NIH FY2025 funding data finally emerges on RePORT drugmonkey.wordpress.com/2026/03/06/n...
06.03.2026 22:55
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NIH FY2025 funding data finally emerges on RePORT drugmonkey.wordpress.com/2026/03/06/n...
Very happy to announce that my student Zhengyang Wang successfully defended his dissertation, today. Congratulations Dr. Wang!
New preprint from the lab.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Discovering macroscale functional organization on the structure of brain-like recurrent neural networks
Can't make it to #NJ12? Wherever you are, donate to my campaign!!. Wherever you are in the country, if you want to fight gerrymandering, defend science, and rebuild democracy, I'm on your side!
Donate:
secure.actblue.com/donate/sam4nj
training. I found this document to be a really useful starting point:
code.claude.com/docs/en/best...
My wife's company has started training their employees in these methods, and I am going to get my lab trainingas well. If anyone knows of any good resources, please post them! 8/8
I made a map of 3.4 million Bluesky users - see if you can find yourself!
bluesky-map.theo.io
I've seen some similar projects, but IMO this seems to better capture some of the fine-grained detail
Aurora over Swedish Forest
apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap22032...
👇New biosketch requirement update.
“After evaluating the number and types of recent technical inquiries we received to both the SciENcv and eRA Service Desks, we recognize the difficulties these issues have had on the community’s ability to comply with the original timeline of January 25, 2026.”
👇
Congress toyed with the idea of explicitly prohibiting multi-year funding of NIH grants - which severely cut down the number of awards last year - but in the end, it didn't go through. Expect paylines to be only moderately better this year.
www.statnews.com/2026/01/20/n...
NIH receives a 0.9% increase in the appropriation bill the House and Senate voted that now awaits the President's signature. Below inflation - but better than the 40% decrease the President's budget requested.
www.aaas.org/news/fy-2026...
gutterballing
super surveillance
hedgehogging
obsessing over tiny predictors
I've been on the internet since the 90s and this remains one of the very best things I've encountered here. Thanks @mastroianni.bsky.social for all your writing but especially this, you beautiful bouncing baby bog boy. "So you wanna de-bog yourself" www.experimental-history.com/p/so-you-wan...
It won't actually exist for another month or so, but because it now 'exists' on amazon, I'll humbly observe that, after working through this book, your student/trainee would be able to read and understand all but two or three papers in this week's J. Neurosci. Check it out:
Repeatable, low-drift recordings in behaving non-human primates using flexible microelectrodes
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Our results provide a critical confirmation of the Standard Model of Working memory.
Many thanks to my students who did these challenging experiments, and particularly the co-first authors, Rana Mozumder and Zhengyang Wang (end)
Had persistent activity truly been an artifact, the existence of gaps and off-states would have greatly degraded the performance of simultaneous populations during the delay period (14/10)
Furthermore, this decrease was present in all task epochs, including the stimulus presentation and response periods, rather than the delay period alone. We speculate that off states are caused by variations in neuromodulatory tone (13/10)
When we calculated decoding accuracy of populations of neurons sampled from different trials (or “pseudo-populations”, commonly used in neurophysiology) and tested them with neurons recorded simultaneously, only a subtle performance decrease was evident (12/10)
However, we also show that such off-states are relative decreases in firing rate rather than absolute “gaps” in spiking. Activity across the network continued to maintain information about the stimulus being remembered even during off states (11/10)
A recent study has revealed off-states in the activity of prefrontal neurons during working memory (nature.com/articles/s41...) . We replicated this finding and additionally show that such off-states are coordinated across the prefrontal and posterior parietal cortex (10/10)
Such persistence is only evident for stimuli that are optimal for the recording site. Picking a suboptimal stimulus will not produce such asynchronously elevated firing, which is not an argument that persistent activity is not present somewhere else in the PFC (9/10)
In this article we document “The Asynchronous State” of Working Memory. In single trials, individual neurons may not exhibit persistent activity, however populations of ~100 neurons are sufficient to generate activity elevated above the baseline for the entire delay period (8/10)
However empirical validation was lacking until now.
Enter modern neurophysiological techniques, e.g. Neuropixel recordings from primates (7/10)
We have argued that persistent activity does not imply a perfectly regular firing rate at the level of single neurons. The collective activity of multiple neurons is what maintains information. See this review for a more detailed explanation: www.jneurosci.org/content/38/3...
Alternative theories have sprung out, instead, suggesting that “activity-silent” mechanisms allow information to persist over periods when firing ceases (5/10)
This has led to the idea that observed persistent activity is an “artifact of averaging”: it only becomes evident when firing rate from multiple trials is averaged together, creating a mere illusion of persistence (4/10)
A thorn in the side of this theory, however, has been that the firing of cortical neurons is quite irregular; individual neurons rarely exhibit continuous, uninterrupted firing throughout the entire delay period of working memory tasks (3/10)
The neural basis of working memory has been debated. What we like to call “The Standard Model” of working memory posits that persistent discharges generated by neurons in the prefrontal cortex constitute the neural correlate of working memory (2/10)
New paper from the lab: "Asynchronous firing and off states in working memory maintenance"
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
