Jonathan A. Michaels
jonathanamichaels.bsky.social
Jonathan A. Michaels
@jonathanamichaels.bsky.social
How do we move? I study brains and machines at York University (Assistant Professor). Full-time human.

Neural Control & Computation Lab
www.ncclab.ca
Everyone deserves an obituary, but this woman especially.
No joke: I got angry hate mail today for writing an obituary of a Black woman scientist—because the person felt she did didn’t deserve the recognition.

Which just makes me want to share it again: www.nature.com/articles/d41...
Gladys Mae West obituary: mathematician who pioneered GPS technology
She made key contributions to US cold-war science despite facing huge barriers as a Black woman.
www.nature.com
February 6, 2026 at 1:32 PM
Reposted by Jonathan A. Michaels
Discover @thetransmitter.bsky.social's Mentorship Directory, connecting mentors and mentees at all stages of their careers.

#neuroskyence

www.thetransmitter.org/mentorship-d...
Neuroscience Mentorship Program Directory
Discover neuroscience mentorship opportunities through this living directory, connecting mentors and mentees at all stages of their careers.
www.thetransmitter.org
February 5, 2026 at 8:07 PM
Why are we spending hundreds of millions of dollars on bringing in new people when we can't fund the ones we have?
13% success rates at #CIHR, is a really 87% fail rate for>4000 scientists. At a time when 🇨🇦 is investing millions to recruit more scientist into a broken funding environment. 🇨🇦, U need a strong science foundation 2 attract success. #CIHR, fix your science foundation, it is eroding in real time
February 4, 2026 at 3:25 AM
Reposted by Jonathan A. Michaels
#OTD in 1995, astronaut Eileen Collins became the first female pilot of a NASA space shuttle.

She piloted the Space Shuttle Discovery during mission STS-63, a mission that included the first-ever rendezvous between a US space shuttle & the Russian space station Mir. #WomenInSTEM #AstronautEnvy 🚀
February 3, 2026 at 2:11 PM
Reposted by Jonathan A. Michaels
February 1st. Finally
February 1, 2026 at 1:37 PM
Reposted by Jonathan A. Michaels
Great collboration from @mnlmrc.bsky.social: Multivoxel fMRI and neuropixel recordings show sensorimotor prediction errors in M1 / S1 in the input, but not in the spiking of output neurons!
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
With @andpru.bsky.social @jonathanamichaels.bsky.social @gribblelab.org
www.biorxiv.org
January 31, 2026 at 2:48 PM
While humans spontaneously dance to a beat, the evolutionary origins of this ability remain debated. Behavioral work has shown that primates can move to auditory rhythms after training.

Our question was: How does this association emerge in the brain?

www.biorxiv.org/content/10....
Reward-driven emergence of auditory pattern encoding in the primate motor system
The ability to anticipate rhythmic patterns is fundamental to human experience, enabling music appreciation, speech comprehension, and dancing in sync to music. How the brain learns to use acoustic information to guide motor behavior remains a key question whose neural underpinnings and evolutionary origins are debated, especially in non-human primates. To understand how brain areas involved in motor control naively respond to predictable tone patterns, we recorded large single neuron populations across primary somatosensory (S1), primary motor (M1), dorsal premotor (PMd), supplementary motor (SMA), pre-supplementary motor (preSMA) cortices, globus pallidus interna (GPi), and medial geniculate body (MGB) of a rhesus monkey. During passive listening (Experiment 1) with a reward only at the end of each trial, primarily the MGB, not motor areas, responded to the auditory tone patterns, ruling out the spontaneous entrainment of motor activity to auditory patterns. Almost all areas robustly
www.biorxiv.org
January 30, 2026 at 7:41 PM
Reposted by Jonathan A. Michaels
January 29, 2026 at 1:08 PM
If you're a member of the Society for the Neural Control of Movement, please vote in the upcoming Board Elections. I was nominated this year, but would honestly be very happy to see any of these people on the board!

ncm-society.org/ncm-elections/
NCM Elections - NCM Society
ncm-society.org
January 28, 2026 at 12:01 AM
A wonderful person.
January 27, 2026 at 4:55 AM
It snowed a lot.
January 26, 2026 at 3:37 AM
Reposted by Jonathan A. Michaels
The same can be true for AI companies.

Making students reliant on LLM tools to think and write makes them a customer for life.

www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-...
Google’s work in schools aims to create a ‘pipeline of future users,’ internal documents say
A major lawsuit revealed details of Google's business motivations to get its products into schools. A Google spokesperson said the documents "mischaracterize our work."
www.nbcnews.com
January 25, 2026 at 4:51 PM
Reposted by Jonathan A. Michaels
Really just the absolute floor of demands that ICE must be abolished, dismantled, and everyone involved with its creation held accountable.
January 24, 2026 at 4:56 PM
Reposted by Jonathan A. Michaels
This is Alex Pretti.

This morning he was murdered by ICE. Six ICE agents held him down and shot him at point blank range. Alex was a nurse and researcher at the VA.

Our thoughts are with his loved ones and we stand united in action calling for the abolishment of ICE.

#ScientistsAgainstICE
January 24, 2026 at 8:03 PM
Reposted by Jonathan A. Michaels
🚨🧵 Happy to share my new preprint “Sensory expectations and prediction error during feedback control in the human brain” with @gribblelab.org , @andpru.bsky.social , @jonathanamichaels.bsky.social and @diedrichsenjorn.bsky.social.

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
www.biorxiv.org
January 21, 2026 at 3:49 PM
Remembering Krishna Shenoy, who died 3 years ago today.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Krishna V. Shenoy (1968–2023) - Nature Neuroscience
Nature Neuroscience - Krishna V. Shenoy (1968–2023)
www.nature.com
January 21, 2026 at 2:34 PM
My copy of The Hobbit has a physical Thrór's map with moon letters (as Tolkien intended) that you can only see when held to the light.
January 19, 2026 at 3:53 AM
Reposted by Jonathan A. Michaels
This kind of messaging is intended to drown moms in research, risk, and responsibility.

The goal is to keep them so anxious and so busy that they can't work for pay--especially not in high-powered "mens" jobs--or get involved in any kind of efforts to push for progressive change.
HHS Secretary RFK Jr: "This idea that you should trust the experts, a good mother doesn't do that"
January 16, 2026 at 12:00 AM
The Neural Control and Computation Lab is seeking a skilled part-time software engineer in Toronto to lead the development of ATHENA (Automatically Tracking Hands Expertly with No Annotations), our open-source, Python-based toolbox for 3D markerless tracking!

www.yorku.ca/health/resea...
www.yorku.ca
January 13, 2026 at 2:52 PM
Reposted by Jonathan A. Michaels
CIAN had the honour of hosting Dr. Takashi Sato last Friday.
#Neuroscience
@jonathanamichaels.bsky.social
@bjorges.bsky.social
@jdcrawford.bsky.social
January 12, 2026 at 4:13 PM
Reposted by Jonathan A. Michaels
New: “Fears are growing that the number of protesters killed by Iranian security forces now reaches into the thousands…cell phone footage has emerged of truck-mounted machine guns strafing residential streets, hospitals swamped by shooting victims, and a morgue overwhelmed by hundreds of bodies”
Death Toll in Iran May Already Be in the Thousands
No precise toll can be ascertained, but a group estimates that protester deaths may have reached 6,000 through Saturday.
time.com
January 12, 2026 at 4:02 AM
Reposted by Jonathan A. Michaels
I don’t know how the protests in Iran will play out—no one does and be wary of anyone who claims otherwise—but I have absolute respect for the courage of the people participating.

May their bravery and fortitude be an inspiration to us all.
January 11, 2026 at 3:30 PM
Reposted by Jonathan A. Michaels
With some trepidation, I'm putting this out into the world:
gershmanlab.com/textbook.html
It's a textbook called Computational Foundations of Cognitive Neuroscience, which I wrote for my class.

My hope is that this will be a living document, continuously improved as I get feedback.
January 9, 2026 at 1:27 AM