Bowen Zheng

Bots have made their way to Prolific experiments. Our lab has stopped online testing of adults entirely now for this reason - we want to know if what we study is real. Probably data collected 2-3 years ago are ok, but moving forward we just can't know. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Pace of ecology drives the tempo of visual perception across the animal kingdom Nature Ecology & Evolution - Using phylogenetic comparative methods across 237 species from disparate phyla, the authors show that species with fast-paced ecologies have higher temporal...

Our new paper is now out showing how time perception in animals is linked to their ecology. Using data from 237 species we show temporal perception is faster in species that fly and pursuit predators www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🌐

Beautiful - recommended! Here, @sasolla.bsky.social recaps her decades-long journey from physics to neural networks (working with LeCun & Hopfield) to motor cortex, & and from industry (including Bell Labs) to academia, all driven by curiosity and awe (which flows from her voice). Inspiring!

Toy models, just in time for Christmas!

Excited to share my first article for @thetransmitter.bsky.social

#neuroskyence

this honestly looks like AI slop….

Discrete and systematic communication in a continuous signal-meaning space Abstract. Human spoken language uses a continuous stream of acoustic signals to communicate about continuous features of the world, by using discrete forms

Human speech is continuous, and many meaning spaces (like color) are continuous too. Yet we use discrete words like “blue” and “green” that carve these spaces into categories.

In our new paper, we ask: How do people turn continuous spaces into structured, word-like systems for communication? (1/8)

What does it mean to understand language? Language understanding entails not just extracting the surface-level meaning of the linguistic input, but constructing rich mental models of the situation it describes. Here we propose that because pr...

What does it mean to understand language? We argue that the brain’s core language system is limited, and that *deeply* understanding language requires EXPORTING info to other brain regions.
w/ @neuranna.bsky.social @evfedorenko.bsky.social @nancykanwisher.bsky.social
arxiv.org/abs/2511.19757
1/n🧵👇

anything less than 420-D should not be called high D imo

Inhibitory Plasticity Balances Excitation and Inhibition in Sensory Pathways and Memory Networks Plasticity at inhibitory synapses maintains balanced excitatory and inhibitory synaptic inputs at cortical neurons.

"Spiking Networks Hate It! Find Out the One Plasticity Trick They Don’t Want You to Know! Never stabilise models by hand again." - I woke up thinking we missed an opportunity with the title of this one. :/ www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... Also: It snowed in Vienna, 10cm white fluffies! Happy Sunday!

This raises what I like to call the "AI test for tasks".

If many people use AI to do task X, then that tells you that task X is actually just a brainless administrative exercise.

Any such task should probably be eliminated, and if that's not an option, modified to make automation even easier.

What is the most profitable industry in the world, this side of the law? Not oil, not IT, not pharma.

It's *scientific publishing*.

We call this the Drain of Scientific Publishing.

Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820
Background: doi.org/10.1162/qss_...

Thread @markhanson.fediscience.org.ap.brid.gy 👇

Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end YouTube video by Dwarkesh Patel

The way Sutton himself interprets the “bitter lesson” in this interview definitely caught a lot of bitter lesson enthusiasts off guard.
LLMs not actually being an example of the bitter lesson was quite a nuance no one saw coming.

youtu.be/21EYKqUsPfg?...

So far, learning traps seem robust to social learning in our cases. Surprisingly, despite many manipulations that have tried to reduce this learning trap, the most effective has been simply being a child (see @emilyliquin.bsky.social's work on traps in children) osf.io/preprints/ps...

Ca2+ Plateau Potentials Reflect Cross-Theta Cortico-Hippocampal Input Dynamics and Acetylcholine for Rapid Formation of Efficient Place-Cell Code A central tenet of Systems Neuroscience lies in an understanding of memory and behavior through learning rules, but synaptic plasticity has rarely been shown to create functional single-neuron code in...

Interesting new data on BTSP mechanisms from my old Janelia colleague @hiallen72.bsky.social
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Neuronal signatures of successful one-shot memory in mid-level visual cortex High-capacity, one-shot visual recognition memory challenges theories of learning and neural coding because it requires rapid, robust, and durable representations. Most studies have focused on the hip...

New preprint! How can you remember an image you saw once, even after seeing thousands of them? We find a role for humble mid-level visual cortex in high-capacity, one-shot learning. doi.org/10.1101/2025.09.22.677855 🧵🧪1/

The New York Times piece today about US science is terrible and wrong—in many ways.

I could write a whole article about this, but as one example:

“To close observers, the original crisis began well before any of this…”
No. I’m a close observer of science, and this is incorrect.

This is in principle justified by Rao-Blackwell theorem? one abstracts the problem enough such that the data we do have is a suffcient statistics for the inference problem.

Can a single cell learn? Even without a brain, some microbes show simple forms of cognition. Can this basal cognition be engineered? Check our new paper with @jordiplam.bsky.social on the minimal synthetic circuits & their cognitive limits. @drmichaellevin.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

I’m not sure how useful this form is for characterizing part of the brain that does specific computation though. The heart is an important part of keep me alive to do face processing, but it does’t seem useful to say face processing -> heart is active. though it’s logically correct.

LLRX republished the blogpost www.llrx.com/2025/08/ai-s...

I wrote a Comment on neurotheory, and now you can read it!

Some thoughts on where neurotheory has and has not taken root within the neuroscience community, how it has shaped those subfields, and where we theorists might look next for fresh adventures.

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

MIT report: 95% of generative AI pilots at companies are failing There’s a stark difference in success rates between companies that purchase AI tools from vendors and those that build them internally.

MIT’s NANDA initiative found that 95% of generative AI deployments fail after interviewing 150 execs, surveying 350 workers, and analyzing 300 projects. The real “productivity gains” seem to come from layoffs and squeezing more work from fewer people not AI.

AI slop and the destruction of knowledge This week I was looking for info on what cognitive scientists mean when they speak of ‘domain-general’ cognition. I was curious, because the nuances are relevant for something I am researching at t…

AI slop and the destruction of knowledge irisvanrooijcogsci.com/2025/08/12/a...

Explosive neural networks via higher-order interactions in curved statistical manifolds - Nature Communications Higher-order interactions shape complex neural dynamics but are hard to model. Here, authors use a generalization of the maximum entropy principle to introduce a family of curved neural networks, reve...

Our paper just out in Nature Communications!
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

We introduce curved neural networks naturally introducing high-order interactions showing:
• explosive phase transitions
• enhanced memory retrieval via self-annealing
• increased memory capacity through geometric curvature

So what drives drift? We looked closely at the neurons and found that a small group of them were stable. These stable neurons were more excitable than neighboring cells, making the fate of the cells predictable.

The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention is calling on every single leader in the world: DO EVERYTHING YOU CAN TO GET FOOD & WATER INTO GAZA RIGHT AWAY. Even if it takes bypassing the reports, meetings, endless conferences, parliamentary sessions, UN sessions, and all the other regular diplomatic channels that have led nowhere. Just do it. Genocide must not be allowed to continue while we all watch. We must not allow mass starvation in Gaza. We cannot wait any longer. IF YOU HAVE POWER, USE IT. HISTORY WILL DEMONSTRATE THE RECTITUDE OF YOUR ACTIONS.

DO EVERYTHING YOU CAN TO GET FOOD AND WATER IN TO GAZA.
This is from Lemkin Institute begging..... we are all begging.

Formation of an expanding memory representation in the hippocampus - Nature Neuroscience Multiday imaging of CA1 neurons during learning reveals that the representation stabilizes as the number of readily retrievable, information-rich and stable place cells increases and suggests novel me...

Really interesting results, suggesting that long-term place field stability is not from long-lasting synaptic plasticity, but is instead from an increased *probability of plasticity induction* in subsequent days.

“this is an unfair comparison because the model has not been trained on all data that has ever existed and on all future data that will be digitalized! Our foundation model is omniscient which renders the concept of generalization null!!!!”

Model mimicry limits conclusions about neural tuning and can mistakenly imply unlikely priors Nature Communications - Model mimicry limits conclusions about neural tuning and can mistakenly imply unlikely priors

Who doesn't like a good model of the brain? Yet, from simple regression to neural nets, some limitations keep popping up (e.g., overfitting) @mjwolff.bsky.social & I saw some cool but puzzling data, ran a quick analysis & found one such limitation: model mimicry. Now in #naturecommunications &🧵below

My latest Aronov lab paper is now published @Nature!

When a chickadee looks at a distant location, the same place cells activate as if it were actually there 👁️

The hippocampus encodes where the bird is looking, AND what it expects to see next -- enabling spatial reasoning from afar

bit.ly/3HvWSum