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Lucas C Parra

@parralab.org
632 followers 337 following 131 posts

NeuroAI, applied neuroscience, machine learning, brain stimulation, neural signals, medical imaging - physicist by training. parralab.org

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Reposted by Lucas C Parra
Ken Paller @paller.bsky.social · 12h
Did you know that your speed — in a simple task of quickly pressing a button every time you see a yellow square — is faster when you are exhaling or pausing then when you are inhaling? Dr. Erika Yamazaki figured this out, did all the work, and published on it this week www.cell.com/iscience/ful...
cell.com
Response speed is modulated by respiratory phase
Behavioral neuroscience; Cognitive neuroscience
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Reposted by Lucas C Parra
gamera obscura @ohrobin.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Google earth has updated its satellite images of Gaza. The destruction is almost incomprehensible.
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Carl Zimmer @carlzimmer.com · 27/09/2026
Four days ago, a scientist was surprised by the news that Anthropic discovered new virus genes for making DNA. He says he’s been studying them for years—and feeding his data to Anthropic’s AI as part of his own research. Coincidence? Here’s my story. nyti.ms/3VSWayc
nyti.ms
Did Anthropic’s A.I. Really Make a Scientific Discovery on Its Own? (Gift Article)
An expert at the University of Copenhagen said his team had been sharing its research with the company’s A.I. model, Claude, and that its new finding matched their work.
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Lucas C Parra @parralab.org · 24/09/2026
Every day humans around the world speak about 58 to 133 trillion words. Large language models process between 360 and 430 trillion tokens a day. Roughly speaking, LLM processes 4 times more words than humans speak each day. AI already dominated the conversation!
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Reposted by Lucas C Parra
Nima Dehghani @neurovium.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
56k submissions to ICLR These conferences are now 90% AI-written garbage. These ppl who submit AI papers to have a conference paper on resume (for job/position) have effectively turned that value that they are after to "0". Greed + AI slop -> a pile of rubbish x.com/denny_zhou/s...
x.com
Denny Zhou (@denny_zhou) on X
ICLR 2027 has received more submissions than all previous years (2013–2026) combined
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Elizabeth Jacobs, PhD @elizabethjacobs.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
Russell Vought cannot be given the power to decide what science is funded. He knows nothing about science; in fact, he seems to hate it and everyone who does it. And he has all of the worst characteristics of humanity. The Republican Congress is a fucking disease.
arstechnica.com
Russel Vought will reportedly be given veto power over all NIH grants
Pending move comes over the objections of the NIH director.
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Yoshua Bengio @yoshuabengio.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
Over the past few days, I've taken the time to summarize my thoughts on the recent incidents involving agents’ misaligned behavior. We don't know with certainty what comes next, but we know where these issues originate, and this can help us plan the path forward.
yoshuabengio.org
Yoshua Bengio | Why are AI agents lying, cheating and coordinating?
A lot has been written about the incidents of the last few months in which AI agents misbehaved in serious ways. They took actions that would be considered as crimes if a human took them, escaped thei...
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Ed Gibney @edgibney.bsky.social · 06/09/2026
What a fascinating and disturbing article. I’ve had bones to pick with Buddhism and Sam Harris-style meditation for years (despite liking many things in these too), so it was good to see that backed up by scientific research. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...
theatlantic.com
The Dark Side of Mindfulness
A prominent psychologist and meditation teacher set out to research the benefits of the practice. What she found alarmed her.
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Reposted by Lucas C Parra
Micah G. Allen @micahgallen.com · 05/09/2026
The thing about actually doing power analyses and design simulations is you pretty quickly figure out most studies are grossly underpowered...
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Rabih Alameddine @rabihalameddine.bsky.social · 05/09/2026
Oops
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Mr. Blabalino 🇳🇴🇺🇸💙 @blabalino.com · 22/08/2026
Found this recording of Rita Moreno performing “Fever” on The Muppet Show from 1976. 14/10
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Lucas C Parra @parralab.org · 17/08/2026
"The NIH proposes a controversial change to its grant review, hiding numerical scores from applicants." www.forbes.com/sites/brucel... Submit comments to this rule change here: rfi.grants.nih.gov?s=6a2b1c22c3... @standupforscience.net
forbes.com
NIH Proposes Big Change In How Grant Applications Evaluated
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is proposing yet another significant change in its grant review process, moving away from numerical scores for applications.
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Reposted by Lucas C Parra
Science Magazine @science.org · 13/08/2026
Memories can survive even after the brain temporarily loses more than half of its synaptic connections, according to a new mouse study in Science, which challenges the long-held view that long-term memories depend on stable individual synapses. Learn more: scim.ag/4zhsCK2
scim.ag
Artificial hibernation reveals synaptic engram architecture associated with memory retention
Memories leave lasting physical changes at the synaptic level. Although stable, larger spines are thought to support memory, the high turnover of dendritic spines and the drifting of neuronal represen...
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852dude @852dude.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
Bro. People are cool as fuck.
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Brian Bilston @brianbilston.bsky.social · 04/08/2026
Today is Venn Day, in celebration of the mathematician John Venn, born on this day in 1834. To commemorate the occasion, here’s a poem in the form of a Venn Diagram.
Poem title: At the Intersection
 
The poem is divided into two overlapping circles.
 
The left-hand circle is titled ‘me’ and the text reads:
the day we
went out to have
an ice-cream, we said nothing
just let our silence melt in
the air as we walked across the common
our love never tiring at all
 
The right-hand circle is titled ‘you’ and the text reads:
we should
have talked it over but
nothing ever seems to get
in your fat head. You are so
common that I wish we’d never met
at all and I’d married Tim instead
 
In the intersection of the poem (where the two circles overlap), the text reads:
we
have
nothing
in
common
at all
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Minds, Machines, and Brains (MMB) @mmb-journal.bsky.social · 02/08/2026
Hello world! 👋 We’re Minds, Machines, and Brains (MMB) 👤🤖🧠 a new open access journal from @mitpress.bsky.social exploring the principles of intelligence and cognition across natural and artificial minds. Submissions open this Fall! 🔗 direct.mit.edu/mmb
direct.mit.edu
Minds, Machines, and Brains | MIT Press
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Reposted by Lucas C Parra
Alana Darcher @alanadarcher.bsky.social · 30/07/2026
🎉 *extremely* excited to share our human single neuron + movie dataset is out in #ScientificData! 📄 Human neuron activity during an 83-minute movie from 2,286 neurons and 29 patients 🔗https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-026-07955-0 1st public dataset from @humansingleneuron.bsky.social!🧵
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Lucas C Parra @parralab.org · 24/07/2026
As we explore the idea that brain-body connection plays a role in mental health and psychiatry, let this null results on intersection be a warning: Not all fashionable ideas work out. Important work!
nature.com
Interoceptive performance is unrelated to mental health symptoms in a large multi-domain psychophysical investigation - Nature Mental Health
In this large-scale study, Banellis and colleagues investigate the links between mental health symptoms and interoception by measuring cardiac and respiratory interoceptive sensitivity and relating th...
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Reposted by Lucas C Parra
Micah G. Allen @micahgallen.com · 23/07/2026
When we started the visceral mind project, we promised to publish what we found null and otherwise, and we delivered!
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Ben Allen @evodynamics.bsky.social · 17/07/2026
Congrats we just made it impossible to come here for a PhD www.bostonglobe.com/2026/07/16/m...
bostonglobe.com
Trump administration limits student visas to four years, changing longstanding policy - The Boston Globe
The new rule, which also restricts the international students’ ability to transfer schools or change majors without approval in their first year, will go into effect in mid-September.
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disgruntled lesbian of Minneapolis @phoenix-rights.bsky.social · 16/07/2026
really thinking about this tweet as i’ve been struggling to breathe through nausea for the last 5 hours
climate change will manifest as a series of disasters viewed through phones with footage that gets closer and closer to where you live until you're the one filming it
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stefanofusi.bsky.social @stefanofusi.bsky.social · 15/07/2026
From a great collaboration with @lorenzoposani.com, @shuqiw.bsky.social, Samuel Muscinelli, Liam Paninski, now in Nature: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
nature.com
Rarely categorical, highly separable representations along the cortical hierarchy - Nature
Cortical circuits prioritize diversity over categorical structure, supporting a computational regime geared towards high-dimensional, highly separable neural representations.
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Federico Adolfi @fedeadolfi.bsky.social · 10/07/2026
Click here to ununsubscribe
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Lucas C Parra @parralab.org · 09/07/2026
Should I still teach coding? I take pride in the biomedical signal processing class I have been teaching and refining since 2003. This is the first class where our engineering students learn to code with concrete problems to solve (60% of the grade). Should I still insist that they code themselves?
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Reposted by Lucas C Parra
Stanislas Dehaene @standehaene.bsky.social · 06/07/2026
The global neuronal workspace (GNW) is currently the best documented neuroscience mechanism by which conscious processing arises in the human brain — and now Anthropic researchers have discovered a similar workspace inside their large language model ! www.anthropic.com/research/glo...
anthropic.com
A global workspace in language models
Interpretability research on Claude's internal thoughts.
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Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · 04/07/2026
1. A bit of evolutionary biology. I'm really intrigued by a new perspective piece from Steve Frank that explores connections between how natural selection creates systems that generalize and recent work in machine learning about the surprising capabilities of massively overparameterized systems.
academic.oup.com
Generalization as the great leap in evolvability: insights from machine learning
Abstract. Natural selection encodes learned information in the genome. Learned solutions may be tuned specifically to past challenges, failing in altered e
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Reposted by Lucas C Parra
jens-madsen.bsky.social @jens-madsen.bsky.social · 04/07/2026
New open dataset out in Scientific Data 🚨 We are releasing BBBD: the Brain, Body, and Behavior Dataset. Paper: www.nature.com/articles/s41... Work with @parralab.org
nature.com
The Brain, Body, and Behavior Dataset (BBBD): Multimodal Recordings during Educational Videos - Scientific Data
Scientific Data - The Brain, Body, and Behavior Dataset (BBBD): Multimodal Recordings during Educational Videos
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Sung Kim @sungkim.bsky.social · 28/10/2024
Free eBook: Patterns, predictions, and actions: A story about machine learning by Moritz Hardt, Benjamin Recht This graduate textbook on machine learning tells a story of how patterns in data support predictions and consequential actions. arxiv.org/abs/2102.05242
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Reposted by Lucas C Parra
Aaron Milstein @neurosutras.bsky.social · 28/06/2026
Excited to share this preprint from @ianoldenburg.bsky.social . To evoke movement with holo stim, you need the right pattern at the right time! Interestingly, the preparatory state before spont motion is not the same as the state permissive for evoked motion. Dig in! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
biorxiv.org
The Importance of Synchrony in the Neural Control of Movement
Throughout the mammalian cortex, populations of neurons must work together to enact behaviors. While population recordings in motor cortex have revealed many aspects of when neurons fire during behavi...
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Dongyan Lin @dongyanl1n.bsky.social · 26/06/2026
(1/n) Thrilled to share my first paper at Meta FAIR! "EgoBabyVLM: Benchmarking Cross-Modal Learning from Naturalistic Egocentric Video Data" 👶 Human infants learn language from sparse, noisy multimodal input. Today's VLMs can't. We built a benchmark + challenge to close that gap. 🧵
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Grace Lindsay @neurograce.bsky.social · 26/06/2026
Updated preprint and code from my lab. If you want to explore more realistic neural dynamics in models that can still perform visual tasks, check it out! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
biorxiv.org
Modeling Dynamical Vision with Biologically Plausible Recurrent Convolutional Networks
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) trained for image recognition have demonstrated remarkable conceptual similarities to the primate ventral visual pathway, but their standard feedforward architectu...
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elizabethginexi.bsky.social @elizabethginexi.bsky.social · 24/06/2026
5,843 terminated NIH grants. 110 canceled announcements. Courts ordering reinstatements. Political pre-issuance review in action. My take in MedPage Today. @medpagetoday.com www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/seco...
medpagetoday.com
Opinion | I Was an NIH Program Official. Here's What a Peer Reviewer Doesn’t See.
The NEJM editors understand the threat of the proposed federal grant review changes
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Lucas C Parra @parralab.org · 23/06/2026
www.science.org/content/arti...
science.org
Exclusive: NSF slashes research programs to support new tech initiative, insiders say
Unexpected shift in funds has meant sharp drop in grants this fiscal year
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Thomas Dietterich @tdietterich.bsky.social · 06/06/2026
Excellent and thought-provoking essay by Ted Chiang. [gift link] www.theatlantic.com/philosophy/2...
theatlantic.com
No, Artificial Intelligence Is Not Conscious
Taken to its logical conclusion, this line of thinking is absurd—and damning.
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Lucas C Parra @parralab.org · 05/06/2026
Neuron–astrocyte associative memory | PNAS www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
pnas.org
Neuron–astrocyte associative memory | PNAS
Astrocytes, the most abundant type of glial cell, play a fundamental role in memory. Despite most hippocampal synapses being contacted by an astroc...
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Reposted by Lucas C Parra
John Tuthill @tuthill.bsky.social · 04/06/2026
Spontaneous problem-solving in bumble bees. Amazing work by the bees who were put in these puzzling situations by @akshayebhambore.bsky.social in the lab of @olliloukola.bsky.social www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
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Colette Delawalla, PhD @cdelawalla.bsky.social · 04/06/2026
ALRIGHT EVERYONE HERE IS THE OFFICIAL SUFS GUIDE TO LEAVING PUBLIC COMMENTS ON THE OMB-2026-0034 PROPOSED RULE: www.standupforscience.foundation/policy-and-advocacy/the-sufs-guide-to-writing-public-comments (share with all your friends!)
standupforscience.foundation
The SUFS Guide to Writing Public Comments — Your Site Title
Written by: Cole Donovan, Director of Policy and Advocacy and Colette Delawalla, PhD, CEO
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Dr. Lucky Tran @luckytran.com · 02/06/2026
Incredible! Scientists receive a rare standing ovation after announcing that a new treatment can double the survival time for pancreatic cancer, the deadliest cancer which was once considered “undruggable.” When we fund and support science, we can achieve anything! (Video: Dr. Wish Dhillon)
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Andrew Lampinen @lampinen.bsky.social · 29/05/2026
What are the real problems to be solved in continual learning? In my latest post, I tackle this question — reviewing where I think the field went astray in the past, how language models changed things, and where the real challenges remain. infinitefaculty.substack.com/p/what-are-t...
infinitefaculty.substack.com
What are the real problems of continual learning?
Reflections on catastrophic interference, plasticity, and learning for the future in the era of large language models
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jens-madsen.bsky.social @jens-madsen.bsky.social · 29/05/2026
🚨🚨New open resource for EEG researchers 🚨🚨 Want to work with neural synchrony and intersubject correlation of EEG? We released ready-to-use correlated components spatial filters for the 64-channel 10–20 montage.
tinyurl.com
Attentional state, not trait, predicts test performance in video-based learning
Computer science; Social sciences; Education
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Lucas C Parra @parralab.org · 14/05/2026
This paper changed my mind on how visual processing works in the brain. We knew it was dynamic given all the recurrent connections. But I thought it would converge to a fixpoint during a fixation. Not so, it seems ... The dynamic captures different aspects of the stimulus at different times. Nice.
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Drew Schreiner @schreinerdrew.bsky.social · 13/05/2026
Where, exactly, does learning happen in the brain? Out today in @nature.com, we identify a synaptic locus of birdsong learning and show that the circuit can be tuned to make birds learn faster - but at a cost. Read on👇 #neuroskyence 🧪 #prattle 💬 #bioacoustics Shareable link: rdcu.be/fiyrS
nature.com
A synaptic locus of song learning - Nature
Combining a computational framework and optogenetic and chemogenetic manipulations within and downstream of the cortico-basal ganglia circuit identifies the specific cortico-basal ganglia synapse...
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Zejin Lu @zejinlu.bsky.social · 11/05/2026
Now out in Nature Machine Intelligence @NatMachIntell “Adopting a human developmental visual diet yields robust and shape-based AI vision”: doi.org/10.1038/s422.... A wonderful case where brain inspiration improved AI. With @martisamuser.bsky.social, Radek Cichy and @timkietzmann.bsky.social .
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Natalie Christie Peluso 🧠 @nataliepeluso.com · 20/04/2026
"Quality is a relic now. Nobody wants it. Nobody pays for it. Nobody measures it. The metric is velocity. The metric is how fast you can ship a 3,167-line function that burns a quarter million API calls daily and call it 100% AI-written." 🔥 techtrenches.dev/p/the-snake-...
techtrenches.dev
Claude Code's Source: 3,167-Line Function, Regex Sentiment
Anthropic claimed 100% of Claude Code is AI-written. A source leak exposed a 3,167-line function, regex sentiment analysis, and 250K wasted API calls daily
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Khai Loong Aw @khaiaw.bsky.social · 14/04/2026
Children exhibit visual understanding from limited experience, orders of magnitude less than our best models. We introduce the Zero-shot World Model (ZWM). Trained on a single child's visual experience, BabyZWM rapidly generates competence across diverse benchmarks with no task-specific training. 🧵
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Elliot Murphy @elliot-murphy.bsky.social · 14/04/2026
Extremely cool paper 😎 All elementary functions from a single binary operator arxiv.org/abs/2603.21852
arxiv.org
All elementary functions from a single binary operator
A single two-input gate suffices for all of Boolean logic in digital hardware. No comparable primitive has been known for continuous mathematics: computing elementary functions such as sin, cos, sqrt,...
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Antonino Greco @agreco.bsky.social · 11/04/2026
A neurodevelopment-inspired warm-up strategy to address uncertainty calibration: networks are briefly trained on random noise and labels before exposure to real data, leading to well-calibrated confidence and strong detection of unknown inputs. Cool results! #NeuroAI www.nature.com/articles/s42...
nature.com
Brain-inspired warm-up training with random noise for uncertainty calibration - Nature Machine Intelligence
Cheon and Paik show that overconfidence in deep neural networks arises from standard initialization practices, and that brief warm-up training with random noise improves uncertainty calibration and meta-cognitive recognition of unknown inputs.
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Marc Lanctot @sharky6000.bsky.social · 11/04/2026
French government switching to #linux 🇫🇷❤️🐧 "2026 is set to be l’année de Linux." 😅👌 magnifique! share.google/xHwAIaMQuFzz...
share.google
French government says it's ditching Windows for Linux — country accelerates plans to ditch US-based software in digital sovereignty push
2026 is set to be l’année de Linux.
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Noam Ross @noamross.net · 30/03/2026
For #NSF and #NIH watchers, Grant Witness now has interactive data on numbers of grants and total funding obligations, broken down by institute and directorate, new awards and non-competitive renewals. The stranglehold on new awards is still a disaster. grant-witness.us/funding_curv...
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Clement Naveilhan @clementnaveilhan.bsky.social · 30/03/2026
NEW preprint with @stephen-ramanoel.bsky.social and @mobilebrainimaging.bsky.social 🎉 In this final study of my PhD, we combined immersive virtual reality with mobile EEG and gait analysis during a path integration task, recording from 30 young and 32 older adults www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
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