Sign in

Caswell Barry

@caswell.bsky.social
1.2K followers 483 following 179 posts

Neuroscientist interested in representations of space & memory. Using tools from experimental & theoretical neuroscience as well as machine learning. @UCL barry-lab.com

PostsRepliesMedia
Caswell Barry @caswell.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Things to do in Eastbourne this Sunday: 1) look at the sea 2) look at it again 3) the LitFest, 11am, where @lucyannunwin.bsky.social and I will let your kids squish a brain and enlist them in a neuron choir. Ages 7+. The brain is a replica. eastbournelitfest.onlineticketseller.com/events/173023
Eastbourne LitFest flyer: Sunday 27 September, 11am, age 7+. Adventures Inside Your Brain with Professor Caswell Barry and Lucy Ann Unwin, an interactive talk with brain texture squishing, myth-busting and a noisy neuron choir. Shows the book cover and Lucy and Caswell holding model brains.
073
Reposted by Caswell Barry
Andrej Bicanski @andrejbicanski.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Now accepted and published --- with many thanks to the referees for helping sharpen the manuscript. Long time since the first notes. Good to see it officially out. www.cell.com/current-biol...
cell.com
A vector navigation and inference architecture can construct universal cognitive maps for abstract reasoning
Bicanski proposes an algorithm and neural mechanisms for the iterative construction of abstract cognitive maps via non-local inference. Map positions are triangulated and memorized by a set of extant ...
17332
Reposted by Caswell Barry
George McGavin @georgemcgavin.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
They are utterly revolting and obnoxious people. I doubt the RNLI wil see any drop in their income - indeed, it might even increase donations. I'd like to see one of these far-right activists get into difficulty on their paddle board or jet ski - who are they going to call?
3122
Reposted by Caswell Barry
Masahiro Nakano @masahironakano.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
My first paper has been published in Hippocampus! bsky.app/profile/masa... Thank you Caswell and Claudia for your support!
bsky.app
25010
Caswell Barry @caswell.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
Masa's paper is out in Hippocampus. The left-right alternation of hippocampal theta sequences at T-maze choice points, much loved as a 'planning' signal, falls straight out of MEC dynamics. Well done @masahironakano.bsky.social, fun project with @clopathlab.bsky.social doi.org/10.1002/hipo.70131
04615
Reposted by Caswell Barry
UCL Research Department of Cell & Developmental Biology @ucl-cdb.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
🎉 A Big Thank You for a Fantastic CDB Away Day! 🎉 We would like to extend a big thank you to everyone who attended and contributed to the recent CDB Away Day on Friday 11 September 2026. www.ucl.ac.uk/life-science...
042
Reposted by Caswell Barry
UCL Research Department of Cell & Developmental Biology @ucl-cdb.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
🧬🔬 Who are we? At UCL's Department of Cell & Developmental Biology, we're passionate about answering some of biology's biggest questions. 🌱🧠🧫 Find out more here: www.ucl.ac.uk/life-science...
031
Reposted by Caswell Barry
Sainsbury Wellcome Centre @sainsburywellcome.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
Great to see SWC's Professor Tiago Branco in The Scientist! In the feature, he reflects on how his research has expanded from studying single neurons to mapping the brain circuits that drive escape and survival. Read the article: www.the-scientist.com/then-and-now...
the-scientist.com
Tiago Branco Unveils How the Brain Computes Behavior | The Scientist
Neuroscientist Tiago Branco reflects on how his research expanded from studying single neurons to exploring how brain circuits dictate survival behaviors.
061
Caswell Barry @caswell.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
Very excited to see this out — real teamwork, led by @laurenb29.bsky.social & Will de Cothi with @lgiocomo.bsky.social, @colinlever.bsky.social, Laurenz Muessig, Fábio Rodrigues, Francesca Cacucci, Tom Wills, Yanjun Sun & Steven Poulter. In Nature Comms: www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-76686-y
0198
Reposted by Caswell Barry
UCL NeuroAI @ucl-neuroai.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
Our online seminar series is back for the new academic year! Excited to welcome Dr. Ji-An Li from NYU, who’ll be talking about: "Discovering cognitive strategies with tiny recurrent neural networks" 🧠🤖 🗓️Wed 16 September 2026 ⏰4-5pm BST via zoom Register here: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/ucl-neuroa...
eventbrite.co.uk
UCL NeuroAI Talk Series
A series of NeuroAI themed talks organised by the UCL NeuroAI community. Talks will continue on a monthly basis.
1122
Reposted by Caswell Barry
Igor Adameyko @adameykolab.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
A gastropod veliger (about 2 mm in extended state) from the Red Sea. These planktonic larvae travel really far with the help of powerful currents - and help the slow snails to conquer the vastness of the ocean.
14712
Caswell Barry @caswell.bsky.social · 05/08/2026
Lovely result from the Stephenson-Jones lab at SWC: during sleep, mice replay newly-learned motor skills in the striatum — and it continues even after the hippocampus is fully removed. www.nature.com/articles/s41593-026-…
0194
Caswell Barry @caswell.bsky.social · 17/07/2026
Some housekeeping: data from Shipley et al. (@shipleysj.bsky.social; Curr Biol, 2026) is now on the barry-lab site. In an Alzheimer’s model, hippocampal replay during rest is disrupted — not the rate, but the quality — predicting failure to stabilise spatial memory. barry-lab.com/public-datasets/
0100
Reposted by Caswell Barry
UCL Research Department of Cell & Developmental Biology @ucl-cdb.bsky.social · 16/07/2026
🧠 New publication: Rethinking acetylcholine's role in how we learn and remember 🔗 Read more: www.ucl.ac.uk/life-science... #Hippocampus #Acetylcholine #UCL #CellAndDevelopmentalBiology #BarryLab
ucl.ac.uk
Brain chemical acetylcholine may help us update our understanding of the world
A Nature Reviews Neuroscience perspective suggests hippocampal acetylcholine serves as a learning signal, tracking prediction errors to update brain models during memory and learning.
0133
Caswell Barry @caswell.bsky.social · 15/07/2026
Very sorry to see this.
040
Reposted by Caswell Barry
Earl K. Miller @earlkmiller.bsky.social · 15/07/2026
MIT Professor Susumu Tonegawa, renowned molecular biologist and Nobel laureate, dies at 86 news.mit.edu/2026/mit-pro... #neuroscience
news.mit.edu
MIT Professor Susumu Tonegawa, renowned molecular biologist and Nobel laureate, dies at 86
Susumu Tonegawa, a renowned MIT professor of biology and neuroscience and a Nobel laureate, has died at the age of 86. His discovery of how the immune system generates many different antibodies earned...
26846
Caswell Barry @caswell.bsky.social · 09/07/2026
A bit of housekeeping: I've tidied up the public-data page on the Barry Lab website. The raw datasets behind most of our main experimental papers — grid rescaling (Barry 2007), coordinated replay (Ólafsdóttir 2016), place-cell stability (Tanni 2022) — are now downloadable. barry-lab.com/github
050
Reposted by Caswell Barry
Prof. Zoë Waller @drzoewaller.bsky.social · 02/07/2026
We are recruiting! We are seeking a Research Technical Specialist in Mass Spectrometry. The main purpose of this position is to provide general and specialist research support including leading on method development in relation to Mass Spectrometry.
ucl.ac.uk
UCL – University College London
UCL is consistently ranked as one of the top ten universities in the world (QS World University Rankings 2010-2022) and is No.2 in the UK for research power (Research Excellence Framework 2021).
155
Caswell Barry @caswell.bsky.social · 01/07/2026
I mean ... grid cells ... they're not exactly the fraught or dangerous subject
020
Caswell Barry @caswell.bsky.social · 01/07/2026
Hmmm so I see Fable is back. Though of the first five things I tried (Alzheimer's research related, grid cells, fine tuning the local LLM setup on my Mac, better gridness measures etc) all switched back to Opus because of 'safeguards'... that's a bit rubbish.
130
Reposted by Caswell Barry
Isabella Wagner 🧠🦠 @isabellacwagner.bsky.social · 01/07/2026
(1/2) Hiring! 🦠🧠 Postdoc position in my group @univie.ac.at on microbiome-brain interactions as part of the ERC-funded project “MemoryLane: Neural plasticity through the lens of gut-brain interactions”. 📍 Vienna, Austria 📅 Application deadline: 2 Aug 2026 ℹ️ shorturl.at/2E4sf
11613
Caswell Barry @caswell.bsky.social · 01/07/2026
Well well well this is incredibly cool and important
030
Reposted by Caswell Barry
Neil Burgess @neilburgess10.bsky.social · 01/07/2026
Ever wondered how the hippocampal cognitive map is read-out? @changmin-yu.bsky.social @zilong-ji.bsky.social with Jake & John, show that, during navigation, theta sweeps indicate remembered goal-directions (cf. current/next movements or perceptual targets) 1/2 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Decoded locations from place cell firing sweep towards a remembered goal location during each theta cycle irrespective of the current movement or head direction
710047
Caswell Barry @caswell.bsky.social · 26/06/2026
This looks interesting: in familiar environments all active CA1 pyramidal cells are place cells — the "non-place" ones just have unstable fields. Broadly fits my experience; a shift from earlier work holding that many weren’t place cells. www.cell.com/iscience/fulltext/S258…
0120
Reposted by Caswell Barry
UCL Research Department of Cell & Developmental Biology @ucl-cdb.bsky.social · 25/06/2026
Really excited to see this out from the lab & CDB colleagues 🧠✨ A new perspective in Nature Reviews Neuroscience brings together an elegant idea: acetylcholine may help the hippocampus learn by prediction, not just store memories. Worth a read 👇 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
nature.com
Acetylcholine: a candidate substrate for hippocampal predictive learning? - Nature Reviews Neuroscience
Predictive models have emerged as a normative lens for understanding neural function. In this Perspective, de Cothi, Shipley and Barry plausibly unify the diverse roles of hippocampal acetylcholine in...
041
Reposted by Caswell Barry
Nature Reviews Neuroscience @natrevneuro.nature.com · 25/06/2026
Acetylcholine: a candidate substrate for hippocampal predictive learning? A Perspective by William de Cothi, Sarah Shipley & Caswell Barry @shipleysj.bsky.social @caswell.bsky.social #neuroscience #neuroskyence www.nature.com/articles/s41...
nature.com
Acetylcholine: a candidate substrate for hippocampal predictive learning? - Nature Reviews Neuroscience
Predictive models have emerged as a normative lens for understanding neural function. In this Perspective, de Cothi, Shipley and Barry plausibly unify the diverse roles of hippocampal acetylcholine in...
13511
Caswell Barry @caswell.bsky.social · 23/06/2026
Really excited about this work with the awesome Will de Cothi & @shipleysj.bsky.social, out in Nature Reviews Neuroscience. We propose acetylcholine is an analogue of dopamine — tracking not reward prediction errors but state-transition prediction errors. doi.org/10.1038/s41583-026-01058-w
25425
Caswell Barry @caswell.bsky.social · 23/06/2026
Really excited about this work with the awesome Will de Cothi & Sarah Shipley, just out in Nature Reviews Neuroscience. We propose acetylcholine is an analogue of dopamine — tracking not reward prediction errors but state-transition prediction errors. doi.org/10.1038/s41583-026-01058-w
32711
Caswell Barry @caswell.bsky.social · 19/06/2026
Cracking lab walk in the sunshine today. Whole team out together — exactly what summer's for. 🌞
The Barry Lab group on a summer walk, standing together on a sunny grassy field with trees behind.
060
Caswell Barry @caswell.bsky.social · 18/06/2026
The QS rankings are a crude, reductive instrument that flattens the rich complexity of a university into a single number. But @ucl.ac.uk is at number 8 this year, and I think that's pretty awesome. It's a brilliant place to work, and the science coming out of here right now is genuinely exciting.
020
Reposted by Caswell Barry
Nora Newcombe @noranewcombe.bsky.social · 18/06/2026
Science improves lives.
2254
Reposted by Caswell Barry
Luke Sjulson @lukesjulson.bsky.social · 17/06/2026
People like to dunk on MATLAB now, but it’s hard to overstate how large an advance it was at the time and the impact it has had on scientific computing. RIP Cleve Moler www.nytimes.com/2026/06/11/s...
nytimes.com
Cleve Moler, Who Unlocked the Power of Computing for Millions, Dies at 86
17214
Caswell Barry @caswell.bsky.social · 17/06/2026
Nice theory paper: prospective coding and path integration emerging as equilibrium solutions of self-organising networks, no pre-wired attractor required. The forward-shifted activity bump lines up with anticipatory firing in superficial entorhinal cortex. arxiv.org/abs/2606.14649
091
Reposted by Caswell Barry
Dan Goodman @neural-reckoning.org · 16/06/2026
Interesting Transmitter article by Brian DePasquale on what will be the effect of the increasingly widespread use of LLMs to code up research ideas in neuroscience. Includes a somewhat sceptical commentary from me. 😉
12410
Caswell Barry @caswell.bsky.social · 16/06/2026
Job klaxon 📣 UCL is hiring two NeuroAI / computational neuroscience specialists (Lecturer or Associate Prof) — a big part of the new NeuroAI centre we're growing in Biosciences. Do consider applying if it's relevant to you. JD & details: www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DRX021 Happy to take questions.
23422
Reposted by Caswell Barry
UCL Faculty of Life Sciences @ucllifesciences.bsky.social · 15/06/2026
We're excited to announce that we're recruiting for new academic posts in #AI for #Biodiversity Science, Future #Food Systems & #Health, #NeuroAI, Computational #Neuroscience, and #Cardiovascular/Metabolic Neuroscience. 📅 Apply by 10 July 2026. www.ucl.ac.uk/life-science...
A graphic showing a brain and neural pathways in the top half. The bottom half has text that reads Current vacancies in the Faculty of Life Sciences. Grow your career with us. UCL 200.
054
Caswell Barry @caswell.bsky.social · 15/06/2026
Something I should have read months ago. Ulanovsky's bats fly long tunnels and reveal CA3 as a single-field coder, CA1 as multi-field. Sparse in, dense out — really rather nice. www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-…
0195
Reposted by Caswell Barry
Adam Rutherford @adamrutherford.bsky.social · 12/06/2026
A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: 10 yrs on. @davidolusoga.bsky.social + I will be chewing the fat @unionchapeluk.bsky.social 20/7: history, prehistory + the return of scientific racism. Pic from 2016: I'm 10yrs craggier/less smug looking now. www.intelligencesquared.com/events/adam-...
intelligencesquared.com
Adam Rutherford meets David Olusoga: The History in our DNA - Intelligence Squared
15111
Reposted by Caswell Barry
Kris Jensen @kristorpjensen.bsky.social · 11/06/2026
It has been super fun to work on this, where we learned that: 1) Mouse PFC is needed for model-based override of habits. 2) Separate PFC populations encode a 'policy' and the current 'value'. 3) The policy and value codes alternate theta sweeps towards the goal. ...and much much more!
03912
Caswell Barry @caswell.bsky.social · 10/06/2026
Be still my beating heart! Super interesting and important. The Mosers show that when rats switch between familiar rooms, each grid module shifts phase independently — and that differential shift across modules drives global remapping in hippocampal place cells. 🔗 doi.org/10.1101/2025.09.24.677985
1193
Reposted by Caswell Barry
Sainsbury Wellcome Centre @sainsburywellcome.bsky.social · 08/06/2026
Know a brilliant postdoc in neuroscience? Encourage them to apply for the SWC Emerging Neuroscientists Seminar Series - a chance to present to the London neuroscience community. Travel and accommodation covered, no CV’s or references needed. www.sainsburywellcome.org/web/content/...
Quote from Dr Sonja Blumenstock, 2025 ENSS Speaker "It's really achieving what it's designed to do: give researchers a chance to connect, discuss ideas and exchange perspectives."
013
Reposted by Caswell Barry
Prof Rick Adams @drrickadams.bsky.social · 08/06/2026
Closing in two days!
01311
Caswell Barry @caswell.bsky.social · 03/06/2026
Missed this first time — nice fMRI from Wittkuhn & Schuck: people implicitly learn graph structure as a successor representation, with backward replay visible in visual cortex during brief task pauses. Replay strength tracks the SR, not awareness. doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2507516122
051
Reposted by Caswell Barry
Hugo Spiers @hugospiers.bsky.social · 02/06/2026
Flexible goal learning involves coordinated population activity in dCA1 and medial orbitofrontal cortex journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...
0204
Reposted by Caswell Barry
Matteo Carandini @carandinilab.net · 01/06/2026
Neuropixels + Optogenetics = Neuropixels Opto Combining high-resolution electrophysiology and optogenetics. 960 sites, 28 emitters, 2 colors. Today in @natmethods.nature.com doi.org/10.1038/s415... Thanks to @wellcometrust.bsky.social, @alleninstitute.org, @hhmijanelia.bsky.social & team.
115753
Caswell Barry @caswell.bsky.social · 01/06/2026
Really nice review of vector coding in the subiculum from Colin Lever — boundary and object vector tuning pulled together in one place. One for the BVC aficionados. doi.org/10.1002/hipo.70074
160
Reposted by Caswell Barry
Sam Gershman @gershbrain.bsky.social · 29/05/2026
This paper is absolutely wild and amazing. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
science.org
Homing pigeon navigation relies on superparamagnetic macrophages under overcast conditions
Birds use a variety of navigational strategies, including the geomagnetic field, especially when other cues are not available, such as under overcast or nocturnal conditions. Magnetite particles in th...
37911
Caswell Barry @caswell.bsky.social · 29/05/2026
What do place cells do when the reward keeps moving? Reorganise around the uncertainty. Great task. Also Mellor, Dayan & Dombeck — come on! doi.org/10.1101/2025.01.06.631465
0192
Caswell Barry @caswell.bsky.social · 22/05/2026
Really interesting-looking paper from the Balasubramanian lab — a single recurrent network trained on predictive coding spontaneously produces both grid and place cells. Looking forward to reading it. arxiv.org/abs/2605.21356v1
0161
Reposted by Caswell Barry
UCL NeuroAI @ucl-neuroai.bsky.social · 14/05/2026
For our next online seminar, we are excited to welcome @noemielteto.bsky.social from DeepMind, who will talk about: "ATLAS: Active Theory Learning for Automated Science" 🗓️Wed 20 May 2026 ⏰2-3pm BST via zoom Mark your date and register for your attending: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/ucl-neuroa...
eventbrite.co.uk
UCL NeuroAI Talk Series
A series of NeuroAI themed talks organised by the UCL NeuroAI community. Talks will continue on a monthly basis.
2113