1/11 Happy to share our TICS paper on using the flexibility of one of the most basic cognitive functions, perception, to understand one of the most complex cognitive dysfunctions, psychiatric conditions (also my first formal work in computational psychiatry 🎉)
📄: www.cell.com/trends/cogni...
🧵 : 👇
Neuroscientist here, who has talked about the US losing science ground to other countries:
The biggest problem for generating future cures for brain diseases is the ongoing utter destruction of US basic neuroscience.
It’s not about regulation.
This might be one of the most insane scandals in game history
When Pokemon Go players scan PokeStops, theyve been unknowingly building a detailed visual model of the world which is being sold to a military contractor to build a no-GPS positioning for the new generation of unmanned killing machines
Our new paper is out this week in Nature Neuroscience! www.nature.com/articles/s41... We built a BCI that works with the brain's natural geometry — and we found that people could learn to play a video game with their brains in <1 hr of training. This efficiency is groundbreaking & here's why:
TL;DR: We've identified more than 100 cases of apparent manipulation in Thermo Fisher Scientific's antibody verification data.
@sholtodavid.bsky.social @johanduchene.bsky.social
reeserichardson.blog/2026/05/28/h...
Busch et al. use nonlinear neural manifolds to help humans gain rapid control over a noninvasive brain–computer interface, allowing them to learn how to play a video game with real-time fMRI neurofeed...
We’ve documented more than 100 instances of apparent data manipulation in Thermo’s catalog
reeserichardson.blog
www.cell.com
Perceptual multistability, observed across species and sensory modalities, offers
valuable insights into numerous cognitive functions and dysfunctions. For instance,
differences in temporal dynamics a...
China’s beating the US in neuroscience:
“There is a very real possibility that without significant regulatory reform, if you’re a wealthy American, in 10 years, the only place you’ll be able to get your state-of-the-art cancer care is in Shanghai,” said Max Hodak, former president of Neuralink.
ever since i was a small boy i knew i wanted to charge the pepper grinder
Online Now: Perceptual multistability: a multifaceted window into brain dysfunctions
1/ We work hard to factor "noise" out of behavior. But the brain doesn't.
Strip away noise and you may miss what the brain evolved to do
I wanted to share this pre-Bluesky paper where we found premotor (M2) corticostriatal circuits encode a broad history of behavior, beyond just action + reward 👇
“This is going to be one of the three or four major plot lines of the next decade,” former Neuralink president says.
It has been super fun to work on this, where we learned that:
1) Mouse PFC is needed for model-based override of habits.
2) Separate PFC populations encode a 'policy' and the current 'value'.
3) The policy and value codes alternate theta sweeps towards the goal.
...and much much more!
Perceptual multistability, observed across species and sensory modalities, offers valuable insights into numerous cognitive functions and dysfunctions. For instance, differences in temporal dynamics and information integration during percept formation often distinguish clinical from nonclinical populations. Computational psychiatry can elucidate these variations through two primary approaches: (i) Bayesian modeling, which treats perception as an unconscious inference, and (ii) an active, information-seeking perspective (e.g., reinforcement learning), which frames perceptual switches as internal actions. Our synthesis aims to leverage multistability to bridge these computational psychiatry subfields, linking human and animal studies as well as connecting behavior to underlying neural mechanisms. Perceptual multistability emerges as a promising noninvasive tool for clinical applications, facilitating translational research and enhancing our mechanistic understanding of cognitive processes and their impairments.
dlvr.it
What do linear RNNs learn first? I made a highly-interactive blog post to explore this question, since it's more fun to play around with widgets than to read a pdf. ari-benjamin.com/rnn-modes/
Great way to remind yourself what a transfer function is!
Prior experience is used by the brain to guide adaptive behaviour during decision making. Here, the authors show that mice also selectively use information learned through recent and longer-term exper...
it took me so damn long to write this thing that the field actually became real in the 2.5 years hooooly
anyway, here's another book:
100% grass-fed human-written down to every single letter, though probably for AI consumption only at this point.
www.rdgao.com/blog/2026/06...
derek van vliet
Drew Schreiner
An interactive guide to saddle-to-saddle learning in recurrent neural networks, via pole-zero geometry in the complex plane.
ari-benjamin.com
The fundamental principle of using AI for science is that it can help us do some things extremely efficiently, but it usually requires an ‘oracle’ or verifier. I’m of the opinion that we simply don’t ...
How do brains plan actions towards goals?
To get at this question we studied mice navigating complex mazes as goals changed on every trial 🧵
Work with @thomasakam.bsky.social @behrenstimb.bsky.social @kristorpjensen.bsky.social now on BioRxiv: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
