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Reposted by Jacob Zavatone-Veth

Paul Gribble 🇨🇦 @gribblelab.org · Sep 5

This week's sensorimotor superlab reading list is out https://superlab.ca/posts/2025-09-05-list302.html @andpru.bsky.social @diedrichsenjorn.bsky.social @gribblelab.org #neuroskyence #psychscisky #Sensorimotor

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Jacob Zavatone-Veth @jzv.bsky.social · Sep 4

...it's now published, as part of a special issue organized by Harvard neuro colleagues Takao Hensch and Kenny Blum: www.frontiersin.org/journals/neu... (2/2)

Frontiers | Summary statistics of learning link changing neural representations to behavior

How can we make sense of large-scale recordings of neural activity across learning? Theories of neural network learning with their origins in statistical phy...

www.frontiersin.org

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Jacob Zavatone-Veth @jzv.bsky.social · Sep 4

Since I'm back on BlueSky - with @frostedblakess.bsky.social and @cpehlevan.bsky.social we wrote a brief perspective on how ideas about summary statistics from the statistical physics of learning could potentially help inform neural data analysis... (1/2)

Frontiers | Summary statistics of learning link changing neural representations to behavior

How can we make sense of large-scale recordings of neural activity across learning? Theories of neural network learning with their origins in statistical phy...

www.frontiersin.org

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Jacob Zavatone-Veth @jzv.bsky.social · Sep 4

Happy to see this collaboration with @neurovenki.bsky.social out - featuring great work by Juan Carlos!

Venki Murthy @neurovenki.bsky.social · Sep 4

Excited to share new computational work, led by @jzv.bsky.social, driven by Juan Carlos Fernandez del Castillo + contribution from Farhad Pashakanloo. We recover 3 core motifs in the olfactory system of evolutionarily distant animals using a biophysically-grounded model + efficient coding ideas!

Convergent motifs of early olfactory processing are recapitulated by layer-wise efficient coding

The architecture of early olfactory processing is a striking example of convergent evolution. Typically, a panel of broadly tuned receptors is selectively expressed in sensory neurons (each neuron exp...

www.biorxiv.org

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Reposted by Jacob Zavatone-Veth

Venki Murthy @neurovenki.bsky.social · Sep 4

Excited to share new computational work, led by @jzv.bsky.social, driven by Juan Carlos Fernandez del Castillo + contribution from Farhad Pashakanloo. We recover 3 core motifs in the olfactory system of evolutionarily distant animals using a biophysically-grounded model + efficient coding ideas!

Convergent motifs of early olfactory processing are recapitulated by layer-wise efficient coding

The architecture of early olfactory processing is a striking example of convergent evolution. Typically, a panel of broadly tuned receptors is selectively expressed in sensory neurons (each neuron exp...

www.biorxiv.org

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Reposted by Jacob Zavatone-Veth

Siddharth Jayakumar @siddjakes.bsky.social · Sep 2

Excited to share our latest!! Thanks to everyone involved especially @neurovenki.bsky.social!

Venki Murthy @neurovenki.bsky.social · Sep 1

Thrilled to share this work, long time in the making! Carried through creatively by @siddjakes.bsky.social after initial design & piloting by @trackingskills.bsky.social, with help from @trackingactions.bsky.social. Modeling in collaboration with Massimo Vergassola & Nicola Rigolli.

Mice navigate scent trails using predictive policies

Animals actively sense their environment to extract features of interest to guide behaviors. For mammals, odors are prominent environmental features which are sampled by active modulation of sniffing ...

www.biorxiv.org

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Reposted by Jacob Zavatone-Veth

Venki Murthy @neurovenki.bsky.social · Sep 1

Thrilled to share this work, long time in the making! Carried through creatively by @siddjakes.bsky.social after initial design & piloting by @trackingskills.bsky.social, with help from @trackingactions.bsky.social. Modeling in collaboration with Massimo Vergassola & Nicola Rigolli.

Mice navigate scent trails using predictive policies

Animals actively sense their environment to extract features of interest to guide behaviors. For mammals, odors are prominent environmental features which are sampled by active modulation of sniffing ...

www.biorxiv.org

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Reposted by Jacob Zavatone-Veth

Paul Masset @paulmasset.bsky.social · Jun 4

Our work with Pablo Tano, @hyunggoo-kim.bsky.social Athar Malik, Alexandre Pouget and @naoshigeuchida.bsky.social exploring how dopamine neurons could enable multi-timescale reinforcement learning in the brain is out in @nature.com
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Multi-timescale reinforcement learning in the brain - Nature

Individual dopaminergic neurons encode future rewards over distinct temporal horizons.

www.nature.com

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Paul Masset @paulmasset.bsky.social · Mar 29

Don't miss our #Cosyne2025 poster (3-128) 'Simultaneous detection and mapping in the olfactory bulb' proposing a new computational role for mitral and tufted cells in the olfactory bulb
with Matthew He, @chenjiang01.bsky.social @neurovenki.bsky.social @cpehlevan.bsky.social @jzv.bsky.social

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Jenelle Feather @jfeather.bsky.social · Mar 6

Applications are open for the 2025 Flatiron Institute Junior Theoretical Neuroscience Workshop! A two-day workshop 7/10-7/11 in NYC for PhD students and postdocs. All travel paid. Apply by April 14th.🧠🗽🧑‍🔬http://jtnworkshop2025.flatironinstitute.org/
@flatironinstitute.org @simonsfoundation.org

JTN - 2025

jtnworkshop2025.flatironinstitute.org

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Rui Costa @ruimcosta.bsky.social · Mar 7

Science Matters. 🔬
For 80 years, science has been a north star for the U.S. In 1945, Vannevar Bush’s report Science, The Endless Frontier called for bold government investment in research transforming our health, economy, quality of life. Science is not zero-sum—it creates value and better lives.

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Reposted by Jacob Zavatone-Veth

Ding Liu @dingliu.bsky.social · Feb 27

In our new paper @dulaclab.bsky.social, we investigated a fundamental question in social neuroscience: the origin of "sociality" (the need of being together) at the levels of behavior, neuron type, neural circuit and sensory modulation. (Detailed digest below) (1/7)
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

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Paul Masset @paulmasset.bsky.social · Feb 18

Honoured to have been selected as a #SloanFellow
Thankful for all the support from family, mentors, collaborators, colleagues and students along the way!
@sloanfoundation.bsky.social

McGill University @mcgill.ca · Feb 18

Professors Paul Masset and David Rolnick awarded 2025 Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowships ✨ Their work ‘exemplifies McGill’s leadership in AI research and innovation.’ Since 1955, 33 McGill faculty members have received this honour.

Read more: mcgill.ca/x/iZ4

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Venki Murthy @neurovenki.bsky.social · Feb 13

Yes, many worrying things happening in science that should take priority in grabbing our attention - but we are worried precisely because scientific knowledge is worth creating. In that spirit, I am proud to highlight our latest @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social preprint! #neuroscience 🧪

Perception and neural representation of intermittent odor stimuli in mice

Odor cues in nature are sparse and highly fluctuating due to turbulent transport. To investigate how animals perceive these intermittent cues, we developed a behavioral task in which head-restrained m...

www.biorxiv.org

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Reposted by Jacob Zavatone-Veth

Ken Miller @kenmiller.bsky.social · Jan 31

New preprint: "The geometry of the neural state space of decisions", work by Mauro Monsalve-Mercado, buff.ly/42wVHD5. Surprising results & predictions! (Thread) We analyze neuropixel population recordings in macaque area LIP during a reaction time, random-dot motion 1/

Picture of neural manifolds for the two choices in a decision-making task, depicted in 3D and in 2D

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Venki Murthy @neurovenki.bsky.social · Jan 27

Theory in neuroscience, you say? How about this preprint by @david-g-clark.bsky.social, with a couple of others you might recognize? :-) #neuroscience

Symmetries and continuous attractors in disordered neural circuits

A major challenge in neuroscience is reconciling idealized theoretical models with complex, heterogeneous experimental data. We address this challenge through the lens of continuous-attractor networks...

www.biorxiv.org

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Dave Levitan @davelevitan.bsky.social · Jan 25

The thing is “cancer research” is *incredibly* popular. Everyone knows people with cancer. This is slam dunk shit.

Dave Levitan @davelevitan.bsky.social · Jan 25

Heard from inside the National Cancer Institute, part of NIH — travel through April is canceled. Purchasing with government card is frozen. All public comms are off limits. Can’t even submit abstracts to future meetings. Can’t submit *manuscripts* for publication. All hiring activity frozen. Fuck.

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Venki Murthy @neurovenki.bsky.social · Jan 22

Excited to welcome @sueyeonchung.bsky.social to Harvard!! She will be at the @kempnerinstitute.bsky.social and the Center for Brain Science. We are very lucky!!

Leading Computational Neuroscientist SueYeon Chung to join Harvard’s Kempner Institute and FAS’ Center for Brain Science - Kempner Institute

CAMBRIDGE, MA —The Kempner Institute announced today the appointment of SueYeon Chung (PhD ‘17), who returns to Harvard as a Kempner Institute Investigator and faculty member in the Faculty of […]

kempnerinstitute.harvard.edu

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Venki Murthy @neurovenki.bsky.social · Jan 21

Our perspective on designing electronic noses inspired by natural olfaction! #neuroscience #ChemSky 🧪

Design Principles From Natural Olfaction for Electronic Noses

Unlocking “universal smell” requires integrating key principles of natural olfactory systems: modulation of gas transport, utilization of non-selective sensing elements, chemical filters akin to the ...

advanced.onlinelibrary.wiley.com

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Reposted by Jacob Zavatone-Veth

Andrea Montanari @andrea-montanari.bsky.social · Jan 20

Recently posted an updated version of arxiv.org/abs/2306.13326
on `Solving systems of Random Equations'
I find this a really useful model to gain intuition into the behavior of optimization algorithms in high-dimensional overparametrized landscapes, as the ones arising in modern machine learning.

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Joao Barbosa @jbarbosa.org · Jan 20

Thanks to the yield of U arrays, we were able for the 1st time AFAIK to average across neurons (not trials) and see memory bumps on single trials. Look at this 😍

Not the focus of the work but it taps into an open debate on the neural mech. of WM cf @cconstan.bsky.social @earlkmiller.bsky.social

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Sarthak Chandra @sarthakc.bsky.social · Jan 17

1/ Super-excited to share our new work “Episodic and associative memory from spatial scaffolds in the hippocampus”, that just appeared in Nature! www.nature.com/articles/s41... Key insights and ideas 👇#tweeprint

Episodic and associative memory from spatial scaffolds in the hippocampus - Nature

A neocortical–entorhinal–hippocampal network model based on grid cell states recapitulates experimental results and reconciles the spatial, associative and episodic memory roles of the hippocampus.

www.nature.com

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Venki Murthy @neurovenki.bsky.social · Jan 15

Very cool paper on Manx shearwater flight strategies! Also cool that the first & corresponding author @stephharris.bsky.social lists their BlueSky handle in the affiliations :-) 🧪

Adjustable wind selectivity in shearwaters implies knowledge of the foraging landscape

Many seabirds have evolved to use wind to fly efficiently, but this constrains travel direction. Harris et al. show how flight costs vary with the wind in Manx shearwaters and measure the degree to wh...

www.cell.com

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Brad Hulse @bradkhulse.bsky.social · Jan 15

Happy head direction cell day y’all!

On this day, 41 years ago, Jim Ranck recorded the first “HD cell” in his Brooklyn lab in 1984.

Jim shared the news with the world at SFN that year, showing a video of the cell’s firing on a TV he somehow acquired and brought to his poster… (1/3)

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Daron Acemoglu @dacemoglumit.bsky.social · Jan 14

A summary of my thinking on shared prosperity, work and AI in ten bullet points.

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