📢📢 Announcing this year's conference on the Mathematics of Neuroscience & AI (Rome, 9-12th June). We’ve got a stellar line-up and venue, and invite everyone to join:
www.neuromonster.org
Renormalization in the brain?
With @andreasantoro.bsky.social and @jesseba.bsky.social we're organizing a workshop at @cosynemeeting.bsky.social (Lisbon, March 16) on how coarse-graining principles from physics can explain neural computation across scales. nplresearch.github.io/neurorenorm2...
Max Andrews @thatsjustlikeyouropinionman.com has converted the Epstein email drop into a searchable, visualized, network that allows you to explore relationships among the actors and examine the nature of their connections. You'll find D. Trump in the "yolk." 👏Max
epstein-doc-explorer-1.onrender.com
"'They’re spending more money than I would even tax them,' [Mamdani] said in an interview with MSNBC last week."
This is the message. Make it clear that these billionaires aren't just worried about losing money. They're worried about losing the ability to exchange their money for power.
Already counting down till next year ⏳
Packed room at our satellite!!
On wednesday, @jesseba.bsky.social @marilyngatica.bsky.social with @nicopedre.bsky.social organize Cobrains kgatica.github.io/CCS2025-CoBr....
and then we double down with @jesseba.bsky.social talking about adaptive networks in a learn-relearning generalization task in rodents vs artificial networks (Biological networks #2, 2/9, with @scarpino.bsky.social).
“The idea that taking walks, reading things unrelated to your research, and hanging out with strangers in a campus pub should be considered part of the serious process of thinking, but might well meet with skepticism in practice.”
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
- did not measure people's creativity performance by any reputable creativity task or measure, just measured the ESSAY content (after giving people different instructions)
- did not measure people's overall MEMORY ABILITY
- false on "brain activity," DIFFERENT activity is not "weaker"
it’s even more demoralizing when the history you’re repeating is history you were around for the first time
Without me, Trump would have lost the election, Dems would control the House and the Republicans would be 51-49 in the Senate.
This must have been what it felt like at the end of the first triumvirate. This is so cool, I love living through history.
Super, super excited to be here at the sixth annual conference on the Mathematics of Neuroscience and AI!
Hot takes/kind reminders
a) “the bitter lesson”’s promise of scale did not deliver wrt AI reasoning & higher cog functions—O3 hallucinates 2x more than O1
b) prediction is not understanding, hallucinating is worse
c) gen AI could help neuroAI but following latest AI trends is not a paradigm shift
This was so much fun!!!
I’m so excited to share our preprint on how brainstem neurons sense and integrate multiple body signals during food consumption. We imaged 1000s of neurons across the lateral parabrachial nucleus (LPBN) in behaving mice. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
m.youtube.com/watch?time_c...
I guess it’s homegrown crim of me to publicize my thoughts on Columbia rolling over so easily
Coinciding with it's "No" letter Harvard has refashioned its university homepage into essentially an advertisement for the social benefits of university research. This is the current front page.
We are rallying at noon at Cambridge Common for the leadership of the Harvard Corporation to stand up and stand with us as we defend higher education and democracy in the United States from an unprecedented attack.
Over 800 faculty have urged Harvard's leadership to "legally contest ... unlawful demands that threaten academic freedom and university self-governance." The Cambridge City Council has called on it to "stand up in defense of the values that are fundamental to both the University and our democracy."
MARCHING EVERYWHERE: The Largest Coordinated Protests in US History. A chart with detailed information about 8 different massive days of coordinated protest in U.S. history. Apologies that there is not room here to copy all the data. But the upshot is that today's Hands Off mobilization stands out for the number of locations where protests took place.
A map of the United States with a sea of red dots fully covering the blue background except in some of the most rural areas of the country. Beneath the map are the words "Map and List of Nationwide 'Hands Off' Protest Locations on April 5
For the data nerds out there, here's a chart of the largest coordinated protests in U.S. history from my 2018 book HOW TO READ A PROTEST
Today's "Hands Off" protests, in 1000+ locations around the country, rank as one of the very largest decentralized days of protests EVER.
If you’re upset about the chaos and corruption Trump is inflicting on your country—whether your focus is the nihilistic dismantling of government, the economy, our foreign relations, or his threats to the rule of law—please join the nationwide marches on April 5. Learn more here 👉
handsoff2025.com
If you are a faculty member at a US university, please consider signing this excellent petition asking our presidents, chancellors, etc to work together to defend our institutions from the direct attacks by Trump administration: sites.google.com/view/we-must...
I think some in the Senate have convinced themselves that the backlash to folding will be limited to “the left” and therefore ignorable.
Those people are deeply and profoundly misreading the moment and the stakes.
Virtually every swing district House Dem walked the plank to vote NO for a reason.
12/ Neuroscientists have been doing MechInterp on the brain for many decades now, and while access to the underlying system has been shallow for the brain vs. NNs, the theory is advanced and (we argue) could still be useful for understanding AI.
The paper: arxiv.org/abs/2502.12131
(End of thread)
11/ Finally, we asked: Does the RS behave like a dynamical system?
To test this, we teleported RS vectors to different positions in PCA space and observed their evolution.
Result? Early layers exhibit attractor-like behavior—pushing activations back toward their “natural” trajectory.
10/ To visualize global RS behavior, we trained a Compressing Autoencoder (CAE)—squashing activations into 2D.
The CAE finds low-dimensional population dynamics, which showed that early layers are harder to reconstruct, while later layers become lower-dimensional and more structured.
