Richard Gast

The Dude abides. I don't know about you but I take comfort in that. It's good knowin' he's out there. The Dude. Takin' 'er easy for all us sinners.

Happy #LebowskiDay to all who celebrate

You probably saw this already, but just in case - there is a search for an Independent young PI to lead the EEG Lab at University of Coimbra, Portugal

#DynamicsClub in March: 𝗥𝗶𝗰𝗵𝗮𝗿𝗱 𝗚𝗮𝘀𝘁 @rgast.bsky.social will share his work on neural heterogeneity and network function (PMID: 38198531, 41475350) pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41475350/

March 6 (Friday) at 11am PT / 2pm ET
Join us in person at UCLA or on Zoom: lingyunxiong.github.io/DynamicsClub/

Vectorized instructive signals in cortical dendrites - Nature Mice learning a neurofeedback brain–computer interface task show neuron-specific teaching signals in cortical dendrites, consistent with a vectorized solution for credit assignment in the brain.

This paper on how the brain may do gradient descent is very cool: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Delighted to see that @ohbmossig.bsky.social has confirmed dates for the 2026 @ohbmofficial.bsky.social brain hack!
ohbm.github.io/hackathon2026/ 11-13 June Thur-Sat, in the usual 3 days before the meeting, at the Campus Victoire, University of Bordeaux

Looking forward to it!

me and the peer reviewer i suggested

We can do without them: how the UG is cutting ties with Big Tech By 2030, the university aims to be digitally independent. And that’s not a pipe dream, say proponents of the plan.

University of Groningen: ⭐ no more big-tech by 2030 ⭐ Google Workplace 🚫 Windows 🚫 MS Office 🚫 ChatGPT 🚫 A huge challenge! Meeting culture won't get us there. Dedication and focus will. 💪🚀 Let's get to work.
ukrant.nl/magazine/we-... @rug.nl @rug-gmw.bsky.social #science

Alchemists be like

Neural mechanisms underlying intracortical microstimulation for sensory restoration Nature Biomedical Engineering - Intracortical microstimulation can elicit artificial sensations in persons who have lost sensation due to neurological injury or disease. This Review discusses...

Just out in @nature.com BME: Our Review unpacks intracortical microstimulation: axons, not somas, drive activation; direct + indirect pathways shape perception; parameters interact with neuron type, layer, and network; long-term use limited by neural depression & tissue response. 🧠⚡

rdcu.be/eZbTz

My left hand with Avagadro’s Constant

Anyone have a thought about this weird mol on my hand?

Useful browser extension to help assess issues in papers:

- retraction check
- PubPeer comments check
- tortured phrases check
- fake references check

We need more tools in this spirit to help make sense of science.

Thank you so much @markcembrowski.bsky.social, your own reviews on the subject of neural heterogeneity have provided excellent starting conditions for our work!

thank you very much, David Dahmen, Axel Hutt, @giacomoi.bsky.social, @antihebbiann.bsky.social, Jeremie Lefebvre, Luca Mazzucato, Adilson E. Motter, Rishikesh Narayanan, @melikapayvand.bsky.social, and Henrike Planert, this has been wonderful learning experience, and I hope it serves the field!

Another contribution to this question is the study of how different aspects of neural network heterogeneity impact the dynamic and computational properties of these networks. This is what my co-authors and I are attempting in this perspective.

Electrophysiological classification of human layer 2–3 pyramidal neurons reveals subtype-specific synaptic interactions - Nature Neuroscience Using multineuron patch clamp in human cortex, the authors uncover four functional subtypes of pyramidal neurons with distinct morphology and subtype-specific synaptic interactions, revealing conserve...

See recent work from Henrike Planert, one of our co-authors, for example www.nature.com/articles/s41..., as well as the work by @markcembrowski.bsky.social and @nspruston.bsky.social on the relationship between transcriptomic and electrophysiological cell identity www.nature.com/articles/s41...

It's a fundamental question of neuroscience how brain function emerges from its diverse networks of neurons. One contribution to this question is to characterize neurons in terms of their electrophysiology, morphology, etc., including the relationships between those properties.

How heterogeneity shapes dynamics and computation in the brain No two neurons are the same, yet models often treat neural populations as pools of identical and interchangeable elements. Here, Dahmen et al. highlight recent theoretical advances that reveal the imp...

At the Bernstein Conference 2024, Jeremie Lefebvre and I organized a workshop on the computational consequences of neural heterogeneity. Now, slightly more than a year later, we funneled the emerging discussions into a perspective piece: www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...

Greetings from Kyiv,
where the night brought missiles and drones.
Explosions still continue this morning.

Emergency power outages.
Heating problems.
Residential buildings hit.

Christmas Procession in Kyiv.

View from the bell tower of St. Michael's Monastery.

I want the world to see this.

anyone got any advice on the following situation? I wrote and did a big chunk of the admin for a large MRC grant which also also awarded. I am named in the Staff breakdown on the grant as "researcher co-lead" with 100%FTE, and I am mentioned by name as "postdoctoral researcher Maria Niedernhuber"

The Tasselled Wobbegong is a master of disguise that can eat a fish almost as big as itself in one gulp. It's classified as a shark, but when it lays on the sea floor it looks like a harmless rug if you manage to see it. But with powerful jaws and sharp teeth they are no fish to mess with.

This is such a great visualization of the carbon cycle and of how humanity has completely altered it within a geological instant, by @rarohde.bsky.social:

Relatable Corvid

This is a scandal.

Public universities should be banned from paying these insane buyouts for college coaches.

No pro sports teams are paying $33 million to fire their incompetent coach, so why are colleges paying this kind of money?!?

And I swear, once again, this is not dunking on kids. We are seeing this at all levels--even grad students. AI + social media has had a profound impact on how we think and process our world, and we can't stop to reflect on it, because billionaires keep hurling addictive tech at us.

Neural dynamics outside task-coding dimensions drive decision trajectories through transient amplification Most behaviors involve neural dynamics in high-dimensional activity spaces. A common approach is to extract dimensions that capture task-related variability, such as those separating stimuli or choice...

“Our findings challenge the conventional focus on low-dimensional coding subspaces as a sufficient framework for understanding neural computations, demonstrating that dimensions previously considered task-irrelevant and accounting for little variance can have a critical role in driving behavior.”

Hello New York! Giving a Swartz seminar at NYU today, come say hi!
as.nyu.edu/departments/...

It's the number they posted on a white board and it includes some couple of hundred online participants. But > 20k in person, if I remember it correctly

#SfN25

Tonight was a very bad night.