I use birdsong to understand how the brain learns complex skills across molecules, synapses, circuits, behavior, and computation. On the 2026–27 faculty job market.

Using a combined approach of monkey electrophysiology, artificial neural networks and human psychophysics, Xue et al. show that neuronal interference from irrelevant information underlies behavioral e...

Joan Birman thought her major discoveries were behind her. Then came an email from a young neighbor — a girl who knew little but wanted to learn.

Chiang and Rich show that macaques spontaneously chunk spatial targets in a self-ordered working memory task. dlPFC neurons compress chunked targets into lower-dimensional representations that are shi...

The authors use recurrent neural networks to predict how structured prior experience shapes neural dynamics as mice learn flexible timing strategies during complex context-dependent behavior.

The 3rd call is now open with a submission deadline on 9 November 2026 17:00 (CET).

All physical interactions between an organism and its environment occur within the space immediately adjacent to and surrounding its body, its peripersonal space (PPS). This space has been extensively...

This study leverages cell type-specific optogenetics in the monkey cerebral cortex to elucidate the unique functional contributions of excitatory and inhibitory neurons in visual form processing. The ...

Held-out log-likelihood is the standard currency for comparing statistical models of neural spike trains, and is often reported as bits per spike relative to a homogeneous Poisson baseline. The units ...

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans...

The ability to record from large populations of neurons has triggered the development of myriad methods for comparing them. But we’re still grappling with how to convert measures of likeness into a…

Compositionality exists on a continuum of increasing complexity rather than as a binary trait. Studying its implementation in simpler biological and artificial systems is the most tractable path towar...

Functional synapse clusters (FSCs) are synapses with correlated presynaptic activity that are colocalized on the same neuronal dendritic branch. FSCs have been observed after learning in cortical and ...

University of California, Berkeley is hiring. Apply now!

Discovery AI Initiative and Departments of Biochemistry and Cell Biology, Integrative Immunobiology, Neurobiology, and Pharmacology & Cancer Biology

Cortical circuits prioritize diversity over categorical structure, supporting a computational regime geared towards high-dimensional, highly separable neural representations.

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) trained for image recognition have demonstrated remarkable conceptual similarities to the primate ventral visual pathway, but their standard feedforward architectu...