Earl K. Miller

How Congress can restore the independence of US science Members must go beyond reinstating US government research spending and re-establish decentralized governance at the National Institutes of Health and other agencies.

How Congress can restore the independence of US science
www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Neural Tuning for Ordinal Processing: Convergent Patterns in Human Brains and Artificial Networks Processing ordinality, i.e., the rank of an item in a series such as 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc., is a fundamental skill shared by humans and animals. While humans often use symbolic sequences like numbers or...

Neural Tuning for Ordinal Processing: Convergent Patterns in Human Brains and Artificial Networks
www.jneurosci.org/content/46/9...
#neuroscience

Creating oscillatory dynamics.

Recurrent cortical networks encode natural sensory statistics via sequence filtering The visual cortex receives a stream of high-dimensional sensory input. The role of dense local, recurrent cortical connections in shaping responses to these inputs has been unclear. Here, we show that...

Recurrent cortical networks encode natural sensory statistics via sequence filtering
www.cell.com/neuron/abstr...
#neuroscience

Intelligence emerges when the whole brain works as one For decades, scientists have mapped attention, memory, language, and reasoning to separate brain networks — yet one big mystery remained: why does the mind feel like a single, unified system? Research...

Researchers at Notre Dame suggest that intelligence doesn’t live in one “smart” region of the brain at all. Instead, it emerges from how efficiently & flexibly the brain’s many networks communicate & coordinate with each other.

#NeuroSkyence

www.sciencedaily.com/releases/202...

And don't forget: 3. The more critical you are, the more careful you must be. Before writing a negative review, re-read the manuscript, double-check the literature, and be certain. If you are going to be negative, be sure.

Principles for proper peer review

According to Principles for Proper Peer Review, if there are no major flaws and the data support the conclusions, reviewers should: 1. Be constructive. 2. Review the paper in front of them. Don’t try to write the paper for the authors.
jocnf.pubpub.org/pub/qag76ip8...

More people should have your attitude.

Cognitive control networks in human and macaque
doi.org/10.64898/202...
#neuroscience

Principles for proper peer review

Or worse: Here's what I would do if I had this data. I refer to points #4 and #5 in Principles for Proper Peer Review:
4. Don’t write the paper for the authors
5. Respect the authors’ time and effort
jocnf.pubpub.org/pub/qag76ip8...

Principles for proper peer review

I give you Principles for Proper Peer Review
jocnf.pubpub.org/pub/qag76ip8...

Peer review would be easier if we stopped treating it like combat with the authors. Results want to be free, and perfect is the enemy of good. Do the data support the conclusions? If so, that’s enough. A paper isn’t a blank slate for projecting your own ideas.

Lack of reviewers threatens robustness of neuroscience literature Simple math suggests that small groups of scientists can significantly bias peer review.

Broad peer review is crucial for a healthy scientific literature, but neuroscientists turn down review requests too often. Simple math suggests that small groups of scientists can significantly bias the literature, writes @jvoigts.bsky.social.

#neuroskyence

www.thetransmitter.org/publishing/l...

Looks like more than theta-gamma

Striatum-wide dopamine encodes trajectory errors separated from value - Nature Cue-evoked striatal dopamine release in mice encodes bidirectional trajectory errors, spatially and temporally separated from value coding, reflecting the relationship between the speed and direc...

Striatum-wide dopamine encodes trajectory errors separated from value
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
#neuroscience

Winning the popularity contest: the 10 most-read physics stories of 2025 – Physics World Here's a second chance to catch up with the most popular stories Physics World published in 2025

Work by Ghose and @pinotsislab.bsky.social on quantum effects in the brain is of the most-read physics stories of 2025!
physicsworld.com/a/winning-th...
#neuroscience

Photomosaic of Charles G. Gross composed of pictures of his students, colleagues, and friends.

If this were a leap year, today would be Charles G. Gross’s birthday, one of the giants of neuroscience. Miss you, Charlie. Read more about Charlie here:
doi.org/10.1016/j.ne...
#neuroscience

Propofol-mediated loss of consciousness disrupts predictive routing and local field phase modulation of neural activity | PNAS Predictive coding is a fundamental function of the cortex. The predictive routing model proposes a neurophysiological implementation for predictive...

Here are a couple of papers supporting the hypothesis that a *disconnection* between frontal and posterior cortex is associated with anesthesia-induced unconsciousness, not frontal cortex per se.
doi.org/10.1073/pnas...
doi.org/10.1162/jocn...

There’s good evidence that a prefrontal model interacting with posterior cortex is important for consciousness, but if you’re looking for consciousness in a single brain region, you’re asking the wrong question.

Never really thought that. The hunt for a single locus of consciousness is the wrong question.

I've been studying the PFC for over 30 years. I never thought it was the location of consciousness. It is however important for control of thought and action, which is what consciousness is all about

It's a form that I didn't recognize. A bit of a strawman, if you ask me.

Frontiers | Cross-population amplitude coupling in high-dimensional oscillatory neural time series Neural oscillations have long been considered important markers of interaction across brain regions, yet identifying coordinated oscillatory activity from hi...

The brain oscillates and we should figure out why. Development of new analytics will be key:
Cross-population amplitude coupling in high-dimensional oscillatory neural time series
www.frontiersin.org/journals/com...
#neuroscience

They argue against the idea that *only* the higher-order model is important for consciousness. Did anyone argue for that?

Neuroscience undermines the higher-order theorists’ preferred solution to the targetless HOT problem The Higher-Order Theory (HOT) of consciousness holds that mental states become conscious when they are represented by another mental state. Most HOT theorists maintain that it is the higher-order, ...

This paper argues against higher-order theory (HOT) of consciousness. But its conclusion matches my understanding of HOT: conscious experience requires both a higher-order model and its linkage to posterior cortex.
doi.org/10.1080/0951...
#neuroscience

I hear you. Thanks.

Great advice. Thanks!

Brain network modeling with The Virtual Brain derives pharmacodynamics of ketamine https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02.24.707663v1

I include myself