@modirshanechi
Postdoc at Helmholtz Munich (Schulz lab) and MPI for Biological Cybernetics (Dayan lab) || Ph.D. from EPFL (Gerstner lab) || Working on computational models of learning and decision-making in the brain; https://sites.google.com/view/modirsha
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!
Excited to share our new paper to be published in Neuron!
With Valentin Schmutz @bio-emergent.bsky.social and Wulfram Gerstner @gerstnerlab.bsky.social, we explore how circuit structure in RNNs shapes network computation and single-neuron responses.
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
New @sfb1528.bsky.social and @rtg2906-curiosity.bsky.social publication. We show that mothers are worthy of the pedagogical assumption: they preferentially sample information that fills their child's knowledge gaps and children learn best from maternal sampling: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
After several years of work, my lab is starting to put out our first papers on learning in a unicellular organism (Stentor coeruleus).
Here we show evidence for a form of associative learning in Stentor:
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
🚨New pre-print🚨
osf.io/preprints/ps...
What if the relationship between smartphone use and mental health depends not just on specific harmful or beneficial activities, but also on how users transition between activities?
One week left to apply!
Why are some males caring toward infants while others are neglectful or abusive? I'm so pleased to share work that my colleagues and I @princeton.edu have just published @nature.com (an explanatory thread to follow!) (1/8)
This gene editing approach specifically targets a single nucleotide corrected behavioural abnormalities in an animal model of Snijders Blok–Campeau syndrome
go.nature.com/40j3rX3
🚨 Hiring in Munich 🇩🇪: 2 open-topic PhD positions in human & machine learning (TVöD E13 80%).
Start ~June 2026 (flexible). Deadline: March 2, 2026.
Apply/info: hcai-munich.com/PhD_Job_Ad.pdf
Reposts appreciated 🙏
I just did the dumbest thing of my entire career to prove a much more serious point.
I tricked ChatGPT and Google, and made them tell other users I’m a competitive hot-dog-eating world champion
People are using this trick on a massive scale to make AI tell you lies. I’ll explain how I did it
Come and join us in beautiful Munich! 🧠
We have a friendly, collaborative, and inclusive environment, where scientific rigour and curiosity are celebrated. 🎉
#psychology #AI #intelligence #cogsci #neurosky #neuroskyence #ScienceCareer #AcademicJobs #Researcher #ResearchOpportunities #JobSearch
Come and join us in beautiful Munich! 🧠
We have a friendly, collaborative, and inclusive environment, where scientific rigour and curiosity are celebrated. 🎉
#psychology #AI #intelligence #cogsci #neurosky #neuroskyence #ScienceCareer #AcademicJobs #Researcher #ResearchOpportunities #JobSearch
Iranians are experiencing a collective trauma. Thousands have been killed/injured in recent events, the economy is crippled & the threat of a wider conflict is real. This is especially difficult for those living in Iran, as many have lost (or fear losing) loved ones. www.nature.com/articles/d41...
Our model jointly learns object embeddings and idiosyncratic weightings of psychological dimensions.
The results show improved accuracy on hold-out data as well as reliably measurable dimensional weights (up to ~8 dimensions) and summary stats thereof
Do people's internal representations of natural objects differ? We (@ericschulz.bsky.social) show so by incorporating idiosyncrasies into neural nets to create better models of human behavior. We also reliably extract idiosyncrasies and map them to demographics. More: osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/pxt9a
These days I drink Iranian tea everyday so I don't forget.
Media coverage of these events have been very poor in my internet bubble so far.
New report from doctors shows the Iranian regime slaughtered 16,500 protesters during the communications shutdown.
“If Trump chooses not to act, his encouragement of the Iranian people to rise up, his repeated promises of U.S. support, and his subsequent abandonment of them will be remembered as one of the most callous examples of presidential betrayal in modern history”
www.theatlantic.com/internationa...
estimates of the death toll in Iran is now >16000
With some trepidation, I'm putting this out into the world:
gershmanlab.com/textbook.html
It's a textbook called Computational Foundations of Cognitive Neuroscience, which I wrote for my class.
My hope is that this will be a living document, continuously improved as I get feedback.
I don't know enough to have my own view on this paper or response, but to me this is science social media at its best: doing post publication peer review of papers that make big claims. Bravo @alexanderhuth.bsky.social
This paper had a pretty shocking headline result (40% of voxels!), so I dug into it, and I think it is wrong. Essentially: they compare two noisy measures and find that about 40% of voxels have different sign between the two. I think this is just noise!
Please repost to get the word out! @nkgarg.bsky.social and I are excited to present a personalized feed for academics! It shows posts about papers from accounts you’re following bsky.app/profile/pape...
🚀 Deadline for this is this Sunday! 🏃♀️
Interested in the latest advances in neuroscience (neural dynamics and internal models) and how they can be leveraged to build smarter, adaptive AI?
➡️ My first real solo piece 🖤🫶 @natneuro.nature.com
rdcu.be/eWVmA
Way back in 1999, Kenji Doya sketched a big picture theory of the brain:
1️⃣The cerebellum is specialized for supervised learning
2️⃣The basal ganglia are for reinforcement learning
3️⃣The cerebral cortex is for unsupervised learning
How does this hold up in 2026? www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
New Perspective from myself, Sarah Heilbronner and @myoo.bsky.social . “Rethinking the centrality of brain areas in understanding functional organization” in Nature Neuroscience. 🧵
rdcu.be/eVZ1A
Predicted hair cortisol concentration (pg/mg) by birth mode
A trending PNAS article in the last week is “Evolved birth physiology meets modern birth practice: Sustained effects of planned cesarean delivery on child hair cortisol in Brazil.” Explore now: https://ow.ly/Lj1550XNIgO
For more trending articles, visit https://ow.ly/oIyQ50XNIcn.
Postdoctoral research position in #ComputationalPsychiatry and #EEG as part of relmed.ac.uk trial testing reinforcement learning as biomarker for antidepressant treatment response. www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/... @uclbrainscience.bsky.social @mikebrowning.bsky.social @relmed.bsky.social
Our paper is finally out in Nature Human Behavior!!
@epfl-brainmind.bsky.social
