Joao Barbosa

Happy to see you at #cosyne2026 to show you the unrolled version!
[3-221] | March 14 | 1:45pm - 4:15pm |

CMC lab is heading to #Cosyne2026, with 3 wonderful posters (1-031, 3-001, and 3-008 also see thread 👇), 2 new enthusiastic team members (@clairesturgill.bsky.social and @maxschwabe.bsky.social ), and tons of excitement for discussions and new ideas!

Unravelling the structure of behavioral variation from data

Don’t miss this week’s entry in the NITMB Seminar Series! Featuring @antoniocbscosta.bsky.social, INSERM CRCNPI at @institutducerveau.bsky.social

Join us at NITMB or online on Friday, March 13th
www.nitmb.org/nitmb-semina...

Going to Cosyne? There will be a "Biologically-inspired Artificial Intelligence: Challenges and Opportunities" workshop on Monday 16th! 🧠

Exciting lineup of speakers alongside the opportunity to present your #NeuroAI poster, more info on program & poster signup below!

#compneuro #neuroscience

Electronic music is a genre that was started and shaped by women, so on International Women's Day, here are some Bandcamp recommendations for women making some of the best electronic music you can get today. 🧵

How are neural manifolds and single-neuron response properties related to circuit structure?

How degenerate are these relationships?

Theory and a plethora of examples can be found in the following paper, out today in Neuron 🌟

It was a privilege to co-supervise first author @lpezon.bsky.social!

Once you get past the first 5 minutes of me bumbling around clearly in need of media training, we settle into a nice groove talking about fitting mechanistic models, ML/AI for neuroscience, underconstrainedness vs. degeneracy, and its potential benefits for biology (plus some good chuckles).

Peer review would be easier if we stopped treating it like combat with the authors. Results want to be free, and perfect is the enemy of good. Do the data support the conclusions? If so, that’s enough. A paper isn’t a blank slate for projecting your own ideas.

Math metal from the 80s? Now i want to hear it!

Neurons around a recording ephys electrode

Diagram of monkey looking at a screen in a neuroscience experiment

Spike rasters for two units in response to a checkerboard shown in the screen. One is an ON neuron, the other is an OFF neuron

Waveforms of single neurons within a single ephys electrode sorted using K-means clustering.

Just uploaded some of my *hand-crafted* comp-neuro teaching materials, thought they might be useful to someone out there.

It's just some exercise notebooks for data analysis github.com/morales-greg...

Going to #COSYNE2026? Don't miss our tutorial on our open neural dynamics data resources.

🗓️ March 12, 9:15-10:15am
🧑‍🏫 Presented by @sejdevries.bsky.social
🔗 More info: https://www.cosyne.org/tutorials

@cosynemeeting.bsky.social

This Thursday (March 5th), we're hosting Changsong Zhou, but mind the time shift (from our usual 15:00 UTC to 14:00). Here's the registration link + more information about the talk:
cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/meeting/regi...

AI is rapidly changing how we write code — but how should we use it in research?

To kick off our 2026 “How-To” we welcome Russ Poldrack (@russpoldrack.org; Stanford University):

🧠 Better Code, Better Science

📅 22 April 2026
🔗 Register: forms.gle/WRUdGQEpd5is...

#OHBM #OpenScience

in my decision making class I run a version of The Endowment Effect that goes like this:

When students come in, sealed envelopes are waiting on their chair-arms.

The main slide that greets them says 'NO TOUCHING'

These reviews on neural manifolds are super relevant to today’s world of large-scale population recordings. How do we link circuits, population geometry, dynamics, and function?

“A neural manifold view of the brain” from Perich, Narain, and Gallego 2025

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

(1/2)

Of course! I put Fig 5 in many of my talks, posters (sometimes forgetting to cite you as you know 🫣) and even grant proposals!

I hope you're doing well, too

Agreed! It's really embarrassing. I think it's OK – even unavoidable – to use AI to bounce ideas, but in the end we must own our writings or we should stop writing at all.

I’m building a foundational reading list for our lab (systems & circuit neuroscience, compneuro, modeling, neuromodulators, population coding etc.).

I’d like to crowdsource recommendations.

Which review(s) would you consider mandatory reading for the next generation of researchers?

"Principles of Corticocortical Communication: Proposed Schemes and Design Considerations" A Kohn et al

....

"Neural Mechanisms That Make Perceptual Decisions Flexible" by @gouki-okazawa.bsky.social ocial and @roozbehkiani.bsky.social sky.social

And some less recent that really changed my thinking during my PhD:

"Dimensionality reduction for large-scale neural recordings" by JP Cunningham & B. Yu

3/4

"Attractor and integrator networks in the brain" by M. Khona & I. Fiete

"A unifying perspective on neural manifolds and circuits for cognition" by @cmlangdon.bsky.social, M Genkin & @engeltatiana.bsky.social

2/4

From the top of my head, here some recent ones:

"Two views on the cognitive brain" by @johnwkrakauer.bsky.social, @dlbarack.bsky.social

"Reconstructing computational system dynamics from neural data with recurrent neural networks" by @durstewitzlab.bsky.social et al

1/3

Episode #38 in #TheoreticalNeurosciencePodcast: On extracting spiking network models from experiments - with Richard Gao @rdgao.bsky.social

theoreticalneuroscience.no/thn38

How to fit spiking network models to experimental data when there is no unique parameter set giving the best fit.

Cognitive Neurophysiology (CNP) - Institute of Basic Medical Sciences We are now hiring two PhDs and a Post Doc:Deadline 1st of March:https://www.jobbnorge.no/en/available-jobs/job/294553/phd-research-fellow-in-machine-learning-for-cognitive-neuroscienceDeadline 4th of ...

We have PhD positions and Post Doc positions available! www.med.uio.no/imb/english/... Please apply if you are interested in human invasive intracranial recordings or applied machine learning in a neuroscientific context.

Deadlines 1st of March (Sunday!) and 4th of March.

Please RT!

The number of Americans living in Norway is overtaking the number of Norwegians living in the US.

New paper on a long-shot I've been obsessed with for a year:

How much are AI reasoning gains confounded by expanding the training corpus 10000x? How much LLM performance is down to "shallow" generalisation (approximate pattern-matching to highly-related training data)?

t.co/CH2vP0Y7OF

Mission: record hippocampal place cells in zero gravity
Crew: 3 rats with electrode arrays
Vehicle: Space Shuttle Columbia
Status: data now publicly available on DANDI, 28 years later

The ratstronauts' mission is finally complete. 🐀🚀 h/t NASA

about.dandiarchive.org/blog/2026/02...

Excited to share our new paper in @pnas.org with @bnmorillon.bsky.social &
@valentinwyart.bsky.social www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
We study three core inference systems, and how their interaction shapes human learning and decision-making.

Netflix Backs Out of Bid for Warner Bros., Paving Way for an Ellison Takeover

The richest man owns X.

The second and third richest men control Google.

The fourth richest man owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.

The fifth richest man owns The Washington Post.

And now the sixth richest could soon take over both Paramount and Warner Bros.

See the problem here?

How can we build better experiment-theory collaborations in neuroscience?

We're hosting a series of 6 in-person, interactive workshops to discuss this.

Come along!

www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/understand...