With some trepidation, I'm putting this out into the world:
gershmanlab.com/textbook.html
It's a textbook called Computational Foundations of Cognitive Neuroscience, which I wrote for my class.
My hope is that this will be a living document, continuously improved as I get feedback.
Have you ever wondered what you would find if you could keep your eyes on a bee for more than a few meters? Us, too!
preprint (with videos!) + thread ๐งต
Precise, individualized foraging flights in honey #bees ๐ revealed by multicopter drone-based tracking
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
1/9
I agree, we might not. But at least it's not obviously a wrong thing to do to play around on easy mode first. Especially as easy mode is already pretty hard.
Many of our big insights into brain function come from trying to mimic it, writes @timothyoleary.bsky.social. This lesson should guide how we organize research programs.
www.thetransmitter.org/systems-neur...
#neuroskyence
I once saw a (very interesting) talk about sleep in which the speaker started by saying that we don't really know how to define sleep, and then proceeded to operationalize sleep in flies as basically periods when they are still for a long time. This got me thinking...
I can also recommend "Why We Sleep" by Matthew Walker - he talks writes about the nightmares & sleep disruptions associated with PTSD. (Ch10 I think). Probably the most accessible of these.
And potentially this book chapter, a little bit older, for the epinephrine stuff. You might also find the authors' other work interesting and relevant.
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK3907/
Maybe this one for PTSD & cognitive decline?
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
#neuroskyence
Here's some of the preclinical stroke motor rehab work
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26542082/
Very cool! The group at my undergrad institution which pioneered VNS for stroke rehab-which supercharges cortical map mechanisms-has some work showing that A1 map changes corresponding to improved sensory performance revert over time-w/o worsened performance.
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
First time holding the Neuralink implant. Our hospital network will be leading the first clinical trials here in Canada. Letโs go!
@uhnresearch.ca @uhn.ca #Neuralink #neuroscience #AI #neuroAI #compneuro
Screenshot of a journal article titled "Two ontogenetic challenges to trait individuation" by Alejandro Fรกbregas-Tejeda, published in Synthese (2025) 205:219. The abstract reads: "Trait individuation is an epistemically indispensable and heuristically fruitful practice in biological science. However, important ontological issues transcend an epistemology-only reading of what trait individuation entails (e.g., adaptation and homology), prompting scholars to advance models and frameworks to grapple with this problem. Here, I articulate two challenges that arise when advancing theories and frameworks to tackle trait individuation: the synchronicity and the diachronicity challenges. The synchronicity challenge involves specifying the traits an organism has at a given moment in ontogeny, whereas the diachronicity challenge involves understanding the causal processes that drive trait individuation in development and tracing these units across time. To delve deeper, I introduce extant functionalist and structuralist perspectives on trait individuation and evaluate how they address both challenges. Overcoming these challenges is necessary for such accounts to fulfill their theoretical promise of individuating the traits that organisms have in an ontologically sound way."
โTraitsโ are central units of biological analysisโbut how should they be individuated, and relative to which ontogenetic frame of reference? In my new paper, I argue that answering this isnโt easyโand matters more than it seems. ๐๐ link.springer.com/article/10.1... #philsci #HPBio #evosky #evodevo
yes I have been translating Matlab to Python, how could you tell;
Happy 107th Birthday, Brenda Milner! Her contributions to neuropsychology shaped the way we understand the human brain. From surviving two world wars and two pandemics, to paving the way for future generations of researchers, Milnerโs legacy continues. @mcgill.ca @cusm-muhc.bsky.social
Nice model for long-term neural implants - get the fancier hardware (eg, additional recording capabilities) approved and to market and let the algorithms/software catch up later. Then benefits become accessible to people a lot faster once the algorithm's approved (since their implant is compatible).
"Any Medtronic DBS implant manufactured after 2020 has the ability to be switched into adaptive stimulation mode"
If the only purported benefit is enabling stimulation to augment function, it's hard to imagine any of these super tiny implants having access to enough neurons to meaningfully do so. (2/2)
Nice piece. Recently saw a comment by Synchron COO suggesting that Neuralink implants are "overengineered" compared to stentrode. That does seem to be the case. (1/2)
Thrilled to see our TinyRNN paper in @nature! We show how tiny RNNs predict choices of individual subjects accurately while staying fully interpretable. This approach can transform how we model cognitive processes in both healthy and disordered decisions. doi.org/10.1038/s415...
The most important thing about science the public needs to remember is that the set of experimental and theoretical methods we refer to as "science" is the best, most reliable way of knowing we currently have.
It's rough around the edges but it works way better than anything else.
1/N
How do neural dynamics in motor cortex interact with those in subcortical networks to flexibly control movement? Iโm beyond thrilled to share our work on this problem, led by Eric Kirk @eric-kirk.bsky.social with help from Kangjia Cai!
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Graphical abstract for "Vocal communication is seasonal in social groups of wild, free-living house mice." The abstract has, from top to bottom, a title, four middle image panels, and two bottom text panels. Image title: "Vocal communication in social groups of wild-free living house mice" Middle image panels from left to right: (1) An aerial snap shot of the region where the study site is located, an agricultural landscape in rural Switzerland. (2) An image of the study site, a small barn in the forest inhabited by mice. (3) An image of a radio frequency identification (RFID) box used to track mouse social interactions. A mouse is entering the box from the left while another sits outside. (4) A spectrogram showing example vocalizations - one low frequency squeak and one ultrasonic call - recorded from an RFID box. Bottom panels: Left: Data Collectionย -ย 10 years of RFID-based tracking data (from 6,946 mice) -ย 15 months of acoustic monitoring (totaling 6,594 hours) -ย Machine learning for vocal detection and labeling (CNN) Right: Key Findings -ย Vocalization is seasonal (most in spring and summer) -ย Vocalization is associated with the presence of pups -ย Vocalization is correlated with social group dynamics
Very happy to share the latest from my postdocโฌ!
10 yrs of mouse social networks + 1.25 yrs of acoustic data โก๏ธ insight into vocalization & sociality in a wild population of your favorite lab model ๐
paper: bit.ly/4n93yyD
data: bit.ly/4lfFBEk
code: bit.ly/4kNnMwx
#bioacoustics #neuroskyence
1/8
Spending a few days with intramural researcher at NIH has me thinking about the old Bell Labs, the storied research institute where major breakthroughs in physics, chemistry and mat sci (and associated @nobelprize.bsky.social awards) were made in the 70s-80s 1/n
Aha! I have timed this immensely well, out today
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
The Cognitive Computational Neuroscience conference is in Amsterdam this year, but you don't have to go that far to attend. Local meetups/watch parties are being organized all over, including the one I'm hosting in New York!
Check them out and register (free!) here ๐
#neuroskyence #compneurosky
Whale vocalizations not only resemble human vowels, but also behave like ones!
We previously discovered that sperm whales have analogues to human vowels.
In a new preprint, we analyze linguistic behavior of whale vowels.
Oh nice, a peripheral --> central molecular mechanism!
pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...
But by the same token, I suppose studying a moving target with many different instantiations (species, individuals, etc) does complicate things.
Evolution should aid theorizing, no? It can provide a framework for understanding: we can take broadly conserved or convergent principles to be things that are especially important for nervous system function.
