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
Claude Code is incredible, but if you push it far you will see it very quickly gets stuck in loops and I become its therapist.
February 12, 2026 at 2:14 PM
Just wait until Schmidhuber discovers this thread.
February 6, 2026 at 9:25 PM
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
Congrats!!
February 3, 2026 at 11:09 PM
Don’t know if these things count since it’s debatable if they share anything in common with a human mind
February 3, 2026 at 2:17 PM
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
I’m not convinced
January 31, 2026 at 2:08 PM
Huge congratulations to first author Sujaya Neupane for leading this effort, and to our collaborators at Western University – Jessica Grahn, Andrew Pruszynski, Mehrdad Kashefi, and Rhonda Kersten, for their ideas, expertise, and support.
January 30, 2026 at 7:41 PM
Strikingly, this encoding persisted in the GPi even after rewards were withdrawn, suggesting that the basal ganglia could act as an interface where extrinsic rewards are transformed into 'intrinsic value', effectively unmasking latent audiomotor connections.
January 30, 2026 at 7:41 PM
However, once tones were paired with reward, a profound reorganization occurred: robust encoding emerged across the motor network, particularly in PMd and globus pallidus interna (GPi).
January 30, 2026 at 7:41 PM
We found that motor areas do not spontaneously respond to auditory patterns during passive listening, but care a lot about trial structure and reward.
January 30, 2026 at 7:41 PM
Using high-density Neuropixels probes, we recorded from neural populations across the motor and auditory systems of a rhesus macaque – first during passive listening to see how these circuits respond to auditory patterns.
January 30, 2026 at 7:41 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