Our first NeuroAgent! 🐟🧠

Excited to share new work led by the talented @reecedkeller.bsky.social, showing how autonomous behavior and whole-brain dynamics emerge naturally from intrinsic curiosity grounded in world models and memory.

Check it out here! 👇

Personal note: as @anayebi.bsky.social pointed out, this project started back at MIT during our faculty job search. This was... not an easy time. There were months when, to quote another scientist, I used to come into the office just to have the privilege of walking home with Aran 😘

An awesome collaboration with @anayebi.bsky.social, led by the amazing @reecedkeller.bsky.social! The neural-glial circuit underlying futility integration in larval zebrafish naturally emerges in intrinsically motivated, embodied agents. See their excellent threads (+ the preprint) for the details!

I am very excited about our new paper just published in PNAS.

www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1...

It was a pleasure to work on this idea together with @leokoz8.bsky.social and Jean-Jacques Slotine.

P.S., the first image in this thread shows a single astrocyte in the mouse visual cortex (accessed via MICrONS: nature.com/articles/s41...), with an overlaid network of astrocyte processes and the governing energy equation for our network shown below.

Paper: pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... (6/6)

Takeaway: Memory may not live solely in synaptic weights. Our work suggests it could also reside in the molecular machinery of astrocytes. This reframes our understanding of memory—and opens new directions in neuroscience, ML, and neuromorphic computing. (5/6)

By tuning astrocyte connectivity, the model spans a spectrum: from Hopfield-like Dense Associative Memory to Transformer-like architectures. This flexibility gives rise to a continuum of highly performant systems. (4/6)

Core idea: astrocytes store information in internal calcium dynamics and inter-process communication. This astrocytic “hardware” enables many-neuron interactions and supports a superior memory scaling law—outperforming all known biologically plausible models. (3/6)

One astrocyte can interact with millions of synapses—detecting neurotransmitters, modulating synaptic strength, and signaling back to neurons. Our theory shows how these dynamics can support powerful associative memory functions. (2/6)

Big week for astrocyte research: 3 new Science papers link astrocytes to behavior. We're excited to add to the momentum with our new PNAS paper: a theory, grounded in biology, proposing astrocytes as key players in memory storage and recall. w/ JJ Slotine and @krotov.bsky.social
(1/6)

Ah 😁 agreed!

I agree in spirit, but is this really apples to apples? The brain was "trained" over hundreds of millions of years of biological evolution. That's a lot of lightbulbs...

Of interest to neuro people who are enchanted by oscillations: expect to see them any time your neuron(s) are involved in regulating a signal...

Continual learning and all its attendant implications (dynamics, online control, etc)?

Da!