Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Juan Gallego @juangallego.bsky.social · 8h

the title sounds very intriguing, i should find the time to look at the paper, or listen to the podcast

congrats Ben, Shraddha, and the rest of the team

1

Juan Gallego @juangallego.bsky.social · 1d

🚨Big news!🚨
The lab is relocating to Lisbon, joining a great team of experimental and theoretical neuroscientists, and the Neurotechnology Warehouse, a new initiative to bridge basic and translational research.

I'll be sharing postdoc openings soon. Come join us in this new incarnation of the lab!

Champalimaud Research @champalimaudr.bsky.social · 2d

🧠🎼 What does it take to restore movement? Neuroscientist and engineer, @juangallego.bsky.social, joins the new Centre for Restorative Neurotechnology at the Champalimaud Foundation.

🔗 Find out more in this interview: www.fchampalimaud.org/news/juan-al...

17 20 170

Reposted by Juan Gallego

Reza Shadmehr @rezashadmehr.bsky.social · 5d

Tenure-track faculty position in motor neuroscience at Penn State.

psu.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/PSU_Academic...

Open-Rank Faculty Position in Sensorimotor Control and Rehabilitation Neuroscience

APPLICATION INSTRUCTIONS: CURRENT PENN STATE EMPLOYEE (faculty, staff, technical service, or student), please login to Workday to complete the internal application process. Please do not apply here, a...

psu.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com

14 27

Juan Gallego @juangallego.bsky.social · 28d

Well, those studies are hard but they're coming

Re distributed code -- I didn't write the original post but partial compensation after focal lesions do support distributed computation...

3

Juan Gallego @juangallego.bsky.social · 28d

I agree, observations don't imply causation but people know that.

Also agree about having to write carefully and precisely

1

Juan Gallego @juangallego.bsky.social · 28d

It could, what I mean is that it likely won't exist in a real mammalian brain...

1

Juan Gallego @juangallego.bsky.social · 28d

You can look at papers doing single or few neuron manipulations & looked at changes in the overall neural population (we cite a few in the paper, spanning hippocampus, motor regions, V1, there's also Rebesco et al Front Neuro 2010): they all consistently show that the population changes w the target

1 2

Juan Gallego @juangallego.bsky.social · 28d

3) there are already several experiments casually probing assumptions about manifolds using brain computer interfaces (e.g. work from @aaronbatista.bsky.social + Byron Yu and Steve Chase, we're starting to do some stuff too...) and 1/2

1 2

Juan Gallego @juangallego.bsky.social · 28d

2) the toy model that you seem to outline of a single neuron within a circuit doing a "computation" (???) seems implausible in practice based on the neuroanatomy of the mammalian brain (recurrent connectivity, common inputs, distributed neuromodulator release...)

1 2

Juan Gallego @juangallego.bsky.social · 28d

Some thoughts, but I'm not sure about the exact challenge you lay out

1) I think it's well established that decoding or any correlational analysis, doesn't imply causation. This isn't a challenge for manifolds but for (neuro)science in general. Explanations should be based on many types of results

1 2

Juan Gallego @juangallego.bsky.social · Sep 8

Very cool project.
Congratulations to the superlabers

Andrew Pruszynski @andpru.bsky.social · Sep 6

📣 This is a big one that we've been cooking for a while! We think it adds to the heart of motor control: 'how does motor cortex work'. Congratulations @mkashefi.bsky.social!

Mehrdad Kashefi @mkashefi.bsky.social · Sep 6

Excited to share my latest work with @jonathanamichaels.bsky.social @diedrichsenjorn.bsky.social & @andpru.bsky.social!
We asked: How does the motor cortex account for arm posture when generating movement?
Paper 👉 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
1/10

2

Juan Gallego @juangallego.bsky.social · Aug 25

Very cool, I really like these final tweaks.

And you give me too much credit !

Reposted by Juan Gallego

Ursula K. Le Guin Bot @leguinbot.bsky.social · Aug 23

Nothing remains the same from one moment to the next, you can’t step into the same river twice. Life – evolution – the whole universe of space/time, matter/energy – existence itself – is essentially change.

6 15

Reposted by Juan Gallego

Sam McDougle @actlab.bsky.social · Jul 24

Happy to announce that my lab @ Yale Psychology (actcompthink.org) will be accepting PhD applications this year (for start in Fall '26)!

Come for the fun experiments on human learning, memory, & skilled behavior, stay for the best 🍕 in the US.

Please reach out if you have any questions!

Homepage of the Action, Computation, & Thinking (ACT) Lab, Yale department of psychology

actcompthink.org

3 51 110

Juan Gallego @juangallego.bsky.social · Aug 21

Food for thought for theorists and experimentalists in neuroscience!

Ann Kennedy @antihebbiann.bsky.social · Aug 20

I wrote a Comment on neurotheory, and now you can read it!

Some thoughts on where neurotheory has and has not taken root within the neuroscience community, how it has shaped those subfields, and where we theorists might look next for fresh adventures.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Theoretical neuroscience has room to grow

Nature Reviews Neuroscience - The goal of theoretical neuroscience is to uncover principles of neural computation through careful design and interpretation of mathematical models. Here, I examine...

www.nature.com

7

Juan Gallego @juangallego.bsky.social · Aug 20

Thanks for compiling these interviews into a single list

And for clarity, my comment was in the context of coming up with new ideas 💡

1

Juan Gallego @juangallego.bsky.social · Aug 19

I don't think it's only that emergence is a description, it's also a philosophical stance on how the world or some things in it work

but again too nuanced for bsky so perhaps we all can have a conversation about these things in person at some meeting!

2

Juan Gallego @juangallego.bsky.social · Aug 19

I don't know Michael...
I agree that there's a lot of hoodoo vooddoo around the word emergence, but I have also seen a lot of push back against the idea that the system can have properties that its parts don't
Maybe this was in the wrong circles !

2

Juan Gallego @juangallego.bsky.social · Aug 19

as a motor control person, I also thinks it's wrong to think about all of the brain as encoding information... control for the win! :-)

but i know what you mean and I agree

fin de coffee break

1

Juan Gallego @juangallego.bsky.social · Aug 19

as for interactions, I think it's a key features of complex systems but having interactive parts doesn't necessarily mean that a system will have emergent properties

1

Juan Gallego @juangallego.bsky.social · Aug 19

Of course one can argue whether we can't infer properties from higher levels from single neurons because we aren't smart enough to figure them out or whether higher levels really have properties that are not in their constituent (neurons in this case)

So it's a bit ontology vs epistemology

1 1

Juan Gallego @juangallego.bsky.social · Aug 19

Books get written about these words and there's too much nuance for bluesky —plus I'm not an expert— but I think the clearest example for neuro is the pervasive feeling that we will understand cognition bottom up from single neurons, as opposed to higher levels having more explanatory power 1/2

1

Juan Gallego @juangallego.bsky.social · Aug 19

Likewise, and thanks for pushing your salon —one of these interesting online resources…

…And I can't believe we've never met in person

a raccoon is standing in the grass with its arms outstretched and says " sending you a big hug " .

ALT: a raccoon is standing in the grass with its arms outstretched and says " sending you a big hug " .

media.tenor.com

3

Juan Gallego @juangallego.bsky.social · Aug 19

I still need to read this piece by Antonio, but I can say that he's currently visting the lab and we're having a wonderful time talking about levels of description, "representations", evolvability and many more ideas. So I'm sure it'll be worth your time ⏳

Antonio Bikić @antoniobikic.bsky.social · Aug 18

You know how you once wondered how artificial and biological neurons differ? And what that might mean for AI systems? Luckily, we wrote the definitive paper on this @cp-patterns.bsky.social:

www.cell.com/patterns/ful...

The cost of unmodeled biological complexity in artificial neural networks

This perspective argues that artificial neural networks (ANNs), while effective as function approximators, omit biologically relevant structures, such as ion channels, that introduce intrinsic randomn...

www.cell.com

14

Juan Gallego @juangallego.bsky.social · Aug 19

even if these notions impact core fields like basic chemistry or physics.

I want to believe that reading more broadly (and listening to podcasts and watching talks) is helping me overcome these bias, but it sometimes feel hard to choose doing this instead of reading the last papers in your field!

1 6