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Atanas Stankov

@neuronasko.bsky.social
348 followers 809 following 1.7K posts

CUNY neuro PhD. UMich[visiting student]. Prev at /Stanford/ETH Zurich & UZH/UIUC. Monist soft-determinism. Opinions are my own. Open science: democratize and fund science bottom-up, not just top-down. Neuro needs more brains doing the job à la Solar Punk.

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Atanas Stankov @neuronasko.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
Back to the recent literature on backtracking counterfactuals and why while Judea Pearl mathematically operationalized, he biased the use of causal inference towards an interventionist approach which at the time was an appropriate step to David Lewis’ miracles (von Kügelgen et al. 2023).
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Atanas Stankov @neuronasko.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
Driscoll et al. 2022 review (“Representational drift: Emerging theories for continual learning and experimental future directions”) had this blurb which points in the right direction.
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Atanas Stankov @neuronasko.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Baby step. Took a look at the data. Found high temporal resolution spike times and waveforms. So far so good though I think I’ll just have to sit with the data and transfer it python somehow. One possible future issue came up and that is DL needs lots of data =/. The DeepBC code is hungry.
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Atanas Stankov @neuronasko.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Just as a side note this reminded me of a paper, Lange and Kording 2025 ("Human-niche causality in ML"), which had a similar table comparing the features and limitations of various types of structural causal models. Don't know if this table lists any that are backtracking compatible.
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Atanas Stankov @neuronasko.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Kügelgen et al. 2023 ("Backtracking Counterfactuals") cites Lucas and Kempt 2025 ("An improved probabilistic account of counterfactual reasoning"). Lucas and Kempt had this table comparing which causal structural model (some of their own definition) support intervention/backtracking/observation.
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Atanas Stankov @neuronasko.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
“Oh shoot stick bug.”
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Atanas Stankov @neuronasko.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
Closest thing I found to directly applied a deviation test in autocorrelograms with jitter or any resampling method is this old Bill Newsome paper. “Correlated Firing in Macaque Visual Area MT: Time Scales and Relationship to Behavior” www.jneurosci.org/content/21/5... Let’s normalize this.
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Atanas Stankov @neuronasko.bsky.social · 06/09/2026
Do people not realize the institutional collapse, good or bad, that happens with knowledge democratization? How naive can experts be? Holy cow!!
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Atanas Stankov @neuronasko.bsky.social · 05/09/2026
Such a lucky mistake by the opponent. Ended up a stalemate via repetition because time was low even though I was a queen vs rook.
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Atanas Stankov @neuronasko.bsky.social · 23/08/2026
Not just on the political right but a lot of people on the political left have this idea that if one thinks consciousness is phenomenal they are an “NPC” and these epiphemenologists are really really good at hiding this view behind many walls of intellectualization.
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Atanas Stankov @neuronasko.bsky.social · 07/08/2026
I want a human to help, not linear algebra running on some polluting data center.
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Atanas Stankov @neuronasko.bsky.social · 05/08/2026
The AI bubble further inflates. What is up with neurotech startups that just take some scientific hypothesis name and plaster it to some arbitrary agent wrapper to milk investors for millions.
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Atanas Stankov @neuronasko.bsky.social · 25/07/2026
This is impressive level punching up to hypocrisy. Never seen a single thread of tweet live rent free in the minds of AI and VC execs calling/rooting for him to get canned. GOATed.
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Atanas Stankov @neuronasko.bsky.social · 21/07/2026
I guess the day came where my natural curiosity finally stumbled upon the relativistic effects of ephaptic coupling, if they do apply in the brain at all would be interesting. Now I see the long term dividends of UIUC’s Phys 225 and 487 courses. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jefimen...
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Atanas Stankov @neuronasko.bsky.social · 20/07/2026
This comment in this thread is what screams to me internal failure of current academic institutions. That one Rutgers neurosci prof said thought I was tone deaf and I think he was tone deaf as well so I didn’t even bother continuing the conversation. www.reddit.com/r/AskProfess...
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Atanas Stankov @neuronasko.bsky.social · 17/07/2026
Air quality index Apple uses got maxed out today.
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Atanas Stankov @neuronasko.bsky.social · 23/06/2026
Just from a social media angle, Lior Pachter is not getting the impact metrics he thinks he might get with this post. Sudhof unpacked vesicle release mechanics via brute force experimentation over decades so if you ding him on stats it won’t do much. Science is praxis and realpolitik.
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Atanas Stankov @neuronasko.bsky.social · 19/06/2026
This is how chunk of the public thinks about causality (Kevin Mitchell’s framework IMO). And it is permanent. Great talk. I really wish more computational neuroscientists took this sort of cognition seriously instead of shaming the public for “I do my own research”. m.youtube.com/watch?v=gF9L...
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Atanas Stankov @neuronasko.bsky.social · 02/06/2026
Field coupling evades the neuronal time constant bc it doesn’t inject current but instead redistributes charges on the external/internal parts of the cell wall. Vigmond et al. 1997 (“Mechanisms of Electrical Coupling Between Pyramidal Cells”) journals.physiology.org/doi/full/10.... 22(annex 3)/n
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Atanas Stankov @neuronasko.bsky.social · 09/05/2026
You totally can. You can’t cheat thermodynamic demons.
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Atanas Stankov @neuronasko.bsky.social · 23/04/2026
I missed one instance of ephaptic coupling (capacitive). An older study had a wire diagram distinguishing ohmic and capacitive coupling of a cell Vm exposed to a Ve. “Ephaptically generated potentials in CA1 neurons of rat's hippocampus in situ” journals.physiology.org/doi/abs/10.1... 3(annex)/n
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Atanas Stankov @neuronasko.bsky.social · 18/04/2026
Traveling waves lit has clues. Josh Jacob’s group had this blurb in ref to Anastassiou et al., Pinotsis & Miller. Note: Steinmetz group found spiral waves to be synaptic. “Planar, spiral, and concentric traveling waves distinguish behavioral states in human memory” www.nature.com/articles/s41...
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Atanas Stankov @neuronasko.bsky.social · 15/04/2026
Them tornado sirens need to stay put. @annarborobserver.bsky.social
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Atanas Stankov @neuronasko.bsky.social · 09/04/2026
I don’t understand. Who is actually losing here? Some of us have been an underdog for years. Experiment and biophys modeling have always been and will always be safe bets. I stopped caring for blackboxes that have no biophys explanation. (I didn’t quote repost bc I don’t want to directly engage.)
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Atanas Stankov @neuronasko.bsky.social · 28/03/2026
NoKings 3.0 Schaumburg IL close to home. Missed the 1.0 in Manhattan and was too late to the 2.0 in Ann Arbor. Never late than ever. Now gotta work on my poster game.
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Atanas Stankov @neuronasko.bsky.social · 09/03/2026
Coincidentally last year ago a Bulgarian politics prof on TV had made the same astute observation about post-COVID in Bulgaria, in the US, and the world. These can be times because major flux like is the putative causal mechanism for democratization. 2/2 GIF source: eguvep.github.io/jpiv/introdu...
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Atanas Stankov @neuronasko.bsky.social · 04/03/2026
Automating science communication is wild. If you are going with the public isolating yourself isn’t helping.
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Atanas Stankov @neuronasko.bsky.social · 09/02/2026
A man with no country sandwiched between clusters. Checks about right =D
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Atanas Stankov @neuronasko.bsky.social · 23/01/2026
PS: Screenshots of the fourth case.
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Atanas Stankov @neuronasko.bsky.social · 23/01/2026
Hypothesis: If an explosion of LLM hallucination science papers on pre-print servers, AI benchmarks, and cold emails to experts the only way to cause a science reform then so be it. Some made the same argument about market bubbles. I’ve screenshotted 4 major (IMO) cases just in the last few weeks.
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Atanas Stankov @neuronasko.bsky.social · 20/01/2026
I frequent in Hacker News to get a vibe check on entrepreneur social media. The community is usually biased to be bullish but it has this genuine quality where they understand negative but important news (usually 2nd page or very short trending on 1st page). Today it’s top negative all around.
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Atanas Stankov @neuronasko.bsky.social · 21/12/2025
AI psychosis has evolved to the grant level. It’s not even psychosis, it’s people getting the positive reinforcement they were denied, for one reason or another, all their lives and now the are giddy. They won’t listen to stick, because AI industry is giving them infinite carrot.
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Atanas Stankov @neuronasko.bsky.social · 16/12/2025
These comments on “it’s the graduates fault” are tone deaf because it’s the graduates that vote on and consume these tools after taking on students loans which is risk.
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Atanas Stankov @neuronasko.bsky.social · 12/11/2025
Sabine’s 👏 bottom 👏 line 👏 is 👏 populist 👏 science 👏 enterntainment. She’s LARPing hard and folks are still falling for it. Even if she belives her own stuff she gets the audience from a bottom-up take to get views. If Mamdani can do it in politics from the left, it can be done for science. 😩
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Atanas Stankov @neuronasko.bsky.social · 23/09/2025
I’ve noticed this bothers a particular group of ML/AI/math researchers. They just don’t like the mere hypothesis that natural phenomena can be black box that reveals itself over time and that an explicit model can’t be intuited from just theory. Empiricism bites back on a first principles level.
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Atanas Stankov @neuronasko.bsky.social · 31/08/2025
I can use perceptual control (my motor system) to intervene and new create meaning.
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Atanas Stankov @neuronasko.bsky.social · 29/08/2025
Conjecture: This Elias Bareinboim post is a clue on how to create a strategy to merge biophysical modeling to causal inference because the No Free Lunch theorem is conceptually tied to Landauer’s Principle via 2nd law of thermodynamics in non-equilibrium states [David Wolpert’s work].
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Atanas Stankov @neuronasko.bsky.social · 25/08/2025
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Atanas Stankov @neuronasko.bsky.social · 20/08/2025
Boss, I’m getting whiplash here.
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Atanas Stankov @neuronasko.bsky.social · 17/08/2025
Cool even r/singularity, one of the most accelerationist subreddits, is starting to ask key questions on the theoretical possibilities on the claims by Ray Kurzweil and AI authors. The post got ratio-ed but still has a size-able amount of upvotes.
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Atanas Stankov @neuronasko.bsky.social · 16/08/2025
2nd highest voted post on r/MachineLearning in the past week. Are the structural issues are general across sciences bc SfN has similar vibes? With microblogging and blogging (Medium/Substack/arXiv) the short to long form communication style is evolving and of course original papers are still king.
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Atanas Stankov @neuronasko.bsky.social · 14/08/2025
“Educational Purposes Only” sure… 👀
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Atanas Stankov @neuronasko.bsky.social · 12/08/2025
Chess evaluation bar over time. I didn’t resign just because I spaced out of tiredness and kept going. The game was lost but then bam. A winning blunder.
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Atanas Stankov @neuronasko.bsky.social · 01/07/2025
Can you interview someone like Chomba Bupe who is one few tech entrepreneurs who I spotted is critical and open about these definitions and concepts. He even disagreed with Gary Marcus on the plausibility of AGI (screenshot). There are other putative expert skeptics of AGI but not yet open about it.
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Atanas Stankov @neuronasko.bsky.social · 25/06/2025
At a quick glance, what makes this a seemingly breakthrough moment is efficiency of the NYC primary outcome based on direct or indirect campaign spending. Loose metaphors of this are Moneyball and DeepSeek. If the message/strategy resonates the price indicators are spectacular.
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Atanas Stankov @neuronasko.bsky.social · 10/06/2025
Right. Even Gary is not conservative enough on the expectations of what is computable in relation to the brain with the current technology. Loving online the debates these days.
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Atanas Stankov @neuronasko.bsky.social · 06/06/2025
PS: The collective vision of this op-ed has a fast track hypothesis of systems evolution for industry. How would industry be unbound to the same evolutionary constraints? (It’s a Socratic question. I want to keep the discussion ball rolling even with bad metaphors.) www.nature.com/articles/s41...
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Atanas Stankov @neuronasko.bsky.social · 04/06/2025
And yet the trend is up and might go up as Twitter becomes worse. The only rule is to stay engaged and let the social network work because it’s an adaptive system. I’m baffled by a lot of folks, including many scientists, who don’t have an intuition of how new media can lead positive outcomes.
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Atanas Stankov @neuronasko.bsky.social · 03/06/2025
Is calcium influx detection for vesicle release in the pre-synaptic bouton a part of the “neural code”? This is as precise as it gets but the supporting protein architecture is very complex. The closest “foundational model” I can think of is AlphaFold. Is that an appropriate analogy?
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Atanas Stankov @neuronasko.bsky.social · 30/05/2025
Three more anecdotal screenshots.
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