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Emerson Harkin

@efharkin.bsky.social
163 followers 95 following 60 posts

Computational neuroscience post doc interested in serotonin | Dayan lab @mpicybernetics.bsky.social | 🇨🇦 in 🇩🇪

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Emerson Harkin @efharkin.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
I used to put plt.style.use("neuro.mplstyle") at the top of every script. Now I just make a lib/__init__.py that handles imports and sets the style, so when I make a quick script to test an idea I can `from lib import np, plt` and have everything I need.
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Emerson Harkin @efharkin.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
I recently tried going one step further with an LLM assist: save plots as PDF + JSON sidecar with the position of the axes within the PDF, then an assembly script merges the panels and adds labels nicely aligned based on the sidecar data. Works, but not well enough to keep me doing it.
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Emerson Harkin @efharkin.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
I've found that figures made at this set of sizes (6-7in wide, 7pt font, 0.5 - 1pt line widths) also look great on a poster when saved as PDF and scaled up. Kills two birds with one stone!
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Emerson Harkin @efharkin.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
And I don't think we have to look further than our own back yards to see why: saving = investment and all that mortgage debt doesn't leave much room for saving.
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Roxana Zeraati @roxana-zeraati.bsky.social · 07/07/2026
Our paper "Neural timescales from a computational perspective" is finally out in @natneuro.nature.com: www.nature.com/articles/s41... We discuss how computational models and methods can distill empirical observations on neural timescales into quantitative, testable theories of brain computation.
nature.com
Neural timescales from a computational perspective - Nature Neuroscience
This review integrates computational approaches to provide a unified view on how data analysis methods, biophysical mechanistic models and machine learning approaches can help to uncover the origins a...
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Emerson Harkin @efharkin.bsky.social · 07/07/2026
Dopamine neurons are heterogeneous, but their diffuse axons are homogenizing. What does this mean for RL models? Stop by poster 362 at #FENS2026 this morning to find out! "Multi-timescale reward prediction learning dynamics with entangled connectivity between the striatum and the dopamine system."
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Ezekiel Williams @ezekielwilliams.bsky.social · 06/07/2026
Come see this paper at ICML 2026 tomorrow (July 7th)! Poster number 613 at the 2pm poster session:)
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Emerson Harkin @efharkin.bsky.social · 05/07/2026
Great opportunity to work with a group that's very productive yet somehow also easygoing! To get an idea of Roxana's interests check out her recent review, just out in Nature Neuroscience: doi.org/10.1038/s415...
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Roxana Zeraati @roxana-zeraati.bsky.social · 04/07/2026
We (@neuroprinciplist.bsky.social & I) will soon open joint PhD & postdoc positions on cross-species mechanisms of different adaptive behaviors. If you’re interested and would like to chat during #FENS2026, drop me a message :)
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Emerson Harkin @efharkin.bsky.social · 26/06/2026
As Feynman once said, "What I cannot create in Javascript, I do not understand." I still don't understand the dopamine field, but I learned more than I expected from this project, and I hope you will too. 3/3
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Emerson Harkin @efharkin.bsky.social · 26/06/2026
The site includes a timeline of landmark papers, interactive versions of important models, and a glossary to help disambiguate the seven hundred definitions of RPE. 2/3
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Emerson Harkin @efharkin.bsky.social · 26/06/2026
Just in time for the start of next week's Braitenberg 100 symposium, I'm excited to share "Dopamine: From prediction to error," a site I built to better understand where the dopamine RPE hypothesis came from and where it might be headed. efharkin.com/s/dopamine-h... 1/3
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Roxana Zeraati @roxana-zeraati.bsky.social · 21/05/2026
Some incredibly exciting news that still feels a bit surreal: I am starting my research group @mpicybernetics.bsky.social! The best part? We are hiring at all levels! Curious about the science we plan to tackle, read along :) #NeuroSky
An illustration of different species, from worms to humans, foraging, indicating the main topic of our research group.
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Richard Naud @neuronaud.bsky.social · 06/10/2025
How are the fluctuations in electric field organized across the whole brain? We analyzed the 3.4 M samples from the international brain lab using a combination of deep learning and graph theory. We found a surprising structure made of communities and landmarks. doi.org/10.1101/2025...
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Emerson Harkin @efharkin.bsky.social · 09/03/2026
What can rock-paper-scissors tell us about what I think that you think that I'm thinking? Check out this cool work to find out! 🤛🤛📄
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Emerson Harkin @efharkin.bsky.social · 24/02/2026
Reproducibility challenge: How much of your paper could someone simulate for a lab journal club? observablehq.com/d/95e1ff1680...
observablehq.com
Habit, working memory, and reward learning
In "A habit and working memory model as an alternative account of human reward-based learning", Collins argues that vanilla reinforcement learning models do not provide the best account of how human b...
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Emerson Harkin @efharkin.bsky.social · 08/12/2025
Isn't it more like "You can save so much money by using a shipping container vs air freight, but your stuff will arrive in 6mo instead of tomorrow"?
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Emerson Harkin @efharkin.bsky.social · 15/11/2025
I meant to ask whether you've ever tried to get an LLM to generate bullet point summaries of human-written papers and compared those summaries with your "ground truth" initial outlines. Would a poor match point to unclear (human) writing?
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Emerson Harkin @efharkin.bsky.social · 15/11/2025
Out of curiosity, have you ever tried passing the final text through an LLM to see how well you can recover the original bullet points? Like an autoencoder, but where the latent is way bigger than the input.
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Emerson Harkin @efharkin.bsky.social · 15/11/2025
There's no worse feeling than writing a document that captures all of your key ideas with no fluff and being advised to "just flesh it out". Time to interpolate a few paragraphs, I guess...
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Shaked Palgi @shakedpa.bsky.social · 16/10/2025
I am excited to share my PhD work on head-direction cells recorded in the wild, now published in @science.org, where we recorded neurons in bats flying outdoors on an island. doi.org/10.1126/sci... With @ray-neuro.bsky.social, Shir Maimon, Liora Las, Nachum Ulanovsky and many others
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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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Sam Gershman @gershbrain.bsky.social · 19/09/2025
This is one of the most outstanding examples of circuit understanding I've seen in a long time. The unification of theory and experiment is beautiful. When Malcolm presented this in my lab, the audience was cheering at the end, and one person shouted (non-ironically) "You did it!"
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Emerson Harkin @efharkin.bsky.social · 24/09/2025
What a beautiful result! Congrats on this work.
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Mari Sosa @marisosa.bsky.social · 22/09/2025
The Sosa Lab website is now live! www.sosaneurolab.com We will be seeking a postdoctoral researcher to join the growing team! If you are a rodent neuroscientist and interested in doing systems neuro work in the mountains 🏔️, please check out the "Join" page.
sosaneurolab.com
Sosa Lab
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Emerson Harkin @efharkin.bsky.social · 22/09/2025
field matures. Kuhn would have been writing around the time of H&H's squid axon experiments. I can't help but think that if he were writing today, he might say that ephys has matured --- but neuro as a whole, maybe not so much. Perhaps that's your point?
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Emerson Harkin @efharkin.bsky.social · 22/09/2025
I just finished reading Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions and was astonished by his argument that fully precise definitions are 1) rare, especially early on, and 2) not necessary for progress. In his view, shared intuitions are more fundamental, and these only become codified as the 1/2
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Emerson Harkin @efharkin.bsky.social · 06/09/2025
A nice reminder about the importance of being critical and kind in science. rdcu.be/eEzd7
rdcu.be
Agree to disagree
Nature Chemistry - Science is about discovering new knowledge, so, logically, there will be disagreement. Shira Joudan contemplates how disagreements can be useful, and how to deal with them when...
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Alireza Modirshanechi @modirshanechi.bsky.social · 25/08/2025
So happy to see this work out! 🥳 Huge thanks to our two amazing reviewers who pushed us to make the paper much stronger. A truly joyful collaboration with @lucasgruaz.bsky.social, @sobeckerneuro.bsky.social, and Johanni Brea! 🥰 Tweeprint on an earlier version: bsky.app/profile/modi... 🧠🧪👩‍🔬
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Roxana Zeraati @roxana-zeraati.bsky.social · 09/08/2025
Looking forward to attending #CCN2025 for the first time and presenting the first steps of my postdoc project! If you’re interested in how learning the temporal structure of the environment affects foraging decisions and how we’re testing this in a naturalistic experiment come by poster B90, Wed.
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Emerson Harkin @efharkin.bsky.social · 08/08/2025
So now every ChatGPT response will start like this? "Your message addresses an important question and provides many nice insights. However, additional work is needed to make it fully convincing. Specifically, I have the following concerns:"
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Guido Meijer @guidomeijer.com · 05/08/2025
🚨Pre-print alert🚨 We stimulated serotonin with optogenetics while doing large-scale Neuropixel recordings across the mouse brain. We found strong widespread modulation of neural activity, but no effect on the choices of the mouse 🐭 How is this possible? Strap in! (1/9) 👇🧵 doi.org/10.1101/2025...
doi.org
Serotonin drives choice-independent reconfiguration of distributed neural activity
Serotonin (5-HT) is a central neuromodulator which is implicated in, amongst other functions, cognitive flexibility. 5-HT is released from the dorsal raphe nucleus (DRN) throughout nearly the entire f...
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Emerson Harkin @efharkin.bsky.social · 23/07/2025
What a thoughtful and thought-provoking piece!
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Fernando Rosas @frosas.bsky.social · 22/07/2025
Finally published: “Top-down and bottom-up neuroscience: overcoming the clash of research cultures” www.nature.com/articles/s41... Looking for ways to better understand different neuroscientific perspectives and enable productive collaborations
nature.com
Top-down and bottom-up neuroscience: overcoming the clash of research cultures - Nature Reviews Neuroscience
As scientists, we want solid answers, but we also want to answer questions that matter. Yet, the brain’s complexity forces trade-offs between these desiderata, bringing about two distinct research app...
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Emerson Harkin @efharkin.bsky.social · 06/06/2025
What do you think? If a 🛑 is represented in a forest and no behaviour is there to hear it, does it really make a sign? Inspired by this thought-provoking thread from @neuralreckoning.bsky.social: bsky.app/profile/neur...
media.tenor.com
a woman says " you know what i 'm trying to say " with her eyes closed
ALT: a woman says " you know what i 'm trying to say " with her eyes closed
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Emerson Harkin @efharkin.bsky.social · 06/06/2025
3. Slightly tangential: If we did a controlled experiment beforehand that involved randomly presenting a 🛑 while recording neural activity, we can say that the 🛑 *causes* the activity. 🧪 No need to use weasel words and say "activity correlates with 🛑".
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Emerson Harkin @efharkin.bsky.social · 06/06/2025
🤓 My uninformed opinion: 1. We can say that a red octagon is represented. 2. If drivers usually stop, we can say a stop sign is represented even if this particular driver didn't stop this time. 3. (continued 👇)
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Emerson Harkin @efharkin.bsky.social · 06/06/2025
I've been watching the debate over "representations" in neuroscience 🍿 and I wanted to suggest a thought experiment: Suppose a driver sees a 🛑 and this causes vision neurons to spike in a characteristic way, but the driver blows through the intersection. Is the stop sign *represented* in the brain?
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Emerson Harkin @efharkin.bsky.social · 05/06/2025
Congrats! So exciting to see this wonderful work in print. Those water drops are looking 👌, btw
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Emerson Harkin @efharkin.bsky.social · 05/06/2025
⏰ Check out this inspiring pair of articles from @paulmasset.bsky.social and Margarida Sousa! Some dopamine neurons care about rewards far in the future more than others, allowing the brain to learn the timing of future rewards. Congrats to the authors! 🍾 🔓 links: rdcu.be/epxkE rdcu.be/epxkG
rdcu.be
A multidimensional distributional map of future reward in dopamine neurons
Nature - An algorithm called time–magnitude reinforcement learning (TMRL) extends distributional reinforcement learning to take account of reward time and magnitude, and behavioural and...
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Friedemann Zenke @fzenke.bsky.social · 27/05/2025
1/6 Why does the brain maintain such precise excitatory-inhibitory balance? Our new preprint explores a provocative idea: Small, targeted deviations from this balance may serve a purpose: to encode local error signals for learning. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... led by @jrbch.bsky.social
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Emerson Harkin @efharkin.bsky.social · 25/05/2025
In medicine, systematic reviews do the job of distilling a large body of literature into a clear take-home message. In neuro, systematic reviews are few and far between, and it feels like sometimes we use theory papers as the next best thing...
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Emerson Harkin @efharkin.bsky.social · 22/05/2025
Thanks so much! I'm really glad you found it helpful.
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Ida Momennejad @neuroai.bsky.social · 09/05/2025
Ugh… there’s also what I call messianic AI, the fantasy that AI will “solve” science. Treating science like a vending machine for solitons/profit & scientists as human cogs replaceable by machinery. But Science is a living culture of critical discussion, mentorship, shared community values &methods.
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Patrick Davidson @pdav.bsky.social · 06/05/2025
Pandemic project ready to share! Short movies (many of which are emotional) you can use as stimuli: rdcu.be/ekNMo Stimuli, data, and code: osf.io/hk32g/?view_... #psynomBRM
link.springer.com
The Second Database of Emotional Videos from Ottawa (DEVO-2): Over 1300 brief video clips rated on valence, arousal, impact, and familiarity - Behavior Research Methods
We introduce an updated set of video clips for research on emotion and its relations with perception, cognition, and behavior. These 1380 brief video clips each portray realistic episodes. They were s...
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Emerson Harkin @efharkin.bsky.social · 06/05/2025
I'm curious about how this would work, since the inherent specificity of perturbation data seems to go against the generality we'd want from a foundation model. Train foundation model on big correlation data, then fine tune on a perturbation?
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Emerson Harkin @efharkin.bsky.social · 02/05/2025
Everybody has that one VIP friend who boosts you up by dragging all your other buddies down.
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Emerson Harkin @efharkin.bsky.social · 02/05/2025
Sometimes negative results are also beautiful.
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Emerson Harkin @efharkin.bsky.social · 29/04/2025
I don't have a strong opinion about whether "representation" is a good term. Personally I tend to use "activity pattern" or "tuning feature". I've seen "correlation" used in the wild mean this, and I'm not a fan b/c it sounds like the studies of neural activity are 💩 compared with behaviour.
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Emerson Harkin @efharkin.bsky.social · 29/04/2025
Exactly. My point is that calling patterns of neural activity "correlations" makes it sound as though we can never draw conclusions about what causes them, so I don't think this would be a good alternative to "representation".
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