With great sadness, we heard from Masashi Kawasaki's death. He was/is a role model for so many Neuroethologists with a keen interest in weakly electric fish.
Günther Zupanc wrote an Obiturary for J Comp Physiol A.
link.springer.com/article/10.1...
Ok, reinforcement learning fans: RL is great, but what do we do when there's no obvious reward from the environment? What about perfecting a golf swing or a foxtrot or a musical performance? We may have an answer. A tale of 🐦 🎶 + 🧠. 🧵1/ #bioacoustics #prattle 💬 #neuroai #compneuro
"Our study highlights both the advancements in LLM capabilities and their persistent limitations, raising the possibility of systematic differences in semantic memory structures between humans and LLMs in representing color-word associations" link.springer.com/article/10.1...
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
The neuroscientists are clear that they examined 'structural and relational comparisons among qualia' and were not 'measuring' qualia themselves, whatever that might mean. Sabine Hossenfelder is usually entertaining and accurate, but not this time.
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40050292/
Why Tononi et al's defense of IIT fails to convince me. medium.com/@kording/86f...
As we attempt to build autonomous AI systems, we're discovering that agency—a capability we take for granted in animals—may be much more complex than we imagined, writes @tonyzador.bsky.social, in the latest essay in our NeuroAI series.
#neuroskyence
www.thetransmitter.org/neuroai/neur...
Sorry IIT ain’t general relativity. Funny they would choose this parallel.
A crowd of people wraps around a hallway. About 25-30 people are visible
UCSF hosted its first food pantry event for postdocs today, where a local food bank gives free food to UCSF employees.
This picture represents about half the line that had formed 10 minutes before the market had opened.
What the fuck are we doing here guys?
Bonobos and chimps, two very closely related primates, have wildly different social interactions. (Bonobos resolve conflict through sex, chimps through violence)
Would we not expect innate differences in "pro-sociality" to play a role in these species-typical differences?
sorry for being the blacksheep again...
#neuroskyence
www.thetransmitter.org/consciousnes...
For those of us who think about things like seeing and remembering, the idea that we’d measure via subjective Qs is easy to skoff at. UNTIL you realize objective approaches won’t work for some impt things (like mood). A nice review supporting “subjective” measures.
www.nature.com/articles/s44...
