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Patrick Mineault

@patrickmineault.bsky.social
4.6K followers 580 following 338 posts

NeuroAI, vision, open science. NeuroAI researcher at Amaranth Foundation. Previously engineer @ Google, Meta, Mila. Updates from neuroai.science

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Patrick Mineault @patrickmineault.bsky.social · 2h
There's a new imaging modality in town: functional ultrasound imaging. I went down a deep rabbit hole to understand how it works physically and computationally. Follow me as I show you how *you* can use it and improve it www.neuroai.science/p/functional...
neuroai.science
Functional ultrasound imaging from scratch
A new modality is coming to brain imaging
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John Tuthill @tuthill.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
a good summary of how we got here and what it means. i would add is that everyone who works with the fly connectome datasets knows that they all far from "complete". each one, though monumental, has major reconstruction/annotation issues, not to mention the lack of a peripheral nervous system.
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Patrick Mineault @patrickmineault.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
Are virtual flies playing Beat Saber? SM64? Doom? No. The new fly connectome is an incredible achievement! Less is going on in the sim videos than it seems. I'm stoked to see people engage with neuroscience though. My breakdown: www.neuroai.science/p/are-flies-...
neuroai.science
Are flies playing Beat Saber?
What a time to be alive!
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Patrick Mineault @patrickmineault.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
I was floored to hear there are chemogenetics trials in humans. We're engineering neurons to have synthetic receptors that can be activated using normally inert drugs! How big of a deal is this for epilepsy, PD, pain? I did a deep dive into human chemogenetics www.neuroai.science/p/the-race-t...
neuroai.science
The race to engineer new knobs for the human brain
Spotlight on DREADDs and chemogenetics
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Patrick Mineault @patrickmineault.bsky.social · 22/08/2026
How has neuroscience changed in the past 10 years? I reread The Future of the Brain, a 2014 compilation of essays from neuroscientists, to see if we accomplished what we said we would. Atlases! Connectomes! Whole brain simulations! TL;DR: we did pretty well! www.neuroai.science/p/the-future...
neuroai.science
The Future of the Brain, past and present
Reflecting on a decade of neuroscience advancements
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Raymond Chua @raymondrchua.bsky.social · 08/06/2026
Excited to share our new paper accepted at ICML 2026 with @tyrellturing.bsky.social and Doina Precup! 🇰🇷 See you in Seoul. A major challenge in continual reinforcement learning is balancing: • plasticity (learning new things) • stability (not forgetting old ones) 🧵 1/15
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Carsen Stringer @computingnature.bsky.social · 22/05/2026
🚨🧠 Our paper is out! We introduce a simple computational model that generates macroscopic, long-timescale dynamics as seen in large-scale neural recordings. #neuroscience #dynamics @marius10p.bsky.social @zhong-lin.bsky.social @hhmijanelia.bsky.social Link: go.nature.com/4tRNjIu
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Patrick Mineault @patrickmineault.bsky.social · 07/05/2026
We have an implicit model of neurodegenerative disease: many discrete diseases, with their own disparate biology. Underlying all of them is the general process of aging. We must strike at the root of senescence. Here's our plan for addressing brain aging. blog.amaranth.foundation/p/solving-br...
blog.amaranth.foundation
Towards Solving Brain Aging
The most important problem in medicine, and the case for acting now.
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Blake Richards @tyrellturing.bsky.social · 06/05/2026
From @tonyzador.bsky.social and crew, a paper showing that neurons' positions in the brain are not just determined by molecular, but also by lineage: www.cell.com/neuron/abstr... #neuroscience 🧪
cell.com
A lineage-based model of scalable positional information in vertebrate brain development
How is brain development coordinated over long distances as it grows from a single zygote to billions of cells? Kerstjens et al. propose that positional information is inherited through the cell linea...
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Patrick Mineault @patrickmineault.bsky.social · 04/05/2026
Do you think that the canonical cortical circuit is complicated? It's so much worse than that! Overlayed on top of the wired connectome, there are *18* different signal-carrying peptides in cortex! Their range is ~similar to the size of a cortical column elifesciences.org/articles/47889 1/
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Patrick Mineault @patrickmineault.bsky.social · 31/03/2026
Stoked this is finally out! We ask: how can we simulate the brain from the bottom up? It's not sufficient to grab the connectome and wire it up in silico! We need 1) ultrastructure 2) (causal) calibration data 3) functional data. Then we can build a simulation compiler. 1/
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Patrick Mineault @patrickmineault.bsky.social · 25/03/2026
Paradoxically, when you see a yellow on blue slide, you know you're about to get a fantastic lecture. Bonus points for Times New Roman.
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John Tuthill @tuthill.bsky.social · 24/03/2026
🧵 New preprint led by @bingbrunton.bsky.social, @elliottabe.bsky.social, @lawrencehu.bsky.social We gave a worm brain control of a fly body and it walked What did we learn? Nothing, other than deep reinforcement learning is effective We call it the digital sphinx www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
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Patrick Mineault @patrickmineault.bsky.social · 20/03/2026
If you have a good substack about neuro / AI and are cranking out solid content, happy to add it to my list of recs on substack—that little feature has driven 100's of subscribers to other newsletters
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Dan Levenstein @dlevenstein.bsky.social · 15/03/2026
A cool insight here: CDM isn’t just hard to infer, it’s hard to train directly (because it can’t be specified as a loss on systems behavior). This means it either needs to emerge as a consequence of other losses, data, or architecture choices.
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Griffiths Computational Cognitive Science Lab @cocoscilab.bsky.social · 17/03/2026
Current AI models are trained on human behavior -- the words we produce. New preprint explores the idea that we might be able to address some of the gaps in these systems by training on the latent variables behind that behavior: human cognition.
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David Sussillo @sussillodavid.bsky.social · 17/11/2025
A remarkable journey of resilience and transformation, from the chaotic corridors of group homes to the halls of Columbia and Stanford, EMERGENCE is a coming-of-age tale where heartbreak and humor meet the scientific wonder of modern artificial intelligence. 🔗 Preorder: tinyurl.com/fzcxb5ea
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Sean Escola @seanescola.bsky.social · 15/03/2026
We know about cosmological dark matter despite being unable to measure it because, without it, galaxies would fall apart. By analogy, let's talk about "cognitive dark matter" (CDM): brain functions that meaningfully shape behavior but are hard to infer from behavior alone. New paper! 🧵👇
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Patrick Mineault @patrickmineault.bsky.social · 10/03/2026
There's no better way to learn than to teach! Help make NMA a resounding success!
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Patrick Mineault @patrickmineault.bsky.social · 09/03/2026
Ran into David Chalmers at Wash Sq Park. Beautiful day to ponder the hard problem of consciousness.
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Patrick Mineault @patrickmineault.bsky.social · 09/03/2026
Looking for YOUR INPUT on what we've learned in neuro in the past 20 years. I've only heard pessimistic takes! Come on, grid cells, manifolds, optogenetics, connectomes, moving past the monoamine theory of depression and the Ab theory of AD, glymphatics and lymphatics, what is sleep?! We did stuff!
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Patrick Mineault @patrickmineault.bsky.social · 08/03/2026
I want to write a fun little post on what we've learned in neuroscience in the last 20 years. What are the most interesting results you can think of? Biggest trends?
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Benjamin Cowley @benjocowley.bsky.social · 26/02/2026
DNN models of the brain are getting bigger. Are we replacing one complicated system in vivo with another in silico? In new work, we seek the *smallest* DNN models of visual cortex, balancing prediction with parsimony. It turns out these compact models are surprisingly small! rdcu.be/e5H8G
rdcu.be
Compact deep neural network models of the visual cortex
Nature - Parsimonious deep neural network models can be used for prediction of visual neuron responses.
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David Schoppik @schoppik.com · 05/03/2026
Lots of things to think about in these posts from @patrickmineault.bsky.social -- nice to see more blog entries :)
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Patrick Mineault @patrickmineault.bsky.social · 05/03/2026
What are cell types good for, computationally? Encoding innate behavior! In this 2-parter, I break down the relationship between cell types—which I had, in years prior, dismissed as mere implementation detail—and computation. I changed my mind! www.neuroai.science/p/cell-types...
neuroai.science
Cell types: encoding the brain's BIOS
Inferring the structure of primary rewards from connectomics
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Fred Callaway @fredcallaway.bsky.social · 18/02/2026
I'm excited to announce that I had my first (co-authored) book published today! "The Rational Use of Cognitive Resources" with Falk Lieder and Tom Griffiths (@cocoscilab.bsky.social ). You can read it for free! (see thread)
Book cover. A silhouette of a person's head filled with colorful geometric shapes—perhaps symbolizing cognitive resources or deployment thereof. The style is attractive and modern, if generic.

text: 
The Rational Use of Cognitive Resources
Falk Lieder, Frederick Callaway, Thomas L. Griffithts
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Blake Richards @tyrellturing.bsky.social · 17/02/2026
The revised version of our paper on the impact of top-down feedback is now out @elife.bsky.social: doi.org/10.7554/eLif... tl;dr: we show that using human-brain-like feedback/anatomy in a deep RNN leads to human-like visual biases! This work was led by @tmshbr.bsky.social #NeuroAI 🧠📈 🧪
doi.org
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Carsen Stringer @computingnature.bsky.social · 09/02/2026
🚨 new work from the lab on how eye movements 👀 versus orofacial movements influence 🐭 visual cortex activity 🧠 #neuroscience #behavior #neuroAI
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Joel Chan @joelchan86.bsky.social · 31/01/2026
Discovered @patrickmineault.bsky.social's excellent Good Research Code Handbook today, which was always awesome, but is even more necessary as more scientists consider integrating coding agents into their workflows. goodresearch.dev
goodresearch.dev
The Good Research Code Handbook
This handbook is for grad students, postdocs and PIs who do a lot of programming as part of their research. It will teach you, in a practical manner, how to organize your code so that it is easy to...
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Minh-Huy Mai-Duc @sabertoaster.bsky.social · 29/01/2026
www.neuroai.science/p/claude-cod... Why yes this is very helpful for me as an undergrad. I like the way the methods that Patrick laid, how to aid research using AI and its pros vs cons
neuroai.science
Claude Code for Scientists
Abundant code without the sharp edges
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Mark Histed @markhisted.org · 30/01/2026
From @patrickmineault.bsky.social, on how scientists can use Claude Code to help with all the heavy data analysis coding that is a big part of our lives. use a make system, set up folder structures, write tests, use git, use package managers. Notes on notebooks and visualizations too. 🧪
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Juan Gallego @juangallego.bsky.social · 07/01/2026
🚨📜+🧵🚨 Very excited about this work showing that people with no hand function following a spinal cord injury can control the activity of motor units from those muscles to perform 1D, 2D and 3D tasks, play video games, or navigate a virtual wheelchair By a wonderful team co-mentored w Dario Farina
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Mark D Humphries @markdhumphries.bsky.social · 30/12/2025
Just published my review of neuroscience in 2025, on The Spike. The 10th of these, would you believe? This year we have foundation models, breakthroughs in using light to understand the brain, a gene therapy, and more Enjoy! medium.com/the-spike/20...
medium.com
2025: A Review of the Year in Neuroscience
Enlightening the brain
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Patrick Mineault @patrickmineault.bsky.social · 16/12/2025
✈️ Montreal AI and Neuroscience is over, off to Costa Rica. Great catching up all things NeuroAI with hometown friends. Thanks for the shirt and the bagels, folks!
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Karim Jerbi @karimjerbi.bsky.social · 12/12/2025
🔴 Live: Panel discussion #1: @ MAIN2025 The future of Neuroscience - The role of AI ?  with Andreas Tolias, Siva Reddy, Joao Sacramento, Ching Fang + Eva Portelance Moderated by Patrick Mineault @patrickmineault.bsky.social @andreastolias.bsky.social
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Patrick Mineault @patrickmineault.bsky.social · 02/12/2025
What I would have done for a dataset like this to exist in grad school! One day, we'll figure out the dorsal stream. openreview.net/forum?id=Ila...
openreview.net
STSBench: A Large-Scale Dataset for Modeling Neuronal Activity in...
The primate visual system is typically divided into two streams — the ventral stream, responsible for object recognition, and the dorsal stream, responsible for encoding spatial relations and...
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Patrick Mineault @patrickmineault.bsky.social · 02/12/2025
Headed to NeurIPS, looking forward to catching up with you about NeuroAI, foundation models of the brain, AI safety and AI for science
media.tenor.com
a man in a suit and tie says you stay classy san diego in front of a channel 4 news team
ALT: a man in a suit and tie says you stay classy san diego in front of a channel 4 news team
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Patrick Mineault @patrickmineault.bsky.social · 29/11/2025
This equivocation of oscillations and continual learning is a bit of stretch... I'm surprised they didn't get dinged by the reviewers for neuro-babble. openreview.net/forum?id=nbM...
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Patrick Mineault @patrickmineault.bsky.social · 19/11/2025
We're almost at the end of the year, and that means an end-of-year review! Send me your favorite NeuroAI papers of the year (preprints or published, late last year is fine too).
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Aaron Milstein @neurosutras.bsky.social · 27/05/2025
New #NeuroAI #compneurosky preprint! To better understand how target-directed learning works in the brain, we sought to engineer an artificial neural network capable of solving complex image classification tasks that comprises only experimentally-supported biological building blocks. (1/15)
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Patrick Mineault @patrickmineault.bsky.social · 06/11/2025
I had way too much fun making these diagrams. Sure, it's not as legible as if I had typed out the text; but I feel like these have a bit more personality
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Charlotte Volk @charlottevolk.bsky.social · 30/09/2025
🚨 New preprint alert! 🧠🤖 We propose a theory of how learning curriculum affects generalization through neural population dimensionality. Learning curriculum is a determining factor of neural dimensionality - where you start from determines where you end up. 🧠📈 A 🧵: tinyurl.com/yr8tawj3
tinyurl.com
The curriculum effect in visual learning: the role of readout dimensionality
Generalization of visual perceptual learning (VPL) to unseen conditions varies across tasks. Previous work suggests that training curriculum may be integral to generalization, yet a theoretical explan...
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Emilie Macé @mace-lab.bsky.social · 11/09/2025
Thrilled to share that our work is now published in Science! ✨ We found a preference for visual objects in the mouse spatial navigation system where they dynamically refine head-direction coding. In short, objects boost our inner compass! 🧭 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... 🧵1/
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The Viking (Gunnar Blohm) @gunnarblohm.bsky.social · 26/08/2025
Having fun facilitating this amazing group of young Profs at the #Neuro4Pros workshop with @kordinglab.bsky.social and @meganakpeters.bsky.social, @yaelniv.bsky.social, and Hannah Bayer. Watch out world: this is the next generation of leaders! compneurosci.com/Neuro4Pros/i...
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Patrick Mineault @patrickmineault.bsky.social · 20/08/2025
"Everyone agrees that emergence is important, but they don’t agree on what the word should mean" arxiv.org/abs/2410.15468
arxiv.org
What Emergence Can Possibly Mean
We consider emergence from the perspective of dynamics: states of a system evolving with time. We focus on the role of a decomposition of wholes into parts, and attempt to characterize relationships b...
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PessoaBrain @pessoabrain.bsky.social · 16/08/2025
𝗖𝗼𝗴𝗻𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗶𝘀 𝗲𝗺𝗲𝗿𝗴𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗯𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻 by Earl K Miller, Scott L Brincat, Jefferson E Roy This promises to be a must read One day we should create an online journal club to just read these kinds of papers! #neuroskyence doi.org/10.1016/j.co...
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Shahab Bakhtiari @shahabbakht.bsky.social · 31/07/2025
A few years ago, with @tyrellturing.bsky.social @patrickmineault.bsky.social and others, we showed one single objective (prediction) was sufficient for explaining specialized pathways of mouse visual cortex: tinyurl.com/2vsjbve7 Super cool to see the same observation now for human visual cortex.
proceedings.neurips.cc
The functional specialization of visual cortex emerges from training parallel pathways with self-supervised predictive learning
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katja heuer @k4tj4.bsky.social · 27/07/2025
1 To predict the behaviour of a primate, would you rather base your guess on a closely related species or one with a similar brain shape? We looked at brains & behaviours of 70 species, you’ll be surprised! 🧵Thread on our new preprint with @r3rt0.bsky.social , doi.org/10.1101/2025...
Brain Surfaces of 70 primate species
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Patrick Mineault @patrickmineault.bsky.social · 30/07/2025
RFI: How can brain science shape frontier-scale AGI? The Amaranth Foundation wants your 2-page ideas on how brain science can guide & govern frontier-scale AGI—incl. short-timeline (2025-2028) scenarios. Send ≤2-page ideas by 29 Aug. Link: blog.amaranth.foundation/p/rfi-neuros...
blog.amaranth.foundation
RFI: Neuroscience & the Path to Safe AGI
Safe Artificial General Intelligence through Neuroscience
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Marcus Ghosh @marcusghosh.bsky.social · 25/07/2025
How can we best use AI in science? Myself and 9 other research fellows from @imperial-ix.bsky.social use AI methods in domains from plant biology (🌱) to neuroscience (🧠) and particle physics (🎇). Together we suggest 10 simple rules @plos.org 🧵 doi.org/10.1371/jour...
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