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Valentin Schmutz

@bio-emergent.bsky.social
1.1K followers 765 following 49 posts

Trying to find solvable models neuroscientists like. Postdoc @oxfordmathematics.bsky.social sites.google.com/view/valentinschmu…

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Reposted by Valentin Schmutz
Matthijs Pals @matthijspals.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
What kind of dynamics underlie sequence working memory? In the last project of my PhD we developed and analysed RNNs fitted to multi-session single-unit data of macaques. Now out on: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... With @jakhmack.bsky.social and data from Chen et al., Neuron 2024. [1/4]
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Soledad Gonzalo Cogno @soledad-gcogno.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
📣 🔥 🤩 Our lab is recruiting a PhD student! If you want to do a PhD in computational neuroscience come and join us at the @kavlintnu.bsky.social ! 🧠 💻 For questions and info, the lab will be at Bernstein in a few days 😊 ⏰ Apply before October 11: www.jobbnorge.no/en/available...
jobbnorge.no
PhD in Computational Neuroscience (307990) | NTNU - Norwegian University of Science and Technology
Job title: PhD in Computational Neuroscience (307990), Employer: NTNU - Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Deadline: Sunday, October 11, 2026
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Soledad Gonzalo Cogno @soledad-gcogno.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
📢🔥🎉🤩 New preprint from the lab, in collaboration with @clopathlab.bsky.social ! What network mechanisms generate a diversity of neural activity sequences within and across circuits? www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 🧵👇
biorxiv.org
A common structure in recurrent networks supports neural sequence generation locally and in downstream neurons
Neural sequences, characterized by neurons or groups of neurons that fire one after the other, have been observed in multiple brain regions, across species, and are known to underlie a diversity of br...
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Valentin Schmutz @bio-emergent.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
metr.org/blog/2026-08... Nothing has informed me more about the world we are living in than this 91-page report on the OpenAI/Hugging Face incident. This report describes a real case of AIs getting out of the box, while their actions and reasoning are still somewhat understandable to humans...
metr.org
Brief independent investigation of agents’ behavior, reasoning and collaboration in the OpenAI / Hugging Face hacking incident
Two METR staff members and a Redwood Research contractor investigated an incident in which OpenAI agents coordinated a multi-day hack of Hugging Face on a shared unsanctioned message board.
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Reposted by Valentin Schmutz
Enny van Beest @ennyvb.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
Textbook: tracking position during navigation is primarily the job of the hippocampus. Recent findings suggest a more complicated story. Recording >20k neurons brainwide, we indeed find spatial representations in every region! With @kenneth-harris.bsky.social and @carandinilab.net
Brainwide representations of a virtual corridor
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The Royal Society @royalsociety.org · 29/08/2026
The Ferrier Medal and Lecture 2027 is awarded to Professor Kenneth Daniel Harris for his contributions to neuroscience by unifying experimental neurophysiology with advanced analytical methods and for pioneering methods that allow recording from thousands of neurons. #RSMedals bit.ly/4qCJZRo
A man in a black shirt smiles at the camera in front of a whiteboard covered in scientific notation.
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David G. Clark @david-g-clark.bsky.social · 31/07/2026
This September, I will join the @flatironinstitute.org Center for Computational Neuroscience as a Group Leader, where I will launch the High-Dimensional Dynamics & Computation Group. Information for postdocs and grad students is forthcoming. I am grateful to my mentors who made this possible!
Exterior view of the Flatiron Institute in Manhattan
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Shuqi Wang @shuqiw.bsky.social · 15/07/2026
Our paper "Rarely categorical, highly separable representations along the cortical hierarchy" is now out in Nature! www.nature.com/articles/s41... In this paper, we studied whether the brain is well-organized and interpretable, both globally and locally. (See thread below.)
nature.com
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Louis Pezon @lpezon.bsky.social · 30/06/2026
Both brains and RNNs can re-use components of computation across similar tasks or contexts. But what exactly are those “shared components”? How can they be used to solve several tasks? We address these questions in a new preprint with @avm.bsky.social! Link: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
biorxiv.org
Interpretable compositional computation with recurrent neural networks
Flexible cognition utilizes reusable components to enable rapid adaptation of behavior to different contexts or tasks. Analysis of artificial neural networks trained on multiple tasks suggested that t...
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Jacob Zavatone-Veth @jzv.bsky.social · 23/06/2026
Tremendously excited to announce that I will be joining @rockefeller.edu as an Assistant Professor and Head of Lab starting in January 2027! My group will be broadly focused on theoretical neuroscience, and mathematical problems in neural computation in the large.
Rockefeller campus image from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Rockefeller_University_Campus_aerial_2.jpg, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license.
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Kenneth Harris @kenneth-harris.bsky.social · 19/05/2026
New method for identifying the fine transcriptomic types of thousands of neurons recorded in vivo!
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Valentin Schmutz @bio-emergent.bsky.social · 08/05/2026
Unbelievably honoured to read Tatiana Engel's (@engeltatiana.bsky.social) wonderfully written Preview on our work "Linking neural manifolds to circtuit structure in recurrent networks" (with @lpezon.bsky.social & @gerstnerlab.bsky.social) in this issue of Neuron www.cell.com/neuron/fullt... 🙏
cell.com
Finding clues to circuit structure in population dynamics and single-neuron selectivity
In this issue of Neuron, Pezon et al. introduce neural circuit models with flexible connectivity structure that can generate low-dimensional population dynamics with different distributions of single-...
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Soledad Gonzalo Cogno @soledad-gcogno.bsky.social · 20/04/2026
There is still time to apply to join our lab as a PhD student At @kavlintnu.bsky.social 💻🧠🇳🇴 www.jobbnorge.no/en/available... Apply before May 6.
jobbnorge.no
PhD in Computational Neuroscience (298392) | NTNU - Norwegian University of Science and Technology
Job title: PhD in Computational Neuroscience (298392), Employer: NTNU - Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Deadline: Wednesday, May 6, 2026
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Julie Fabre @juliefabre.bsky.social · 08/04/2026
How do the basal ganglia turn what you see into what you do? New preprint w/ @kenneth-harris.bsky.social, @flickerfusion.bsky.social & @carandinilab.net: we recorded across striatum, GPe & SNr in a Go/NoGo task. Striatum encodes which stimulus, GPe & SNr encode action. 🧵 biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
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James McAllister @jajmca.bsky.social · 02/04/2026
Really excited to share a new preprint! 𝗛𝗼𝘄 𝗱𝗼 𝗯𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻𝘀 𝘀𝘁𝗮𝘆 𝗿𝗼𝗯𝘂𝘀𝘁 & 𝗲𝗳𝗳𝗶𝗰𝗶𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝘄𝗵𝗶𝗹𝗲 𝗯𝗲𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗶𝗻𝗰𝗿𝗲𝗱𝗶𝗯𝗹𝘆 𝘀𝗽𝗮𝗿𝘀𝗲? We explore how! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... We built Connectome-based Neural Networks (CoNNs) using Drosophila wiring (larva&adult) & compared with random networks with same sparsity.
Constructing connectome-based neural networks
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Valentin Schmutz @bio-emergent.bsky.social · 30/03/2026
Ten years ago, I did a research internship with Tilo Schwalger (then in the @gerstnerlab.bsky.social) on deriving mean-field equations from networks of interacting neurons – I have been doing that ever since. I'm still very fond of the way he explains things "à la physicienne".
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Earl K. Miller @earlkmiller.bsky.social · 19/03/2026
Cortical circuits are often thought to be specialized, but the same large-scale activity patterns can arise from different circuit architectures. In other words, different instruments can play the same tune, and the same instrument can sometimes play different tunes. www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...
cell.com
Linking neural manifolds to circuit structure in recurrent networks
Neural population activity can be described either by low-dimensional dynamics on neural manifolds or by single-neuron selectivities. Using a theoretical approach, Pezon et al. relate these two statis...
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Richard Naud @neuronaud.bsky.social · 13/03/2026
I thought this was an exciting new theoretical perspective www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...
cell.com
Linking neural manifolds to circuit structure in recurrent networks
Neural population activity can be described either by low-dimensional dynamics on neural manifolds or by single-neuron selectivities. Using a theoretical approach, Pezon et al. relate these two statis...
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Alexander van Meegen @avm.bsky.social · 12/03/2026
Travelling to COSYNE seems to be the perfect opportunity to announce that I started my own lab at RWTH Aachen University earlier this year, funded by NRW's Ministry of Culture and Science through its Return Program. If you are at COSYNE and want to chat please reach out!
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PessoaBrain @pessoabrain.bsky.social · 08/03/2026
𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁'𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗿𝗲𝗹𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀𝗵𝗶𝗽 𝗯𝗲𝘁𝘄𝗲𝗲𝗻 𝗺𝗮𝗻𝗶𝗳𝗼𝗹𝗱𝘀 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗿𝗲𝗰𝘂𝗿𝗿𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗻𝗲𝘁𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸𝘀 𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗯𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻? This looks like a must read (suppl material bursting with goodies). #neuroskeyence doi.org/10.1016/j.ne...
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Valentin Schmutz @bio-emergent.bsky.social · 06/03/2026
How are neural manifolds and single-neuron response properties related to circuit structure? How degenerate are these relationships? Theory and a plethora of examples can be found in the following paper, out today in Neuron 🌟 It was a privilege to co-supervise first author @lpezon.bsky.social!
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Valentin Schmutz @bio-emergent.bsky.social · 21/02/2026
These workshops are absolutely amazing. I had the privilege to attend the theoretical neuroscience workshop in 2024; it was a memorable week.
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Soledad Gonzalo Cogno @soledad-gcogno.bsky.social · 17/02/2026
Applications are now open for the summer school: 𝐌𝐚𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐦𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐥 𝐌𝐞𝐭𝐡𝐨𝐝𝐬 𝐢𝐧 𝐂𝐨𝐦𝐩𝐮𝐭𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐥 𝐍𝐞𝐮𝐫𝐨𝐬𝐜𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐞 🧠 Apply before March 15: www.compneuronrsn.org 📍 Located in beautiful Eresfjord 🇳🇴 🗓️ Between July 6-24 Supported by the @kavlifoundation.org In collaboration with @kavlintnu.bsky.social
compneuronrsn.org
Mathematical Methods in Computational Neuroscience
Summer school in Eresfjord, Norway (July 8th - 26th, 2024)
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Enny van Beest @ennyvb.bsky.social · 02/02/2026
Turns out deep neural networks are better at extracting relevant features than I am... Meet "DeepUnitMatch", a DNN version of our neuron tracking tool: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... It has been a privilage to continue the collaboration with Célian, and cosupervise the talented Suyash & Wentao!
biorxiv.org
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Guillaume Bellec @bellecguill.bsky.social · 30/01/2026
Summer school on Neuro AI in Cambridge. Registration Deadline: 16 Feb 2026 Speaker line up: G. Bellec A. Billard R. Bogacz R. Ponte Costa W. Gerstner M. Giugliano L. Hunt M. Sahani P. Series P. Tino www.fens.org/news-activit...
fens.org
FENS-Chen Institute Summer Program on AI-Accelerated Neuroscience Discovery and Translation hosted by the University of Cambridge - Federation of European Neuroscience Societies
Application Submission Deadline: Monday 16th February 2026, midnight Applications will be open from Thursday 8th January to midnight on Monday 16th February. The application form and further details…
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Valentin Schmutz @bio-emergent.bsky.social · 28/01/2026
Estimating the power-law exponent of the tail of the eigenspectrum from noisy data is a difficult problem. Here is an approach based on eigenmoment estimation. 👏🏻 A hard stats problem remains open: Can we find an estimator of the tail exponent for which we can PROVE unbiasedness, consistency, etc.?
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Valentin Schmutz @bio-emergent.bsky.social · 16/01/2026
Talk on "High-dimensional neuronal activity from low-dimensional latent dynamics" at NeurIPS 2025 with @haydari.bsky.social now accessible online 🎥: neurips.cc/virtual/2025... Please reach out if you have any comments or ideas for follow-up work!
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Alexander Ecker @aecker.bsky.social · 19/12/2025
If you recently finished your PhD in ML for life science and are looking for a new job early next year, please apply! Göttingen is a lovely town and a great scientific environment.
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David G. Clark @david-g-clark.bsky.social · 15/12/2025
Very excited about this new work from the omnipotent Owen, with me and Ashok Litwin-Kumar! Can we reconcile low- and high-dimensional activity in neural circuits by recognizing that these circuits ~multitask~? (Plausibly, yes 😊)
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Blake Richards @tyrellturing.bsky.social · 11/12/2025
I'm more and more convinced that low-dimensional manifolds in the brain are just an artifact of the experimental designs and analyses we use... 🧠📈 🧪
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Ali Haydaroğlu @haydari.bsky.social · 13/12/2025
"Low-d neural activity" would probably look high-D if you plot the spectrum on a log-log scale. @engeltatiana.bsky.social made a similar point recently on @braininspired.bsky.social. Also agrees with our claim with @bio-emergent.bsky.social that low-D and high-D can be two sides of the same coin!
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Ali Haydaroğlu @haydari.bsky.social · 08/12/2025
Best part about being a scientist is the people I get to work with. Valentin (@bio-emergent.bsky.social) and I got to give a talk at NeurIPS, bridging a gap between low- and high-dim perspectives of the brain. Thankfully, the audience was (somewhat) more awake than the San Diego desert 🏜️
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Tatiana Engel @engeltatiana.bsky.social · 05/12/2025
Thank you for having me on BrainInspired, Paul @braininspired.bsky.social! It was such an honor to be on my favorite show—a rare place where we can leisurely talk about manifolds, latent circuits, power laws, and other esoteric ideas, and still be taken seriously in knowing they are all real.
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Valentin Schmutz @bio-emergent.bsky.social · 05/12/2025
Tomorrow at #NeurIPS2025! Oral at 10 am in UL Ballroom 20D and poster #2016 at 11 am. @haydari.bsky.social and I are looking forward to hearing your thoughts.
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Flavio Martinelli @flavioh.bsky.social · 04/12/2025
🧵Excited to present our latest work at #Neurips25! Together with @avm.bsky.social, we discover 𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐧𝐧𝐞𝐥𝐬 𝐭𝐨 𝐢𝐧𝐟𝐢𝐧𝐢𝐭𝐲: regions in neural networks loss landscapes where parameters diverge to infinity (in regression settings!) We find that MLPs in these channels can take derivatives and compute GLUs 🤯
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Kenneth Harris @kenneth-harris.bsky.social · 14/11/2025
1. New preprint resolving a conundrum in systems neuroscience with an AI scientist, and humans Reilly Tilbury, Dabin Kwon, @haydari.bsky.social, @jacobmratliff.bsky.social, @bio-emergent.bsky.social, @carandinilab.net, @kevinjmiller.bsky.social, @neurokim.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
biorxiv.org
Characterizing neuronal population geometry with AI equation discovery
The visual cortex contains millions of neurons, whose combined activity forms a population code representing visual stimuli. There is, however, a discrepancy between our understanding of this code at ...
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Pavel Tolmachev @pawa-pawa.bsky.social · 24/10/2025
Excited to share our new work with @engeltatiana.bsky.social! RNNs are often used to explore how the brain may solve specific tasks. We show that, depending on the architecture, RNNs find distinct circuit solutions, behaving differently when exposed to novel stimuli. www.nature.com/articles/s42...
nature.com
Single-unit activations confer inductive biases for emergent circuit solutions to cognitive tasks - Nature Machine Intelligence
Recurrent neural networks are widely used to model brain dynamics. Tolmachev and Engel show that single-unit activation functions influence task solutions that emerge in trained networks, raising the ...
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Valentin Schmutz @bio-emergent.bsky.social · 22/10/2025
To the math/comp neuro folks in Oxford. I'll be giving a math neuro talk in the Partial Differential Equations Seminar at the MI on Monday 27 Oct at 16:30 (details in the link). www.maths.ox.ac.uk/node/74242 I'll be talking about the "universality" of spatially extended mean-field PDEs (see 🧵⬇️)
maths.ox.ac.uk
Spatially-extended mean-field PDEs as universal limits of large, heterogeneous networks of spiking neurons | Mathematical Institute
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Tatiana Engel @engeltatiana.bsky.social · 12/10/2025
A study led by Cina Aghamohammadi is now out in ‪@natcomms.nature.com‬! We developed a mathematical framework for partitioning spiking variability, which revealed that spiking irregularity is nearly invariant for each neuron and decreases along the cortical hierarchy. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
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Dan Goodman @neural-reckoning.org · 01/10/2025
Message for participants of the #SNUFA 2025 spiking neural network workshop. We got almost 60 awesome abstract submissions, and we'd now like your help to select which ones should be offered talks. Follow the "abstract voting" link at snufa.net/2025/ to take part. It should take <15m. Thanks! ❤️
snufa.net
SNUFA 2025
Spiking Neural networks as Universal Function Approximators
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Alireza Modirshanechi @modirshanechi.bsky.social · 28/09/2025
New in @pnas.org: doi.org/10.1073/pnas... We study how humans explore a 61-state environment with a stochastic region that mimics a “noisy-TV.” Results: Participants keep exploring the stochastic part even when it’s unhelpful, and novelty-seeking best explains this behavior. #cogsci #neuroskyence
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Valentin Schmutz @bio-emergent.bsky.social · 19/09/2025
🎉 "High-dimensional neuronal activity from low-dimensional latent dynamics: a solvable model" will be presented as an oral at #NeurIPS2025 🎉 Feeling very grateful that reviewers and chairs appreciated concise mathematical explanations, in this age of big models. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 1/2
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Dan Goodman @neural-reckoning.org · 16/09/2025
Submissions (short!) due for SNUFA spiking neural networks conference in <2 weeks! 🤖🧠🧪 forms.cloud.microsoft/e/XkZLavhaJe More info at snufa.net/2025/ Note that we normally get around 700 participants and recordings go on YouTube and get 100s-1000s views. Please repost.
snufa.net
SNUFA 2025
Spiking Neural networks as Universal Function Approximators
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Valentin Schmutz @bio-emergent.bsky.social · 24/08/2025
Westlake University (西湖大学), a few hours before the start of this year's Summer School on Mathematical Neuroscience its.westlake.edu.cn/info/1017/28...
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GerstnerLab @gerstnerlab.bsky.social · 08/08/2025
Is it possible to go from spikes to rates without averaging? We show how to exactly map recurrent spiking networks into recurrent rate networks, with the same number of neurons. No temporal or spatial averaging needed! Presented at Gatsby Neural Dynamics Workshop, London.
youtu.be
From Spikes To Rates
YouTube video by Gerstner Lab
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Juan Gallego @juangallego.bsky.social · 01/08/2025
🚨New paper🚨 Neural manifolds went from a niche-y word to an ubiquitous term in systems neuro thanks to many interesting findings across fields. But like with any emerging term, people use it very differently. Here, we clarify our take on the term, and review key findings & challenges rdcu.be/ex8hW
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Tim Sit @timothysit.bsky.social · 21/07/2025
Glad to see my PhD work out! Thanks to all my collaborators and to Kenneth and Matteo for making this possible!
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Matteo Carandini @carandinilab.net · 07/07/2025
New by Agnès Landemard (@agnesland.bsky.social‬) & co Brainwide blood volume reflects opposing neural populations Brainwide fluctuations in blood volume arise from two populations with opposite relation to brain state and distinct relationships to blood supply www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
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Tatiana Engel @engeltatiana.bsky.social · 25/06/2025
Out today in @nature.com: we show that individual neurons have diverse tuning to a decision variable computed by the entire population, revealing a unifying geometric principle for the encoding of sensory and dynamic cognitive variables. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
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Ian Cone @dr-conehed.bsky.social · 16/06/2025
Our preprint is finally out! How can we understand the role of Behavioral Timescale Synaptic Plasticity in credit assignment? Does it fit into existing supervised and unsupervised learning frameworks? What theoretical gaps are still left unexplained? www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
biorxiv.org
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