🔬🧠 Releasing the 1.0 version of #Suite2p and THE PAPER w/ @marius10p.bsky.social! Now with GPU acceleration. Want to use Suite2p but don’t have 100,000 neuron recordings? We show you how to get those with a standard 2p microscope #neuroscience #imaging #neuroAI www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Really interesting work on sequential activity in the odor system!
Democrats in the Senate must grow a spine. They can rein in this murderous regime next week. Why on Earth would they continue to fund this tyranny?
Call your senators now: indivisible.org/campaigns/ho...
It's difficult to know how motivated a fly is, and how motivated behaviors change with experience. To do this, we've been developing new ways to measure operant learning in flies, as described in our new Open-LA paper below.
Examples of sequences of activity seen in multiple regions of the brain
Sequences are everywhere! In every brain region. And are written in stone.
Invariant Activity Sequences Across the Mouse Brain.
Out today, by Célian Bimbard, with @kenneth-harris.bsky.social.
Based on data by Célian and by @intlbrainlab.bsky.social.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Most iPSC lines come from European donors. Now, two teams in Africa are studying neurodevelopment and neurodegeneration using iPSCs and organoids from African donors.
By Lauren Schenkman
www.thetransmitter.org/cellular-neu...
By the way, if you’re interested in working together on problems like this, I’m starting my lab at UCSF this summer. Get in touch if you’re interested in doing a postdoc! More info here: wj2.github.io/postdoc_ad (7/7)
When and why do modular representations emerge in neural networks?
@stefanofusi.bsky.social and I posted a preprint answering this question last year, and now it has been extensively revised, refocused, and generalized. Read more here: doi.org/10.1101/2024... (1/7)
Caleb Watney @calebwatney NSF is launching one of the most ambitious experiments in federal science funding in 75 years. The program is called Tech Labs, and the goal is to invest ~$1 billion to seed new institutions of science and technology for the 21st century. Instead of funding projects, the NSF will fund teams. I'm in the @WSJ today with a piece on why this matters (gift link): wsj.com/opinion/ scienc... Here's the basic case: 1) Most federal science funding takes the form of small, incremental, project-based grants to individual scientists at universities. 2) The typical NSF grant is ~ $250k/year to a professor with a couple of grad students and modest equipment over a few years. This is a
Caleb Watney of IFP talking about why academia and science sucks.
Broken record here, but we can’t have this discussion without talking about agendas and conflicts of interest.
IFP is funded by tech and rightwing billionaires who want to privatize science. 1/
"pattern completion circuits in lower cortical areas may reinforce activity patterns that match prior expectations..."
Yes. That's active filtering. Sensory cortical recurrent networks learn the structure of the sensory world.
New paper from Shin, Adesnik et al. 🧠🤖🧪
Does predictive coding work in SPACE or in TIME? Most neuroscientists assume TIME, i.e. neurons predict their future sensory inputs. We show that in visual cortex predictive coding actually works across SPACE, just like the original Rao+Ballard theory #neuroscience
www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/...
The two key studies of the International Brain Laboratory @intlbrainlab.bsky.social are out today!
A brain-wide map of neural activity during complex behaviour
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Brain-wide representations of prior information in mouse decision-making
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
My first paper with @naoshigeuchida.bsky.social is finally out in @natcomms.nature.com ! rdcu.be/eACGf
TL;DR: asymmetric learning rates can be induced by shifts in tonic dopamine giving rise to pessimistic/optimistic biases in agents or animals undergoing reinforcement learning .
Thrilled to share our new Adesnik lab paper!!
Using holography in excitatory & inhibitory neurons, we reveal how a single cortical circuit can both complete and cancel predictable sensory activity, sharpening representations
📄https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.08.02.668307v1
🧵
When neurons change, but behavior doesn’t: Excitability changes driving representational drift
New preprint of work with Christian Machens: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Certainly true! These two things are related but not the same. This is actually a bit of a misstatement in the article as in the study we don’t look at response strength but at neurons based on their visual information (measured by ROC) metrics and find that they do not appear to be weighted more.
Oh! Seems like a big deal, this. Makes sense too. Like, how would the rest of the brain know which neurons to sample, and if it did already know what the stimulus is, then it wouldn't need those neurons' signals to classify it.
Thanks to @thetransmitter.bsky.social and @ldattaro.bsky.social for this coverage of our recent paper!
This is a simplistic but commonly-held view about how science actually works.
Doing rigorous& impactful science often means ignoring (some) null results.
Intermediate results, null and positive, arise on the way to a publishable contribution, and not all are perfectly rigorous.🧪#neuroscience 1/
A new study led by @timothysit.bsky.social reveals that different layers of mouse V1 integrate visual and non-visual signals differently.
Activity is dominated by vision (or spontaneous fluctuations) in L2/3 and by movement in L5. This leads to different geometries.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Reminder that we still have time to fight this! This bill is being crafted & debated in the coming days and weeks. Organize NOW to do outreach and get people in your neighborhood contacting their reps. @standupforscience.bsky.social has resources. Instructions for Postcards-for-Science are here:
a still of mahmoud khalil as he exited ice detention. he’s wearing a long sleeve khaki button up and a white and black keffiyeh wrapped around his neck. he’s got a big smile on his face and his fist raise in the air, defiant and proud.
Mahmoud Khalil is free.
Breaking: The Trevor Project received a stop-work order last night on its contract with the national 988 suicide prevention hotline. The Trump administration is eliminating the option for LGBTQ callers to the hotline to press 3 and connect with someone who specializes in LGBTQ mental health.
The firing of neural populations is high-dim even if their subthreshold activity is low-dim! This work by @bio-emergent.bsky.social and @haydari.bsky.social shows how, with a solvable model, a data analysis technique, and data from mouse visual cortex: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
New #NeuroAI #compneurosky preprint! To better understand how target-directed learning works in the brain, we sought to engineer an artificial neural network capable of solving complex image classification tasks that comprises only experimentally-supported biological building blocks. (1/15)
We're now appreciating how the immune and nervous systems communicate across body & brain, and there's still more to explore!
Had a fun time co-writing this with some amazing immunologists and neuroscientists @nickmroz.bsky.social @arimolofskylab.bsky.social @annamolofskylab.bsky.social 😎🧠
But also we try to be clearer on this in the paper but it’s hard in short form- we show that visual/task coding properties don’t determine read out but read out based on projection target is possible. I’d love to test that directly in the future!
Yeah this is an important point. Recurrent excitation in V1 could mean that neurons are recruiting more neurons and so they recruit neurons with all the important projection targets. I believe the great majority of L2/3 neurons connect to L5 which is an important output route.
But I wouldn’t be surprised if we still find the strategy is a bit different than that predicted by decoders! Like Jin et al 2019 showing that mice don’t seem to use negative weights on anti tuned neurons in their read out for orientation discrimination, even though that’s probably helpful
I’d speculate I’d see the same in other discrimination tasks where averaging regardless of neural vis properties is viable. But different oris of equal contrast stimuli drive very similar average V1 activity, so that presumably needs different strategy. Marshel et al 2019 also supports this idea.
