Alex Efremov

Fully blind study

After several years of work, my lab is starting to put out our first papers on learning in a unicellular organism (Stentor coeruleus).

Here we show evidence for a form of associative learning in Stentor:
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

What are these services? Networking?

Maybe "drawing parallels" was not the best wording, I didn't mean it as in "equate". I rather mean that we want to find what constraints are shared between nervous systems of different species, as well as what are the differences allowed within these constraints.

"Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution".
I come to think that we'd be very lucky if we manage to draw clear parallels between, let's say, the human brain and the mouse brain, without trying to follow their evolutionary history back to origins.

I don’t think AI’s success in coding will automatically translate to other fields. That level of performance only works where the output is as easily verifiable as code; and not many domains fit that bill. 2/2

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

To rule out the relationship between cytoarchitecture and function, one needs to be sure they are trying to map correct functions. What makes people confident about it?

For one, they can help in shaping out what "brain-like" is

You can still find some link between some processes that nobody linked before. It probably won't be as fundamental as GR but being fundamental ≠ being important.

On a deeper level: the purpose of arealization is (or should be) be to help understand function; so function has no place on the list of area criteria.

If the other criteria disagree with function, that just makes them a poor guide to arealization.

More efficient than what?

The other side of the coin is that if the knob is used but doesn't serve any purpose, the usage has to stop for homeostatic reasons (and sometimes even the knob itself disassembled). So I guess, if it wasn't your intervention that turned the knob, assume that it serves a purpose.

And of course, not all the tracks will be on a new platform (I think I've lost about 1%).
But also some of the tracks that I liked before they disappeared from Spotify are restored in the new playlists.

I used TuneMyMusic for that, had to pay a few bucks to transfer my ~10k songs distributed over ~50 playlists.
So far I have caught just a few alien tracks in the new playlists

Now I'm curious what are the others

But the lack of respect for science can't be reduced to the uncertainty with which the findings are communicated. I would argue that one of the causes is the opposite - people too often see clickbait titles "Scientists discovered X!!!", dig deeper, get disillusioned, and figure that it's all a con

What made you want to switch?

The latter, you just wait for the next debate over how to think about the brain

It seems to me that being vulnerable to anti-science propaganda too often goes hand in hand with not being into sci-fi literature

This summer my lab's journal club somewhat unintentionally ended up reading papers on a theme of "more naturalistic computational neuroscience". I figured I'd share the list of papers here 🧵:

I wonder, where would be a good place to do modeling and chat with many people that study different species or do comparative studies? (asking for a friend)

Working with Dan was the best work experience I ever had, don't miss out

A lot of answers here about the complexity of the brain. I think, the problem is not the complexity itself but our desire to answer complex Qs while the foundation is not there yet. Theory doesn't start with explaining the human brain, it "ends" there (of course, it never really ends)

Alternatively, we can say that now this neural activity represents our perturbations

If we change neural activity, there's nothing more in the physical world, that this activity represents. But we can still call it representation, just of something from the platonic world I guess 😅

A particular cell with altered transcriptome, though, probably makes a transition from being a muscle cell to being a skin cell (not sure if altered transcriptome would be enough here, but feels like it)

But if we somehow change hair cell activity, it doesn't change the sound frequency, no?

And because we want to be able to communicate our findings to those who are not computational neuroscientists

I still think it's relative. This calculation doesn't substantiate info. It just sets an upper boundary on the possibly measured info about the observable universe.