Tim Behrens

Tim I think it was almost 20 years ago when I heard you said that's how you review a paper!

My favorite thing about elife!

Yes!!!! (Hence the two axes in elife’s assessment).

Faster, fairer, and even more open. join us in the future of publishing

Help us challenge the traditional publishing system.

Find out why you should send your research to eLife: buff.ly/MJy9rBE

Looks quite good this year :)

Want the freedom of a fancy fellowship, but not the year-long wait or arduous application?

Come join my lab! Work on neuroscience and AI, explore your creativity, be independent or work closely with me, collaborate widely, and have a lot of fun!

my.corehr.com/pls/uoxrecru...

Opportunity of the year!!!!

Whittington lab is live and hiring…

Super fun
New blog post about @kristorpjensen.bsky.social awesome preprint.

How does the prefrontal cortex plan?

New research from @kristorpjensen.bsky.social & colleagues proposes a ‘spacetime attractor’ model, showing that the brain may plan using the same principles it uses to fill in missing information about the present.

www.sainsburywellcome.org/web/blog/new...

** We have up to TWO funded PhD positions available in our lab!! Apply below to find new ways to enhance memory👇 Pls retweet **

Deadline: 2nd December

1. Cross-species closed-loopTMR: tinyurl.com/bddu4tp6

2. TUS and TMR in humans:
tinyurl.com/jjws5ctj

Happy to chat to interested applicants.

Think I might also be the only person apart from Heidi who calls Matthew “Matt” as well. Perhaps I should stop being so presumptuous:)

Looking for a PhD next year? Want to come and work on the next generation of OPM-MEG/EEG biomarkers in computational psychiatry?

Apply for our MRC iCase studentship with @mkflugge.bsky.social, collabs with @lilweb.bsky.social + industrial placement at P1Vital:
www.medsci.ox.ac.uk/study/gradua...

Thanks Loz!!

🙋Are you interested in bridging theory & experiments?

Applications are now open for 2026 entry to the Gatsby Unit & SWC joint PhD programme.

Join us and be part of a vibrant research community!

💰 Fully-funded 4-year programme
ℹ️ www.ucl.ac.uk/life-science...

@sainsburywellcome.bsky.social

I’m super excited to finally put my recent work with @behrenstimb.bsky.social on bioRxiv, where we develop a new mechanistic theory of how PFC structures adaptive behaviour using attractor dynamics in space and time!

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

This is one of my favourite things ever. From the awesome @kristorpjensen.bsky.social

The current paper is about complex multistep decisions when the *reward function* is known, but there is another one on the way about how to generalise these ideas to value problems when the *reward function must be learnt from repeated experience* (with Jo Warren, Kris and James W)

The post above is slightly oversimplified. I did it for clarity, but then it kept me up last night so I am correcting it now. It should have read:

In the Tanji papers they just repeat one of a few sequences (maximum 6 I think), and although it is hard to be sure because the data aren't available for reanalysis, the published results mostly align with the optimal solution: Separating the sequences into different neural memories.

The point of the kind of solution Kris shows above (and Mohamady showed in mice and LiPing Wang has shown in monkeys), is that it can flexibly construct *any* sequence.

In brief, if you only ever have to repeat a few learnt sequences you should not use this kind of solution. Neurons should not code for elemental steps that generalise across sequences. Instead you should make new neural representations for each remembered sequence.

It's really hard to tell whether the Tanji neurons are doing this but they are probably not. My colleague Will Dorrell (newly PhDed), with James Whittington and Peter Latham, has a beautiful analysis of when you should and shouldn't use this kind of solution.

Awesome 4 year phd in compsys neuro !!

The overall framework agrees with this idea. The current paper is about complex multistep decisions when the goal state is known, but there is another one on the way about how to generalise these ideas to value problems when the goal state needs to be inferred (with Jo Warren, Kris and James W)

Ooh cool. Lots of new cites @kristorpjensen.bsky.social! Thanks Dick. This is exactly the point of bsky and biorxiv :)

This is one of my favourite things ever. From the awesome @kristorpjensen.bsky.social

Look at Edinburgh being stunning for British Cognitive Neurosciences

I have the feeling that a lot of modern systems/circuit neuro would have been included by James in this aesthetic or emotional part of the mind? All of reward circuitry? Many of the innate behaviours (fear/escape/pup weaning etc.)? Lots of social behaviour (social hierarchy/dominance etc.)?

Super fun paper by the awesome Michael Bukwich and team!