Lucas C Parra

White House stalls release of approved US science budgets The US Congress rejected sweeping cuts to science agencies. But the NIH, the NSF and NASA have had their spending slowed.

The NIH budget passed by congress for 2026 is 47.22B -- if it ever gets spent:

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

The first two weeks of war with Iran have cost the US 16.5B:

www.npr.org/2026/03/14/n...

In 4 more weeks of war the US could spend an entire year's worth of health research funds.

NIH Funds Still Not Getting to Researchers Congress approved a budget more than a month ago, but awards are lagging

Russell Vought's OMB is continuing to hold up funds at NIH.
www.medpagetoday.com/publichealth...

Recently, van der Stigchel and colleagues posted a provocative commentary suggesting that we should be wary of bots in online behavioral data collection (🧵by @cstrauch.bsky.social here: bsky.app/profile/cstr...). But should we? Here is my response letter osf.io/preprints/ps.... 1/5

InputDSA: Demixing then comparing recurrent and externally driven dynamics in complex systems - Kempner Institute We explored how to measure the similarity between two complex systems when they are driven by external inputs, like biological neural circuits or reinforcement learning agents. Our novel method, calle...

NEW from the #KempnerInstitute: InputDSA, a tool to separate intrinsic dynamics from input-driven effects—enabling accurate, efficient comparisons of complex systems with external inputs.

Read the #DeeperLearning blog post by @annhuang42.bsky.social & @kanakarajanphd.bsky.social: bit.ly/4bkrvy9

Task learning increases information redundancy of neural responses in macaque visual cortex How does the brain optimize sensory information for decision-making in new tasks? One hypothesis suggests that learning reduces redundancy in neural representations to improve efficiency, whereas anot...

RIP redundancy reduction?

Beautiful work by Liu & colleagues showing that neural redundancy increases with learning, as predicted by a Bayesian model:
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

The role of fibration symmetries in geometric deep learning | PNAS Geometric Deep Learning (GDL) unifies a broad class of machine learning techniques from the perspectives of symmetries, offering a framework for in...

Nice work. You might be interested in reading our paper, which explains why you were able to compress the networks. Training generates symmetries resulting in redundant activity in the network.

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

More to come on this soon ...

Compact deep neural network models of the visual cortex Nature - Parsimonious deep neural network models can be used for prediction of visual neuron responses.

DNN models of the brain are getting bigger. Are we replacing one complicated system in vivo with another in silico?

In new work, we seek the *smallest* DNN models of visual cortex, balancing prediction with parsimony.

It turns out these compact models are surprisingly small!

rdcu.be/e5H8G

NEW: #Kempner researchers develop a mean-field theory of task-trained RNNs that bridges random and learned connectivity—and find macaque motor cortex is best captured by an intermediate, task-specific recurrent structure.
Read the blog post 👇
🔗 bit.ly/47f3Ldl

Orbitofrontal cortex drives predictive filtering of sensory responses - Nature Neuroscience Top-down projections from the orbitofrontal cortex carry predictive signals that grow with sound experience and suppress the auditory cortex via inhibitory circuits, revealing a predictive mechanism f...

Orbitofrontal cortex drives predictive filtering of sensory responses

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

#neuroskyence

A line graph showing NSF grant awards made through 2/27/26 for fiscal year 2026 compared with grant awards for fiscal years 2021-2025.

NSF Update (Awards through 2/27/26)

Directorates to follow

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The impact is already hitting science agencies hard. The NIH—the world's largest public biomedical research funder—has had to rely on leftover stopgap funds.

New grant awards have slowed to a trickle — exacerbating the effects of a record-long shutdown in October.

(h/t @jeremymberg.bsky.social)

😂😂😂😂

"Post-Learning Offline Pauses Support Consolidation Beyond the Mind-Wandering State"
www.preprints.org/manuscript/2...

𝗧𝗵𝗿𝗲𝗮𝘁/𝗲𝗺𝗼𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗶𝘀 𝗱𝘆𝗻𝗮𝗺𝗶𝗰
So we model the dynamics.
Version of record of our paper is available.
#neuroskyence
elifesciences.org/articles/102...

CCN Proceedings submission deadline coming up soon!

Feb 9 - abstract and metadata
Feb 12 - full paper PDF

A multi-region recurrent circuit for evidence accumulation in rats Gupta et al. demonstrate that the rat prefrontal cortex and striatum jointly accumulate sensory evidence through recurrent, bidirectional communication rather than a feedforward hierarchy. Combining m...

Very cool work on how distributed, recurrent neural circuits cooperate to implement evidence accumulation. www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...

Another horrific ICE shooting in Minneapolis. Man wrestled to the ground by federal agents, then shot multiple times.

www.reddit.com/r/Minneapoli...

@startribune.com is there: www.startribune.com/ice-raids-mi...

AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage | Cory Doctorow AI is asbestos in the walls of our tech society, stuffed there by monopolists run amok. A serious fight against it must strike at its roots

A long, absolutely must-read article from Cory Doctorow: www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-i...

Wanna compare dynamics across neural data, RNNs, or dynamical systems? We got a fast and furious method🏎️
The 1st preprint of my PhD 🥳 fast dynamical similarity analysis (fastDSA):
📜: arxiv.org/abs/2511.22828
💻: github.com/CMC-lab/fast...
I’ll be @cosynemeeting.bsky.social - happy to chat 😉

🚨 New paper in @pnas.org to end 2025 with a bang!🚨

Behavioral, experiential, and physiological signatures of mind blanking
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

with Esteban Munoz-Musat, @arthurlecoz.bsky.social @corcorana.bsky.social, Laouen Belloli and Lionel Naccache

Illustration: Ana Yael.

1/n

Cortical field coupling (aka volume conduction) lamina-to-lamina (1) and column-to-column (2).

(1) www.jneurosci.org/content/41/3...

(2) www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Link? Would love to read.

Brain Surfaces of 70 primate species

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To predict the behaviour of a primate, would you rather base your guess on a closely related species or one with a similar brain shape? We looked at brains & behaviours of 70 species, you’ll be surprised!

🧵Thread on our new preprint with @r3rt0.bsky.social , doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Well done Swissuniversities! @snsf.ch et al. once again leading the charge (see previous special issue announcement).

Funders and institutes hold the cards. If they don't pay the profiteers, we researchers will just adapt.

We don't need Nature. Nature needs us.

#SciPub #ResearchIntegrity

Sure, it is still well defined that way. But the claim about internal/external thought associated with more/less neural activity in the DMN seems to be flipped now.

And here I thought naively that my uptick in citation in 2025 on Google Scholar was due to my terrific scholarly contributions. Turns out, EVERYONE I know has had an uptick in citation in 2025. 🤣🤣🤣🤣

Academic publishing is broken.

Anyone in the business of stringing words together is on notice.

Horrifying glimpse into a possible future of the scientific information ecosystem.

Fake papers cited dozens of times in real journals, and indexed in our most commonly used databases -- As this grows, it could become a corruption of the literature impossible to undo.

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#academicsky 🧠🟦

Wow. In fMRI, up is up and down is down, sometimes, but sometimes it's the other way around. This finding trashes the main claim on the default mode network, which states that it's brain areas have higher neural activity during internally oriented throught. Turns out, it's the other way around. 😂😂

Closing out my year with a journal editor shocker 🧵

Checking new manuscripts today I reviewed a paper attributing 2 papers to me I did not write. A daft thing for an author to do of course. But intrigued I web searched up one of the titles and that's when it got real weird...