John Pearson

"Evolution Evolving is a landmark book written by stellar scientists who have brought together numerous interesting and relevant examples that show why development matters for evolution."

Thankyou @kampourakisk.bsky.social for your wonderful review in American Biology Teacher. See shorturl.at/2Gso8

First whole-brain recording of social sound processing in a vertebrate. Surprises start in the hindbrain; thalamus gates conspecific calls; male and female brains diverge downstream. Work by @joerghenninger.bsky.social, @mh123.bsky.social sky.social and team. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Psyched to announce our COSYNE workshop on social behaviors (Mar 17th, Cascais). We have a stellar lineup of speakers on topics from animal cooperation and aggression to the social dynamics of LLM agents.

Co-organized with Libby Zhang (Allen Institute + UW).
cosyne-social-behavior.github.io

Going to #COSYNE2026? Don't miss our tutorial on our open neural dynamics data resources.

🗓️ March 12, 9:15-10:15am
🧑‍🏫 Presented by @sejdevries.bsky.social
🔗 More info: https://www.cosyne.org/tutorials

@cosynemeeting.bsky.social

This paper has now been published in PRX Life! journals.aps.org/prxlife/abst...

In this work I developed a scaling theory for spiking neural populations using a renormalization group approach -- the 1st, to my knowledge, applied to models of spiking neurons. See the thread for a brief summary.

Biological Laboratory | LEGO® Ideas This is a two-floor realistic Biological Laboratory building. In this design, I try to tell stories about biologists, introduce biology concepts to general publ…

I just made an account and voted for this biology laboratory made of LEGO to "promote biological research and inspire more people into the world of biology". They need 10K votes. Reposting and/or voting below would be helpful. 🤗
beta.ideas.lego.com/product-idea...

The deadline to apply for the Brain Prize Cajal summer course in Computational Neuroscience has been extended to March 9! We’re excited for you to join us in sunny Lisbon! Please do not hesitate to send in an application and learn about computational neuroscience! @gjorjulijana.bsky.social

An array of 9 purple discs on a blue background. Figure from Hinnerk Schulz-Hildebrandt.

A nice shift in perceived colour between central and peripheral vision. The fixated disc looks purple while the others look blue.

The effect presumably comes from the absence of S-cones in the fovea.

From Hinnerk Schulz-Hildebrandt:
arxiv.org/pdf/2509.115...

The thing you have to understand about the 80s is that the Harlem Globetrotters could show up in anything at any time and nobody would bat an eye.

We need more <gestures broadly> tokens in our training sets.

Yes! Beautiful new work from a dream team!

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

Mostly, I think we undervalue the importance of *trying more ideas faster*.

I am not here with a policy recommendation, but I think a misguided framing of studies as confirmatory and not exploratory (mostly for publication reasons) has resulted in a mandate for meta-science artifacts that presume every result needs to live forever. 3/n

I value code sharing, data sharing (especially as a computationalist!), and reproducible workflows, but we have to be honest that these are taxes on our time, and the primary benefit is from the small number of high-impact studies that will be returned to over and over again. 2/n

It's also worth saying that this is one of the hardest lessons I learned as a new PI: Maintenance is real! Projects are easy to start and hard to hand off. Technology that changes fast accelerates obsolescence. I think there's real value in trying ideas, letting some fail, and moving on. 1/n

True, but even with well done software, dependency changes, as well as shifts in CI infrastructure, docs builds, and the rest really do add up. I bet most scientific packages have a shelf life of no more than two years of “just works” if not maintained. But C and FORTRAN from the 80s still compile!

The age and experience discrepancy between (mostly junior) scicomm folks and (more senior) PIs explains a lot of this. Seeing how quickly projects rot when lab members leave disincentives any product that requires continual maintenance. Same goes double for software.

The Journal of Neuroscience: 46 (8)

Very excited to share a Special Collection at the Journal of Neuroscience (@sfnjournals.bsky.social) - Central Questions for Social Neuroscience Research. This issue includes some of the latest perspectives on social neuroscience research. Please check it out!👇

www.jneurosci.org/content/46/8

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...

This study is super cool (connecting ecology and perception), that suggest some aspects of animal's perception (temporal precision) is shaped by their environment (which somehow resonates w our proposal on internal foraging perspectives on perceptual selection www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...)

Come be our colleague! The Center for Neural Science at NYU is accepting applications at the Assistant Professor level in computational neuroscience and/or neural engineering apply.interfolio.com/182074

my local park is full of hundreds of snow sculptures and someone has been adding museum labels

learningfromscratch march 16th, workshop day 1 @ cosyne 2026

Excited to be co-organising a #cosyne2026 workshop with Alison Comrie on 'algorithms for learning from scratch'! With a great line-up of speakers, we'll be tackling the question of what processes enable naive biological & artificial agents to adapt to new situations. Info here: tinyurl.com/4u8enf7k

NYU's Center for Neural Science is seeking a faculty candidate that would be jointly appointed with our Tandon School of Engineering. We are looking for post-doc applicants with neuroengineering or computational backgrounds.

apply.interfolio.com/182074

OpenAI Furious DeepSeek Might Have Stolen All the Data OpenAI Stole From Us OpenAI shocked that an AI company would train on someone else's data without permission or compensation.

Well, Steve [Jobs]… I think it’s more like we both had this rich neighbour named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it.
— Bill Gates

Joe Gall was a very prominent cell biologist, and also famous for being a mentor to many female PhD students who went on to have very successful careers
this little anecdote really says it all
pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

a black and white dog is sitting on a couch with its tongue sticking out . ALT: a black and white dog is sitting on a couch with its tongue sticking out .

👁️The retina — strikingly conserved across vertebrates, but an oddity among bilaterians!

So how did it evolve?

With @mikebok.bsky.social, @neurofishh.bsky.social and @denilsson.bsky.social, we argue that retinal complexity may 𝑝𝑟𝑒𝑑𝑎𝑡𝑒 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑒𝑦𝑒 𝑖𝑡𝑠𝑒𝑙𝑓.

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
1/n

New lab paper in #ScienceAdvances: we identify a modality-common selective-attention signal in noncholinergic #BasalForebrain (BF) “bursting” neurons, distinct from the modality-specific attention signals typically described in corticothalamic circuits. 1/n
www.science.org/doi/full/10....