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Dan Goodman @neural-reckoning.org · 27/09/2026

SNUFA abstract submission is closed. Make sure to register for the conference if you would like to take part in voting for which abstracts get promoted from posters to talks!

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Dan Goodman @neural-reckoning.org · 26/09/2026

To be honest the distinction between a sham scientific society and a real one feels blurry to me. I was advised to join IEEE hoping that at some point they'll give me an award or title for my CV. But you pay thousands of $ over a career for this. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

nature.com

Exclusive: Sham scientific societies are misleading star researchers

A Nature investigation reveals a network of organizations that have been building their ranks through deceptive practices.

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Dan Goodman @neural-reckoning.org · 26/09/2026

I don't think this is necessarily true. Many scholarly societies use income from their journals to support their other activities (and huge salaries of directors). In this case I think they have almost identical interests to for-profit publishers. Indeed, they often lobby together against reform.

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Alexandra Proca @aproca.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Submit your paper or extended abstract to UniReps 2026 in Paris! Deadline Oct. 4 AOE 🔵🔴

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Dan Goodman @neural-reckoning.org · 25/09/2026

Check out Abdal's talk on spiking neural network models of neuromodulation from last week's Neuromodulation of Neuronal Circuits workshop at the Paris Brain Institute. www.youtube.com/watch?v=NF0H... And if you're at #BernsteinConference, come and meet Abdal at the poster session next week!

youtube.com

Abdal AlKilany - Rapid neuromodulation enables context-dependent sensory processing

YouTube video by Neural Reckoning

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Dan Goodman @neural-reckoning.org · 25/09/2026

Come and meet the Neural Reckoners at #BernsteinConference next week. I'll be talking about our recent work on neuromodulation at the satellite workshop below, and we have some posters.

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Maciej Kania @kaniamaciej.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Train your model on a task, or fit it to biological data? And once it's optimized, what does it tell us about the brain? 🧠 In our #BernsteinConference satellite workshop, we'll discuss these questions through the lenses of different optimization methods. Check it out in Room 3.104! 🤓😉

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Dan Goodman @neural-reckoning.org · 24/09/2026

And so it begins. The next stage in the UK's rapidly accelerating programme to shoot itself in the foot in every sector of life where it does better than average.

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Dan Goodman @neural-reckoning.org · 24/09/2026

Not a terrible evening to go for a run home though the city.

Golden purple sunset over one of the lakes in Hyde park.

Golden purple sunset over the Royal Albert Hall

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BWJones @bwjones.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

This is an important point. AI is not going rogue. It is behaving as it was designed to behave. The ones going rogue are the companies themselves who have violated norms, and are committing crimes daily from stealing IP to cybercrime. It did not have to be this way, but... Techbros.

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Dan Goodman @neural-reckoning.org · 24/09/2026

Last chance to get your SNUFA spiking neural network abstracts in, deadline tomorrow. Only 300 words and get a chance to give a talk in front of an audience of hundreds (plus YouTube upload gets hundreds more). snufa.net/2026/ And don't forget to register for the conference too. Tell your friends!

snufa.net

SNUFA 2026

Spiking Neural Networks As Universal Function Approximators

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Dan Goodman @neural-reckoning.org · 23/09/2026

This is an absolutely great metaphor for explaining why experimentally figuring out what the brain is doing is hard. I may have to steal this.

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megan peters 🧠 @meganakpeters.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Neuromatch Impact Scholars are smart, dedicated, motivated, and have also gone thru at least one of our courses! Mentoring them can lead to publications and other important outputs! Apply to mentor today -- fantastic opportunity!

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Margot Finn @eicathomefinn.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

'“While 77 per cent of respondents either somewhat or strongly supported the use of taxpayer money to fund research generally, such support dropped to 42 per cent for research that involved scientists’ use of AI at some stage of the scientific process,” the paper says.'

sciencedirect.com

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Blake Richards @tyrellturing.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Two tenure track positions are open in Computer Science @mcgill.ca ! Secure Software mcgill.wd3.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/McGill... Quantum Computing mcgill.wd3.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/McGill... Come join our department, and live in the coolest city in North America! (Yeah, I stand by that.)

mcgill.wd3.myworkdayjobs.com

Tenure-Track Faculty Position in Computer Science: Secure Software and Computer Systems

Please refer to the How to Apply for a Job (for External Candidates) job aid for instructions on how to apply. If you are an active McGill employee (ie: currently in an active contract or position at ...

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Romain Brette @romainbrette.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

New preprint! “Active control of surface immobilization in the foraging behavior of Paramecium”. More about the elementary cognition of these little critters! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

biorxiv.org

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Tim Vogels @tpvogels.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Playing Pong with spikes, dancing rate networks, composite engrams & #ihngrams4engrams. The labs most recent work-in-progress, now on biorxiv.com. Stay tuned for more Pong doi.org/10.64898/202... Dale doi.org/10.64898/202... Composite engrams doi.org/10.64898/202... Ihngrams doi.org/10.64898/202...

Small sub panel of the "Dale" paper's Fig. 1 ,depicting a humanoid dancing with joy. The paper is about how motor cortex can orchestrate a rich and flexible repertoire of network dynamics for rhythmic and goal-directed movements. Computational studies have begun to illuminate the mechanistic origins of this repertoire, but a comprehensive model that can explain the emergence of both transient and self-sustained dynamics is still missing. Condruz et al. show that three simple ingredients: Dalean connectivity, stability, and nonlinear neural responses, suffice to reverse-engineer networks that produce transient, steady-state, and self-sustained periodic activity. A single dynamical principle underlies this repertoire: the interaction of non-normal amplification, inherent to Dalean networks, with neuronal nonlinearity, so to ignite and sustain multi-stable, controllable dynamics. The approach yields entire families of connectivity matrices that require no hand-tuning or learning of weights. Without fitting them to data, these networks reproduce the population-level signatures of motor cortex, implying that the richness of cortical dynamics need not be sculpted by learning, but may emerge from simple biological ingredients. But really, we just feel like dancing with JOY!!

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Hardik Rajpal @h-rajpal.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Glad that this is put now in @cp-cellrepphyssci.bsky.social A higher order interaction with Alberto Liardi, @rhizoqualia.bsky.social, @frosas.bsky.social and Pedro Mediano.

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Bart Penders @penders.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Back of the envelope calculations: 3600 years of research time went into the collective application process. The research will fund 3200 years of research. We are 400 research years poorer as a result of this. 1/2

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Dan Goodman @neural-reckoning.org · 20/09/2026

I'm not sure I agree with @giorgio.gilest.ro's logic that this ends up with technofeudalism. Yes LLM-written papers are flooding journals, but that's because journals are and always were a bad tool for filtering for insight. Our response should be to try something different.

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Dan Goodman @neural-reckoning.org · 19/09/2026

With all the major AI companies now reporting that their LLMs have hacked computers it seems pretty clear that this isn't a case of them all spontaneously developing the capability to break containment but that they're all in competition with each other and training their LLMs to do exactly this.

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Dan Goodman @neural-reckoning.org · 18/09/2026

I do love how every software update now gives me the delightful opportunity to reconsider my decision to painstakingly turn off all the AI features, by turning them all back on and having a splash screen telling me about how great they are.

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Simon Schultz @simonschultz.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

New paper out in PLOS Comp Biology - collaboration with Simon Stringer and Dan Goodman Hierarchical feature binding in a spiking neural network model of the primate ventral visual pathway Brian Gardner et al journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...

journals.plos.org

Hierarchical feature binding in a spiking neural network model of the primate ventral visual pathway

Author summary How the brain pieces together visual details into coherent objects, known as the feature binding problem, remains an unresolved conceptual challenge in neuroscience. Existing theories e...

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Dan Goodman @neural-reckoning.org · 17/09/2026

Reminder everyone, the SNUFA spiking neural network workshop abstract submission deadline is end of next week! Get your abstracts in, and register for the event too. 🤖🧠🧪 #Neuroscience #ComputationalNeuroscience #SpikingNeuralNetworks

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Dan Goodman @neural-reckoning.org · 16/09/2026

Oh that's nice. A university just wrote to me thanking me for writing a recommendation letter for a student that they've now accepted. I don't remember getting an email like that before and even though it's probably automated, it still feels nice. At some point someone decided to put in the effort.

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Dan Goodman @neural-reckoning.org · 15/09/2026

I don't know what strategy high up tech company execs think they're pursuing talking about AI risk as they do. But, it's not spooking investors enough to get those execs kicked out, and they know that before speaking. Whatever they're trying to achieve, they don't think it hurts their bottom line.

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Jess Miers 🦝 @jmiers230.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

And of course OpenAI and Anthropic are running with it too. Rogue AI narratives easily let them off the hook for their sloppy (and embarrassing) development decisions. While also making it look to their eager investors like they're inventing god...

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Dan Goodman @neural-reckoning.org · 13/09/2026

If you really think that AI running out of control is a dangerous possibility, then make tech company CEOs legally liable for illegal actions taken by their company's agents.

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Dan Goodman @neural-reckoning.org · 13/09/2026

If you really think that AI running out of control is a dangerous possibility, then make tech company CEOs legally liable for illegal actions taken by their company's agents.

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Emily M. Bender @emilymbender.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

Between the PRs of (largely likely stolen) math breakthroughs, claims of "rogue AI" (actually cybercrimes by companies, but whatevs), and doomerist "whistleblowers", it feels like we've been subjected to a gish gallop of hype recently. >>

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COSYNE @cosynemeeting.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

📢Have work to share with the computational and systems neuroscience community? Abstract submissions for #COSYNE2027 are now open. Deadline: 18 October 2026, 11:59 p.m. AoE Submit your abstract: www.cosyne.org/abstracts-su... #Neuroscience

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Dan Goodman @neural-reckoning.org · 11/09/2026

Gave a talk at the @crick.ac.uk on "Does heterogeneity help the brain and how could we know if it did?" part of a series we organised with @marcusghosh.bsky.social. It was fun to present work aimed at generating discussion. neural-reckoning.org/talk_2026_cr...

neural-reckoning.org

Does heterogeneity help the brain and how could we know if it did?

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Dan Goodman @neural-reckoning.org · 11/09/2026

If you are interested in understanding what happened with AI hacking incidents, this is a much better article to read than all the breathless hype about AI "swarms" "going rogue".

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Vikram Chandra @vchandra.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

I am excited to announce that I will start the Brain Origins Lab at the Crick in March 2027! Using acoels as a model system, the lab will study how animal brains evolve, and how innovations in brain organisation enable new computational abilities and the evolution of complex behaviour.

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Dan Goodman @neural-reckoning.org · 08/09/2026

Wait Terry Tao posts 5 days ago about how AI could solve Navier Stokes and now this? Feels like too much of a coincidence? Not suggesting anything untoward from Terry, but something's going on here isn't it?

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Dan Goodman @neural-reckoning.org · 08/09/2026

If - as now seems likely - LLM companies are mining their logs for juicy problems, then that means that it's very likely that "secret" test sets don't stay secret for long. When looking at new models' performance on benchmarks that date from before that model, we shouldn't take results at face value

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Melanie Mitchell @melaniemitchell.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

Hey @ericlipton.nytimes.com 👋 AI is not “evolving” on its own. *People* are choosing how to build it. *People* are choosing how to train it. *People* are choosing how to run it. Maybe the problem is that they are the *wrong people* to make these choices.

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Dan Goodman @neural-reckoning.org · 07/09/2026

Dappled sunlight in the woods is challenging to photograph. Most of my shots didn't come out that well, but I kinda like this one. #photography

A single leaf glowing luminous green with sunlight from behind. The background is very dark with a few indistinct shapes. You can see the veins on the leaf.

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Anne Urai @anne-urai.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

Come work in my institute! 👇https://www.academictransfer.com/en/jobs/363675/professor-of-social-decision-making/

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Dan Goodman @neural-reckoning.org · 05/09/2026

Is @jo.nny.rip the first person to actually read the code in the GPT6 press release?

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Jack C. Gartside @jackcgartside.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

New paper from our group :) Inspired by retinal ganglion cell networks, we built an on-chip photonic lasing network that can rapidly learn to solve complex visual tasks, from classification to image segmentation, from scarce training data. Out in Science Advances @science.org t.co/enRyRVgzlI

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Dan Goodman @neural-reckoning.org · 04/09/2026

I know that all the academics are on LinkedIn now so I have to post announcements etc. there, but it's an uncomfortable and unsettling experience actually reading it. Why do they put up with it? It's kind of sickening.

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Jieyu Zheng @jieyusz.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

How fast can mice learn complex mazes? With @mameister4.bsky.social we reveal memory, generalization, latent learning, and remote credit assignment of mice in the Manhattan Maze. Do mice born without a cortex or hippocampus have them too? Check it out! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

biorxiv.org

Rapid spatial cognition in mice, with and without neocortex and hippocampus

Rapid learning, memory, and generalization are often attributed to circuits of the neocortex and hippocampus, but their specific role remains unclear. To examine these cognitive abilities together in ...

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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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Dan Goodman @neural-reckoning.org · 03/09/2026

#SpikingNeuralNetwork people - this year's SNUFA workshop is live! Talks by: ⭐ Eugene Izhikevich ⭐ @giuliadangelo.bsky.social ⭐ Mihai Petrovici ⭐ Susanne Schreiber Submit your abstracts by Sept 25th. Registration is open! More info at: snufa.net/2026/ cc @fzenke.bsky.social @albada.bsky.social

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Kayson Fakhar @kayson.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

🚨 8 months after, this paper found its home at Science Advances. We came up with a generative brain network model based on game theory and found that the human brain is suboptimal both in terms of wiring cost and communication efficiency. Here's why: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

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Dan Goodman @neural-reckoning.org · 02/09/2026

Oh this is going straight to the top of the podcast queue.

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