Patrick Mineault

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

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)

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 🧠📈 🧪

🚨 new work from the lab on how eye movements 👀 versus orofacial movements influence 🐭 visual cortex activity 🧠 #neuroscience #behavior #neuroAI

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...

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

Claude Code for Scientists Abundant code without the sharp edges

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

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. 🧪

🚨📜+🧵🚨 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

2025: A Review of the Year in Neuroscience Enlightening the brain

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...

✈️ 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!

🔴 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

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...

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

Headed to NeurIPS, looking forward to catching up with you about NeuroAI, foundation models of the brain, AI safety and AI for science

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...

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).

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)

iPad + Apple Pencil + Concepts

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

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...

🚨 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

Congrats!

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/

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...

So many arguments boil down to "my semantic boundaries are slightly different than yours"

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...

"Everyone agrees that emergence is important, but they don’t agree on what the word should mean" arxiv.org/abs/2410.15468

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...

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.

Brain Surfaces of 70 primate species

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...

RFI: Neuroscience & the Path to Safe AGI Safe Artificial General Intelligence through Neuroscience

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...

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...

LLM Daydreaming Proposal & discussion of how default mode networks for LLMs are an example of missing capabilities for search and novelty in contemporary AI systems.

Curious what cognitive scientists think about this daydreaming proposal from Gwern: gwern.net/ai-daydreaming

Discovering cognitive strategies with tiny recurrent neural networks - Nature Modelling biological decision-making with tiny recurrent neural networks enables more accurate predictions of animal choices than classical cognitive models and offers insights into the underlying cog...

Thrilled to see our TinyRNN paper in @nature! We show how tiny RNNs predict choices of individual subjects accurately while staying fully interpretable. This approach can transform how we model cognitive processes in both healthy and disordered decisions. doi.org/10.1038/s415...