New Journal Club: Neural manifolds are maturing from visualization trick to biological claim. But if population activity lives on low-dimensional manifolds, what constrains the geometry?
Conjunctive population coding integrates sensory evidence to guide adaptive human behavior. New work led by @jonasterlau.bsky.social in @pnas.org. We used human intracranial EEG to understand how coordinated population activity supports context-dependent behavior. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/.... (1/4)
Ripple oscillations are central for memory and sleep.
But ripple detection in humans remains challenging. Here we introduce a simulation approach in @natcomms.nature.com as common ripple detectors mainly pick up 1/f noise and not genuine oscillations
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www.nature.com/articles/s41...
#neuroskyence
🚨 New preprint!
Why do some insights from spikes translate to field potentials while others don't? In this paper we compare visual memory representations in spikes and LFPs to propose a general framework that answers this question.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
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Bichan Wu (@bichanw.bsky.social) & I wrote a tutorial paper on Reduced Rank Regression (RRR) — the statistical method underlying "communication subspaces" from Semedo et al 2019 — aimed at neuroscientists.
arxiv.org/abs/2512.12467
Aperiodic activity reflects pathological waveforms in epilepsy (and not necessarily hyper-excitability or altered E/I-balance). The 1/f slope goes up *or* down as function of waveforms during seizures. New work by Laura Heidiri and Frank van Schalkwijk from the lab: www.jneurosci.org/content/45/5...
New work from the lab published in @cp-neuron.bsky.social by @jonasterlau.bsky.social and Jan Martini. We describe that trial-by-trial variability indexes recurrent connectivity across the cortical hierarchy, which supports reliable and flexible coding www.cell.com/neuron/abstr... (1/4)
Bifurcations—an underexplored concept in neuroscience—can help explain how small differences in neural circuits give rise to entirely novel functions, writes Xiao-Jing Wang.
#neuroskyence
www.thetransmitter.org/neural-dynam...
A cute little animation: a critically damped harmonic oscillator becomes unstable with integral control if the gain is too high. Here, at K_i = 2, a Hopf bifurcation occurs: two poles of the transfer function enter the right-hand s-plane and the closed-loop system becomes unstable.
📰 I really enjoyed writing this article with @thetransmitter.bsky.social! In it, I summarize parts of our recent perspective article on neural manifolds (www.nature.com/articles/s41...), with a focus on highlighting just a few cool insights into the brain we've already seen at the population level.
🚨New paper🚨
Neural manifolds went from a niche-y word to an ubiquitous term in systems neuro thanks to many interesting findings across fields. But like with any emerging term, people use it very differently.
Here, we clarify our take on the term, and review key findings & challenges rdcu.be/ex8hW
I am in Vancouver at ICML, and tomorrow I will present our newest paper "Partially Observable Reinforcement Learning with Memory Traces". We argue that eligibility traces are more effective than sliding windows as a memory mechanism for RL in POMDPs. 🧵
Behavioral timescales increase when multiple locations are sampled. Left: Schematic of task designs. Participants fixated a central cross and were presented with a cue, which indicated the location participants should covertly attend to. After a variable cue-target interval a target appeared in either the cued or non-cued location and participants responded with a button press. In the first task participants only had to sample two locations, while in the second task, participants had to sample four locations. Second left: demeaned, time-resolved RTs as a function of the cue-target interval for one exemplary participant (two locations: red; four locations blue). Second right: power spectrums with different peak frequencies. Right: the autocorrelation function and the respective timescales.
How does the brain sample the #visual environment in space and time? @iraposo.bsky.social &co show that two distinct temporal patterns (rhythmic oscillations & aperiodic timescales) predict attention-guided behavior @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/3ThTKVy
Hey #CVPR2025! Curious about this work? I'll be presenting it this morning! Poster 31, from 10:30 to 12:30 🤠
@cvprconference.bsky.social
I'm flying to Michigan today to present our new paper "A Pontryagin Perspective on Reinforcement Learning" at L4DC, where it has been nominated for the Best Paper Award! We ask the question: is it possible to learn an open-loop controller via RL? 🧵
🙌 It's been a wonderful PhD Retreat at the HIH yesterday, with lots of time for exchange, poster sessions and the election of the new PhD representatives: Stefano Iavarone, Niloofar Mokhtari @estherkuehn.bsky.social & Surender Surender @ghtabatabai.bsky.social 🎉
Really impressive Carolin!
Proud moment to see work from my PhD in the @granadalab.bsky.social featured on the cover of the April 2025 issue of @molsystbiol.org 🥹 special thanks to my talented husband who helped design this cover. Check out the full paper here: lnkd.in/eDVQuRfc.
really cool work @granadalab.bsky.social!!
New work out in @naturephysics.bsky.social
Led by @NicaGutu & Malthe Nordentoft + great collaborators.
We show that circadian synchrony shapes cell growth. When coordination is lost, clock–cell cycle coupling breaks down.
May help explain paradoxes in circadian cancer biology.
📖 rdcu.be/efNaY
How does the brain integrate prior expectation with sensory evidence? 👀🧠💭
We show that sensory and action neural tuning play distinct roles in guiding visual decisions. Dampening expected action information drives confirmation bias, while dynamic sensory tuning explains speed-accuracy trade-offs.
