Studying sleep and navigation in 🧠s and 💻s.
Wu Tsai Investigator, Assistant Professor of Neuroscience at Yale.
An emergent property of a few billion neurons, their interactions with each other and the world over ~1 century.
My group will study offline learning in the sleeping brain: how neural activity self-organizes during sleep and the computations it performs. 🧵
IMO the 'jingle-jangle' fallacy is a majorly underappreciated source of confusion in many fields. In my field (sleep/memory), we have issues of a similar scale re:
-What is a "sleep spindle"?
-Correlations between "sleep stages" and "memory performance"
1/2
#sleeppeeps
In 100 articles we found 244 different ways of scoring it, 177 were never reused. Correlations between them range -.99 to .99.
At the same time, we show meta-analyses combine these results as if they’re equivalent.
IMO the 'jingle-jangle' fallacy is a majorly underappreciated source of confusion in many fields. In my field (sleep/memory), we have issues of a similar scale re:
-What is a "sleep spindle"?
-Correlations between "sleep stages" and "memory performance"
1/2
#sleeppeeps
As in: their first project was to decide and write the ChatGPT policy for the class.
Here's what happened:
As in: their first project was to decide and write the ChatGPT policy for the class.
Here's what happened:
2. We have radical uncertainty about the future. There is no sense in giving up in advance.
3. We have agency over the future. If you don't like what's happening, work to change what is happening.
I would love to hear from mentors about advice they’re giving to trainees/ colleagues.
2. We have radical uncertainty about the future. There is no sense in giving up in advance.
3. We have agency over the future. If you don't like what's happening, work to change what is happening.
2) is this allowed at NIH? 🤔
3) writing a modeling grant is always interesting because you have hypotheses that are implicit in your model, which you need to justify, and hypotheses you’re going to use the model to test, which you need to state and how and why.
2) is this allowed at NIH? 🤔
3) writing a modeling grant is always interesting because you have hypotheses that are implicit in your model, which you need to justify, and hypotheses you’re going to use the model to test, which you need to state and how and why.
compneurosci.com/Neuro4Pros/i...
It was great! Now we want to know if you'd be interested in participating if we did this again this year?
Let us know!
The most exciting discussions came from asking: “The field has a real challenge connecting cells and circuits to cognition, behavior, and ultimately disorders. Why do you think that’s so hard and what can we do about it?”
Thank you @simonwheeler.bsky.social!
The most exciting discussions came from asking: “The field has a real challenge connecting cells and circuits to cognition, behavior, and ultimately disorders. Why do you think that’s so hard and what can we do about it?”
If the purpose is to make new observations (to inform models), then after.
But neuro tends to be pretty bad at separating the two, and stats or model fits sometimes become tautologies
If the purpose is to make new observations (to inform models), then after.
But neuro tends to be pretty bad at separating the two, and stats or model fits sometimes become tautologies
however a few times now I have had pushback from collaborators/reivewers suggesting it would be better to do the data analysis first, then the modelling.
thoughts?
however a few times now I have had pushback from collaborators/reivewers suggesting it would be better to do the data analysis first, then the modelling.
thoughts?
theoreticalneuroscience.no/thn36
Manifold analysis has changed our thinking on how cortex works. One of the pioneers of this modelling approach explains.
Just to keep this going 😁
1️⃣The cerebellum is specialized for supervised learning
2️⃣The basal ganglia are for reinforcement learning
3️⃣The cerebral cortex is for unsupervised learning
How does this hold up in 2026? www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Just to keep this going 😁
1️⃣The cerebellum is specialized for supervised learning
2️⃣The basal ganglia are for reinforcement learning
3️⃣The cerebral cortex is for unsupervised learning
How does this hold up in 2026? www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...