The 6x US memory champion – Nelson Dellis – can memorize a deck of cards in 40 seconds and knows the first 10K digits of pi.
To figure out how, he let us peak inside his brain. Here is what we learned in our precision brain mapping study www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
youtube.com/shorts/MryMq...
The Portuguese cuisine and sunny weather are a pretty big bonus though. Could have been good fuel for the ranting.
Friday:
Friedrich Schuessler - [2-138] Innate development of continuous attractor networks by molecular axon guidance systems
Saturday:
Simone Ciceri - [3-056] Planning and hierarchical behaviours in homeostatic optimal control
Marcus Boon - [3-088] Mechanical problem solving in mice
Thursday:
@denisalevi.bsky.social - [1-097] Representational drift as a correlate of memory consolidation
@sofiaepsilva.bsky.social - [1-179] BMI adaptations decompose into global and local learning dynamics
📍🇵🇹 Excited for #cosyne2026! Come see my poster on Saturday if you want to talk drift.
My colleagues at @sprekeler.bsky.social's lab also have some great posters coming up:
#compneurosky
I tracked every keyword in 22 years of Cosyne abstracts to map how computational neuroscience evolved — from Bayesian brains to neural manifolds to LLMs — and where it's heading next.
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/...
Grateful to @timothyoleary.bsky.social for hosting and mentoring me during many fun and fruitful visits to work on this project with him and his lab, and to my other co-authors for all the support along the way (Mónika, Michael, @stenichele.bsky.social @sprekeler.bsky.social)
Network graphs showing how neurons interact redundantly and synergistically. The redundant information graph is on the left in red and shows strong interconnection among the most stable neurons, in the upper right quadrant. The synergistic information graph is on the right in green and shows many connections connecting the most stable quadrant to the rest of the network.
We found that neurons that share more information with the population tend to exhibit more stable tuning. High-stability neurons form redundantly connected cliques, and connect synergistically to other lower-stability neurons. Have a look at the paper to learn more about redundancy and synergy!
Out now in @plos.org CB: doi.org/10.1371/jour...
Neural representations of tasks change over time, even in the absence of changes in task performance. But neurons change tuning at different rates. How does a neuron's stability relate to its interactions with the population?
#compneuro #neuroskyence
Kristine's paper "Information theoretic measures of neural and behavioural coupling predict representational drift" is now available on PLOS Comp. Biology.
Link: doi.org/10.1371/jour...
This work was led by Kristine (former PhD student) while visiting University of Cambridge during her PhD.
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...
Let’s talk @storiesofwin.bsky.social. I’m flattered to be among their profiles (coming soon) & I want to elevate the team behind this terrific effort. /1
www.storiesofwin.org
