Associate Professor @marmamsci-ncf.bsky.social
Studying memory, rhythm, vocal learning, and behavioral plasticity, and related brain, mostly in marine mammals, and most mostly in sea lions
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=LfoEA4oAAAAJ&hl=en
Peter Cook
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Great work from Simone Videsen. We found sperm whale slow clicks maintain extreme isochrony with inter-click intervals up to ~10s. That's beyond any known neural system for precise interval timing. May be a long-distance communication system.
nyaspubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
www.popsci.com/environment/...
Fun to see this guy next to the California sea lions -- but as impressive as he is, Chonkers really isn't that unusual for a male steller. They regularly top out over 2000 lbs. They're not as common in CA, but it is part of their southern range.
When we talked I remembered that we'd done an interview about 10 years prior, also on pinnipeds! That time sea lions with amnesia due to neurotoxic algal exposure. I always love science interviews for public radio... www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks...
www.science.org/content/arti...
Yikes - rhe empathetic urge to help suffering animals is good, and we should cultivate it. But the urge is anthropomorphic and needs to be informed, in action, by dispassionate science
New paper from Ulanovsky's group: With brain recordings from🦇 flying in a 200m tunnel, the group discovered that place cells of CA1 exhibit dense spatial coding, i.e., multiple place fields, and cells of CA3 exhibit ultrasparse coding, i.e., one place field. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Did a spot on Quirks and Quarks with Bob McDonald about seal vocal neurobiology. Some other really interesting segments on there as well.
www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks...
I always assumed that brain function had to line up with cytoarchitectonics.
It turns out I was wrong.
Human cortex, especially PFC, is tiled by chains of functional patches that subdivide and interlink architectonic areas into parallel processing streams.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Zeng et al. (2026, Science) reported an intriguing study of rhythmic pattern discrimination in bumble bees (Bombus terrestris). Yet the claim that ‘[they] form robust abstract rhythm representations’ may be premature. See doi.org/10.31234/osf....
Out in the UK today! press.princeton.edu/books/hardco...
Very interesting new work by @lingzhongfan.bsky.social & colleagues, identifying an arcuate fasciculus homolog in the
marmoset brain — with implications for the evolution of the neural scaffold supporting vocal communication 🧪🧠
www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1...
The hippocampus exhibits a CA3-to-CA1 coding transformation that combines fast learning with an efficient, compressed neural code.
A toxic chemical produced by algal blooms damages the Sea Lion's memory and learning centres
www.cbc.ca
The Stellar sea lion reportedly sounds like a falling tree when he belly flops onto floats.
www.popsci.com
Harbour seals 'talk' with their parrot-like brains, 'flaming hot' ice in Uranus and Neptune, Yellowstone's wolves and ravens, a thigh bone from the earliest human and the future of animal testing
In this study, we show that male sperm whales produce low-frequency slow clicks at low repetition rates with extreme source levels > 200 dB re 1 µPa (pp), making them the loudest mammalian communicat...
The arcuate fasciculus (af) is a crucial dorsal pathway underpinning human language,
yet its weak frontal connectivity in macaques—the standard pri...
