Alex O'Hare

March issue @brain1878.bsky.social with winning article in Brain Essay Competition by @oharealex.bsky.social considers if it is technologically feasible for machines to achieve human-level intelligence, and philosophically plausible for them to possess consciousness
academic.oup.com/brain/articl...

What lies beyond thy silicone face and silicon brain? The rapid rise of large language models has fuelled speculation about eventual artificial general intelligence. Winner of the Brain Essay Competition 2025,

Honoured to have been selected as the winner for the Brain @brain1878.bsky.social 2025 Essay Competition! I look forward to developing these ideas in future work.

academic.oup.com/brain/articl...

Excited to be presenting work on topological communities in the human connectome with a poster at the @institutocajal.bsky.social next week! A collaborative effort, masterminded by @brigan.bsky.social!

🚨🚨🚨DOPAMINE 2026!

Abstract submission closes on December 1st!

#Sevilla #Dopamine 👇🏻

dopaminesociety.org/abstracts/

A very good read if you want to learn everything there is to know about dopamine. Take a look at chapter 4!
www.sciencedirect.com/handbook/han...

Dopaminergic action prediction errors serve as a value-free teaching signal - Nature Dopaminergic action prediction error signals are used by mice as a value-free teaching signal to reinforce stable sound–action associations in the tail of the striatum.

This is intetresting, paper argues that dopamine also encodes "action prediction errors", i.e. differences between actions you predict you will make and actions you do, regardless of reward. Could be used to reinforce habits for repetitive voluntary behaviours:

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

🧠📈 🧪

Respectfully, do we really want to leave the millennia-old problem of demarcation in the "hands" of an LLM? In principle, it is a convenient way to improve efficiency and remove bias, but in practice, IMHO, I don't think we're there yet (neither in terms of defining rules or trusting LLMs)

'Untangling the multifaceted VTA responses to stress'

by Urszula Skupio, Alexander Harris & Abigail Polter
@ampolter.bsky.social @dralexharris.bsky.social

www.cell.com/trends/neuro...

What would it take to prove that a chronic infection is a causal agent in Alzheimer’s disease? Accumulating evidence over several years suggests that microbial infections (e.g., bacteria, viruses, fungi) may play a role in the etiology of Alzheimer’s disease (AD). In this review, we discuss the...

'What would it take to prove that a chronic infection is a causal agent in Alzheimer’s disease?'

by Randy Brutkiewicz, Wei Cao, David Morgan, Roberta Souza Dos Reis, Vidyani Suryadevara, Auriel Willette, Sara Willette, Season Wyatt-Johnson & Michael Duggan

www.cell.com/trends/neuro...

Neural anticipation of virtual infection triggers an immune response - Nature Neuroscience Serino et al. show that seeing an infectious avatar approach the body in virtual reality triggers an immune response, indicating that the brain prepares the body to fight infections even for perceived...

Avatars who appear to be sick entering the peripersonal space in virtual reality are anticipated by multisensory–motor areas, activate the salience network, and trigger activation of innate lymphoid cells, mirroring responses seen in actual infections

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

Many thanks to the organizers and participators for another excellent informative conference on mathematical neuroscience. Now looking forward to the OCNS conference in Florence next month!

When I first heard of chronotypes in passing conversation, my first thought was "this is surely pseudoscience". Ever since I discovered this is not the case, I have been absolutely fascinated by this subject which goes a long way in explaining individual differences in productivity and work routines

INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON DYNAMICS IN SYSTEMS AND SYNTHETIC BIOL​OGY: SCHEDULE - Centre de Recerca Matemàtica INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON DYNAMICS IN SYSTEMS AND SYNTHETIC BIOL​OGY: SCHEDULE June 14th, 2021 June 15th, 2021 June 16th, 2021 June 17th, 2021 June 18th, 2021 MONDAY OF VIROLOGY AND IMMUNOLOGY TUESD...

Looking forward to exhibiting a novel computational model of dopamine at the ICMNS '25 conference in Barcelona next week! www.crm.cat/internationa... #ICMNS25 #Neuroscience

Our work, out at Cell, shows that the brain’s dopamine signals teach each individual a unique learning trajectory. Collaborative experiment-theory effort, led by Sam Liebana in the lab. The first experiment my lab started just shy of 6y ago & v excited to see it out: www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

Looking forward to exhibit some work on synaptic dopamine dynamics at the OCNS conference in July this year! ocns.memberclicks.net/cns-2025_quick #OCNS25 #Neuroscience @cnsorg.bsky.social

International Conference on Mathematical Neuroscience | ICMNS25 - Centre de Recerca Matemàtica ICMNS 2025 International Conference on Mathematical Neuroscience REGISTRATION FEE 300€ Standard registration 250€ Registration for postdocs 170€ Registration for students SCHEDULE ABSTRACTS CONTRIBUTE...

Excited to be exhibiting a novel computational model of dopamine at the ICMNS '25 conference in Barcelona! www.crm.cat/internationa... #ICMNS25 #Neuroscience

AGI is not a hard sell -- it provides the fundamental selling point of religion without requiring belief in the mystical, only faith in (pseudo)science and technology. A (digital) afterlife and the promise of immortality. Tech bros are the new prophets, AGI the deity. Kurzweil and Bostrom started it

Well well, as I suspected, you smart folks on Bluesky are unanimous in calling out this nonsense. (And N is pretty big in this informal survey!) And yet still these tech bros are given big platforms to spout this stuff, and the media (and some governments) love it. So we have a problem here, right?

🧠✨ Symposia submissions are NOW OPEN for Dopamine Meeting 2026! @DopamineSociety
📍Sevilla, Spain
📅 Open: May 1, 2025
⏳ Deadline: June 16, 2025
Spread the word — don’t miss out!
#Dopamine2026
dopaminesociety.org

Unthinkable just 10 years ago:

Almost 3/4 of the EU’s electricity in 2024 was from renewable energy sources and nuclear.

Gas and coal electricity generation is at record low levels.

A prospective code for value in the serotonin system - Nature Merging ideas from reinforcement learning theory with recent insights into the filtering properties of the dorsal raphe nucleus, a unifying perspective is found explaining why serotonin neurons are ac...

I'm excited to share that the last chapter of my PhD thesis is now published in Nature! 🍾

What drives serotonin neurons? We think it's the expectation of future reward and --- critically --- how fast this expectation is increasing. 📈

doi.org/10.1038/s415...

1/6

This looks really helpful, although TBH I'm surprised (sort of) to find the LLM community is debating the equivalent of whether simulated water is wet, or simulated black holes will suck the researchers in. Why would "I can simulate ToM responses" be interpreted as "I can create an AI with ToM"?

Astrocyte ensembles manipulated with AstroLight tune cue-motivated behavior - Nature Neuroscience Using the AstroLight system, the authors reveal that astrocytic ensembles in the nucleus accumbens regulate cue-motivated reward behavior, demonstrating that selective manipulation of tagged astrocyte...

An #astrocytic ensemble that emerges in the nucleus accumbens upon activity during cue-motivated behaviors and is essential for modulating cue-reward associations 🧪🧪

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

Full-on eugenics, in its most rabid, racist form is oozing its way back into mainstream discourse.

An opponent striatal circuit for distributional reinforcement learning - Nature D1- and D2-expressing striatal neurons encode separate parts of a learned reward distribution, paralleling modern approaches in machine learning.

Nature research paper: An opponent striatal circuit for distributional reinforcement learning
https://go.nature.com/41a7Snf

The New Science of Unidentified Aerospace-Undersea Phenomena (UAP) After decades of dismissal and secrecy, it has become clear that a significant number of the world's governments take Unidentified Aerospace-Undersea Phenomena (UAP), formerly known as Unidentified Fl...

The case for proper scientific study of unidentified flying and subsea objects. Whatever you think of that, this long paper is full of fascinating case histories.
www.arxiv.org/abs/2502.06794

Dopamine ‘gas pedal’ and serotonin ‘brake’ team up to accelerate learning Mice learn fastest and most reliably when they experience an increase in dopamine paired with an inhibition of serotonin, a new study shows.

Dopamine-serotonin push-pull balances reward seeking and caution. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Happy to comment on this cool study in mammals and the parallels with our own work in #Drosophila!

www.thetransmitter.org/learning/dop...