predicted based...

Incredible! The ultimate experiment. If we could only do something like this for brains, it would go *so far* toward understanding brain and mental conditions.

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

𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁'𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗿𝗲𝗹𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀𝗵𝗶𝗽 𝗯𝗲𝘁𝘄𝗲𝗲𝗻 𝗺𝗮𝗻𝗶𝗳𝗼𝗹𝗱𝘀 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗿𝗲𝗰𝘂𝗿𝗿𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗻𝗲𝘁𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸𝘀 𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗯𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻?
This looks like a must read (suppl material bursting with goodies).
#neuroskeyence
doi.org/10.1016/j.ne...

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/...

Synesthetes claim sensory experiences, such as seeing color when reading or hearing a (black) number. 
But how genuine are these reports and sensations? We introduce a rather direct measure of synesthetic perception: Synesthetes’ pupils respond to evoked color as if it was real color #vision! 👁️🎨🧪

Shifting neural code powers speech comprehension Dynamic coding helps explain how the brain processes multiple features of speech—from the smallest units of sounds to full sentences—simultaneously.

Dynamic coding of speech, as suggested by two new studies, challenges the idea that language features are encoded in a one-to-one manner in the brain.

By @claudia-lopez.bsky.social

#neuroskyence

www.thetransmitter.org/language/shi...

Cell types: from genes to circuits Part II in our series on cell types and connectomes

Here's the second one: www.neuroai.science/p/cell-types... . I made a New Year's resolution to blog more, and so far I'm sticking to it!

Cell types: encoding the brain's BIOS Inferring the structure of primary rewards from connectomics

What are cell types good for, computationally? Encoding innate behavior! In this 2-parter, I break down the relationship between cell types—which I had, in years prior, dismissed as mere implementation detail—and computation. I changed my mind!

www.neuroai.science/p/cell-types...

Infant brain categorizes common objects by two months of age Brain activity patterns in the ventral visual cortex appear to distinguish images across 12 categories, including birds and trees, fMRI scans suggest.

Functional MRI scans of more than 100 2-month-old infants suggest that they are capable of distinguishing among a variety of different objects. The findings challenge perceptions of cognitive development as a gradual process.

By @helenak.bsky.social

www.thetransmitter.org/cognitive-ne...

Two neurobiologists win 2026 Brain Prize for discovering mechanics of touch Research by Patrik Ernfors and David Ginty has delineated the diverse cell types of the somatosensory system and revealed how they detect and discriminate among different types of tactile information.

Two neurobiologists who helped decipher how the somatosensory system detects touch and pain have won this year’s Brain Prize, the largest award in neuroscience.

By @helenak.bsky.social

#neuroskyence

www.thetransmitter.org/somatosensat...

Can the Most Abstract Math Make the World a Better Place? | Quanta Magazine Columnist Natalie Wolchover explores whether applied category theory can be “green” math.

Qualia essays go where curiosity leads. This week, join @nattyover.bsky.social on her quest to understand whether a burgeoning, abstract mathematical field can help the planet. www.quantamagazine.org/can-the-most...

NEW: #Kempner researchers develop a mean-field theory of task-trained RNNs that bridges random and learned connectivity—and find macaque motor cortex is best captured by an intermediate, task-specific recurrent structure.
Read the blog post 👇
🔗 bit.ly/47f3Ldl

happy to announce i just got examiner feedback on my thesis. recommended for acceptance as is, no changes, no corrections :)

link: osf.io/preprints/th...

Cognitive control networks in human and macaque
doi.org/10.64898/202...
#neuroscience

Peer review would be easier if we stopped treating it like combat with the authors. Results want to be free, and perfect is the enemy of good. Do the data support the conclusions? If so, that’s enough. A paper isn’t a blank slate for projecting your own ideas.

New paper: The origins of meaning: From pragmatic control signals to semantic representations
philosophymindscience.org/index.php/ph...

Frontiers | Cross-population amplitude coupling in high-dimensional oscillatory neural time series Neural oscillations have long been considered important markers of interaction across brain regions, yet identifying coordinated oscillatory activity from hi...

The brain oscillates and we should figure out why. Development of new analytics will be key:
Cross-population amplitude coupling in high-dimensional oscillatory neural time series
www.frontiersin.org/journals/com...
#neuroscience

𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗶𝘀 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗽𝘂𝘁𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗶𝗻 𝗱𝘆𝗻𝗮𝗺𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹 𝘀𝘆𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗺𝘀?
Interesting paper tackling this difficult question.
Answer (in part): it's complicated!
The same fixed system can be interpreted as implementing many (even infinitely many) computations depending on the chosen decoding map.
doi.org/10.1088/2632...

Vectorized instructive signals in cortical dendrites - Nature Mice learning a neurofeedback brain–computer interface task show neuron-specific teaching signals in cortical dendrites, consistent with a vectorized solution for credit assignment in the brain.

This paper on how the brain may do gradient descent is very cool: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Will anyone review this paper? Screening, sorting, and the feedback cycles that imperil peer review Scholarly publishing relies on peer review to identify the best science. Yet finding willing and qualified reviewers to evaluate manuscripts has become an increasingly challenging task, possibly even ...

1. Kevin Gross and I just posted a new science-of-science preprint.

This one explores the looming peer review crisis. As many of you know, it's becoming significantly more difficult for journal editors to find scholars willing to serve as peer reviewers for submitted manuscripts.

Screening, sorting, and the feedback cycles that imperil peer review The process of peer review is vital to contemporary science, but is also under enormous strain. This study uses mathematical models to dissect the threats to the long-term viability of peer review, su...

1. Kevin Gross and I have a new paper out today PLOS Biology.

We used economic models based around screening games and the market for unpaid labor to highlight a meltdown cycle threatening peer review.

Frontiers | Regional heterogeneity of striatal cholinergic interneurons: setting the stage for diverse behavioral repertoires Cholinergic interneurons (ChIs) constitute only a small fraction of striatal neurons, yet their dense axonal arborizations and widespread acetylcholine relea...

As promised at the #GRC Basal Ganglia, here is our recent review on striatal cholinergic heterogeneity. I hope people find it useful and inspiring.

www.frontiersin.org/journals/cel...

Maximum Principles A crash course on optimal control

A crash course on optimal control and how it obscures the power and perils of feedback.

How Can Infinity Come in Many Sizes? | Quanta Magazine Intuition breaks down once we’re dealing with the endless. To begin with: Some infinities are bigger than others.

Learn how some infinities can be larger than others in this visual explainer:
www.quantamagazine.org/how-can-infi...

Generative AI for synthetic biology: Designing biological parts, circuits, and genomes The convergence of generative AI and synthetic biology is transforming biological design, enabling the de novo creation of biological parts and systems with predictable, programmable function. Kim et ...

*Very* interested to see this, for all sorts of reasons.
www.cell.com/cell-systems...

The revised version of our paper on the impact of top-down feedback is now out @elife.bsky.social:

doi.org/10.7554/eLif...

tl;dr: we show that using human-brain-like feedback/anatomy in a deep RNN leads to human-like visual biases!

This work was led by @tmshbr.bsky.social

#NeuroAI 🧠📈 🧪