@juangallego
Thinking about the brain, spinal cord, and how we move (and related neurotechnology). Into books, music, coffee, food, photography+art, animals & some humans. Now group leader at Champalimaud Research #neuroskyence #Sensorimotor #compneurosky #Science
New paper hot off the (pre-)press! We dig into the evolutionary origins of neural computations for behavioral control across mice, monkeys, and humans: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6....
As our lab's first foray into comparative analysis of neural dynamics, I’m super excited about this work! 1/18
Was an intellectual pleasure working on this with @quiltydunn.bsky.social
Someone who also feels that there is a glaring gap in current cognitive science/neuroscience/AI
cool stuff!
you forgot #againstrepresentationaldrift
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
While preparing your #NCMKobe26 abstract, read through the highlights from #NCMPan25! The meeting highlight article is now available for review.
Thank you to some of the scholarship winners from 2025 for putting the article together.
journals.physiology....
Hello, BlueSky! This is the official account for Janelia conferences & workshops.
We’ll share calls for applications, deadlines, and meeting updates.
Browse meetings & apply: janelia.news/conferences
Looks very interesting. I'm curious, have you tried it on motor cortex data already?
Our paper on the "Oneirogen hypothesis" is now up in its revised form on eLife!
This is the hypothesis that psychedelics induce a dream-like state, which we show via modelling could explain a variety of perceptual and learning effects from such drugs.
elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre...
🧠📈 🧪
Are you thinking about doing neuroscience outreach but want to make it more exciting or hands on?
Check out RetINaBox! (A collab led by the Trenholm lab)
We tried to bring the experience of experimental neuroscience to a classroom setting:
www.eneuro.org/content/13/1...
#neuroscience 🧪
👀 #newpreprint:
🎮 Real-time Pong gameplay after #spinalcordinjury by learning to control just one motor unit from paralysed muscle - no implants.
Co-led by @juangallego.bsky.social and Dario Farina, with work carried out at @imperialcollegeldn.bsky.social.
📄👉🔗 shorturl.at/RYuYG
I'm very late to the party, but this is a nice take --I like the conceptual framing and manipulations-- on an extremely important question. Great job guys!
Excited to share @rbrianroome.bsky.social ‘s beautiful paper on development of the dorsal horn of the mouse spinal cord @science.org
This is how the anatomical organization and cell types that process pain, touch, body position and more are laid down.
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
wow very cool!
🚨📜+🧵🚨 Very excited about this work showing that people with no hand function following a spinal cord injury can control the activity of motor units from those muscles to perform 1D, 2D and 3D tasks, play video games, or navigate a virtual wheelchair
By a wonderful team co-mentored w Dario Farina
🚨📜+🧵🚨 Very excited about this work showing that people with no hand function following a spinal cord injury can control the activity of motor units from those muscles to perform 1D, 2D and 3D tasks, play video games, or navigate a virtual wheelchair
By a wonderful team co-mentored w Dario Farina
well of course it's your perception of where you've landed vs the perceived target…
what about when you want to reach for a cup of coffee? your error is how far you ended from there no?
Yes this paper by Alex is also very relevant, I was going to link it too but i got sidetracked!
But I think we need simultaneous recordings and manipulations of the two areas during an interesting motor task —cognition is above my paycheck
I hope that we'll be collecting some of those data during the coming years in the lab, and that others will do it too
I think the jury is still out for that...
@somnirons.bsky.social has showed, using models, that the cerebellum may be reshaping cortical dynamics during learning, which I think agrees with Doya's original proposal of cerebellum being a supervised learning system and cortex unsupervised
1/2
Joint junior faculty position in Computational Neuroscience, between Ctr for Computational Neuroscience at @flatironinstitute.org and the CUNY Graduate Center @thegraduatecenter.bsky.social . Application deadline: 16 Jan 2026!
www.simonsfoundation.org/flatiron/car...
cuny.jobs/new-york-ny/...
New paper led by wonder postdocs Francesca Greenstreet and @jessegeerts.bsky.social and @clopathlab.bsky.social trying to understand why –in the "what for" sense– there are multiple motor learning systems –supervised and RL-based– in the brain.
Check out Jesse's 🧵
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
🧠 New year, new preprint!
Why does motor learning involve multiple brain regions? We propose that the cortico-cerebellar system learns a "map" of actions where similar movements are nearby, while basal ganglia do RL in this simplified space.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Cool basal ganglia preprints today!
2 on DA/ACh
1. @paulkramer.bsky.social
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
2. @arifahamid.bsky.social
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Motor learning @juangallego.bsky.social and @clopathlab.bsky.social
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Oh! he was flying under my radar but not any longer
This
Great to see this paper on sensory expectations in motor control from @jonathanamichaels.bsky.social and @andpru.bsky.social out in Nature today!
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
#neuroscience 🧪
sorry I wasn't clear. A great MSc in the lab played with the data from that paper and she saw that she could fit a relatively lowD nonlinear manifold with UMAP to a subset of all the neurons and stimuli (otherwise it was computationally expensive) and classify the images quite well from the manifold
should have said Ken (not sure if on bsky) and @carandinilab.net's group!
This paper by Ken's group seems like a very important follow up to Stringer + Pachitariu et al (consistent a MSc in the lab found that UMAP could capture their data well):
"High-dimensional neuronal activity from low-dimensional latent dynamics: a solvable model"
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
