Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Jesseba Fernando @jesseba.bsky.social · 29d

Already counting down till next year ⏳

Giulio Pergola @giuliopergola.bsky.social · 29d

Great time at @css-conference.bsky.social in Siena 🇮🇹!
Spoke on #schizophrenia risk genes in dynamic co-expression networks across brain development.

Thanks to @nicopedre.bsky.social, @marilyngatica.bsky.social and @jesseba.bsky.social for the #CoBrain satellite on complex systems in neuroscience👏

Jesseba Fernando @jesseba.bsky.social · Sep 3

Packed room at our satellite!!

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NPlab @nplab.bsky.social · Sep 1

On wednesday, @jesseba.bsky.social @marilyngatica.bsky.social with @nicopedre.bsky.social organize Cobrains kgatica.github.io/CCS2025-CoBr....

Satellite Complexity in the Brain: CoBrain (CCS*2025)

Overview, list of speakers, and schedule

kgatica.github.io

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Reposted by Jesseba Fernando

NPlab @nplab.bsky.social · Sep 1

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).

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Ardem Patapoutian @ardemp.bskyverified.social · Jun 26

“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/...

The forgotten half of scientific thinking | PNAS

The forgotten half of scientific thinking

www.pnas.org

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Reposted by Jesseba Fernando

Dr. Cat Hicks @grimalkina.bsky.social · Jun 22

- 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"

Dare Obasanjo @carnage4life.bsky.social · Jun 19

An MIT study of 54 participants found ChatGPT users had lower brain activity, weaker memory, and less creativity than Google or unaided writers.

ChatGPT users brain activity declined over time, relied on copy-paste, and couldn’t recall what they wrote.

The brain is a muscle, use it or lose it.

ChatGPT's Impact On Our Brains According to an MIT Study

The study, from MIT Lab scholars, measured the brain activity of subjects writing SAT essays with and without ChatGPT.

time.com

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Reposted by Jesseba Fernando

Alexandra Petri @petridishes.bsky.social · Jun 22

it’s even more demoralizing when the history you’re repeating is history you were around for the first time

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Melanie Mitchell @melaniemitchell.bsky.social · Jun 10

www.nokings.org

No Kings

On June 14—Flag Day—Donald Trump wants tanks in the street and a made-for-TV display of dominance for his birthday. A spectacle meant to look like strength. But real power isn’t staged in Washington. ...

www.nokings.org

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Reposted by Jesseba Fernando

Joe @joeposting.bsky.social · Jun 5

This must have been what it felt like at the end of the first triumvirate. This is so cool, I love living through history.

Without me, Trump would have lost the election, Dems would control the House and the Republicans would be 51-49 in the Senate.

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Jesseba Fernando @jesseba.bsky.social · May 28

Super, super excited to be here at the sixth annual conference on the Mathematics of Neuroscience and AI!

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Ida Momennejad @neuroai.bsky.social · May 8

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

The Transmitter @thetransmitter.bsky.social · Mar 26

How can we make progress in developing a general model of neural computation rather than a series of disjointed models tied to specific experimental circumstances, ask Eva Dyer and @tyrellturing.bsky.social in the latest entry in our NeuroAI series.

www.thetransmitter.org/neuroai/acce...

Accepting “bitter lesson” and embracing brain’s complexity

To gain insight into complex neural data, we must move toward a data-driven regime, employing large models trained on vast amounts of data. Experts weigh in.

www.thetransmitter.org

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Jesseba Fernando @jesseba.bsky.social · May 9

This was so much fun!!!

Hiroki Sayama @hirokisayama.bsky.social · May 8

SFI Adaptive Network workshop Day 3 featured cool presentations by junior researchers

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Rachel Essner @rachelessner.bsky.social · Apr 29

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...

Brainstem sensing of multiple body signals during food consumption

Studies of body-to-brain communication often examine one stimulus or organ at a time, yet the brain must integrate many body signals during behavior. For example, food consumption generates diverse or...

www.biorxiv.org

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Jesseba Fernando @jesseba.bsky.social · Apr 21

m.youtube.com/watch?time_c...

Jesseba Fernando @jesseba.bsky.social · Apr 15

I guess it’s homegrown crim of me to publicize my thoughts on Columbia rolling over so easily

Marisa Kabas @marisakabas.bsky.social · Apr 14

Holy shit. Video posted by President Bukele’s team on X shows the moments before his press conference with Trump in which Trump tells him: “We want to do homegrown criminals next. You gotta build about five more places.”

(h/t @titonka.bsky.social @michelekelemen.bsky.social)

Reposted by Jesseba Fernando

Josh Marshall @joshtpm.bsky.social · Apr 14

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.

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Niko Bowie @nikobowie.bsky.social · Apr 12

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.

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Niko Bowie @nikobowie.bsky.social · Apr 12

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."

Cambridge City Council Calls on Harvard, President Garber to Resist Trump’s Threats | News | The Harvard Crimson

The Cambridge City Council voted unanimously on Monday to call on the Harvard Corporation — the University’s highest governing body — to refuse the Trump administration’s demands as $9 billion in gove...

www.thecrimson.com

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L.A. Kauffman @lakauffman.bsky.social · Apr 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.

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

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George Conway 👊🇺🇸🔥 @gtconway.bsky.social · Mar 29

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

Hands Off!

Donald Trump and Elon Musk think this country belongs to them. They're taking everything they can get their hands on and daring the world to stop them. On Saturday, April 5th, we're taking to the stre...

handsoff2025.com

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Nancy Kanwisher @nancykanwisher.bsky.social · Mar 30

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...

Home

March 20, 2025 Dear Presidents, Chancellors, and Boards of Trustees of the 60 Universities that received a March 10th warning letter from the U.S. Department of Education: You are on the frontlines ...

sites.google.com

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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez @aoc.bsky.social · Mar 14

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.

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Jesseba Fernando @jesseba.bsky.social · Feb 21

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)

Transformer Dynamics: A neuroscientific approach to interpretability of large language models

As artificial intelligence models have exploded in scale and capability, understanding of their internal mechanisms remains a critical challenge. Inspired by the success of dynamical systems approache...

arxiv.org

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Jesseba Fernando @jesseba.bsky.social · Feb 21

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.

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Jesseba Fernando @jesseba.bsky.social · Feb 21

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.

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