Vineet Tiruvadi, MD, PhD

Transitions in dynamical regime and neural mode during perceptual decisions - Nature Simultaneous recordings were made of hundreds of neurons in the rat frontal cortex and striatum, showing that decision commitment involves a rapid, coordinated transition in dynamical regime and neura...

How does the brain decide? 🧠

Our new @nature.com paper shows that neural activity switches from an 'evidence gathering' to a 'commitment' state at a precise moment we call nTc.

After nTc, new evidence is ignored, revealing a neural marker for the instant when the mind is made up.

rdcu.be/eGUrv

"if something doesn't tell you the answer, it doesn't tell you anything" spot the issue there.

The misleading manifold?

The current debate (decoding vs causal relevance)

and a toy example I gave in the thread below

got me thinking about a related issue: how decoding may reflect structure more than function.

🧵 1/5

The real question is: what should children and students learn? Math, spelling, reading, and especially reasoning! The goal of education isn't to spit out as much text as possible.

Contrasted with trying to reinvent your own approach to inference.

Also: engineering approaches to inference are strictly better for complex systems. Period.

If your analysis pipeline is not amenable to engineering approaches to inference, then you're better off spending time finding a way to represent your data so that it becomes amenable.

The two main pillars of my research vision: Control Theory, and Reverse Engineering.

a doodle from dissertation #happylaborday

A Healthy Academia is a Low Pass Filter. Not aspiring to track the hype on an hour-by-hour basis is kind of our job.

All of NIH funding to Northwestern University is frozen. This pause includes noncompeting approved funding, new and competing grants with fundable scores. No reimbursements for money already spent have been received since March. This situation is rarely reported so please Please get the word out!

NIH Refocus on Human Subjects is Good, if We Stay Thoughtful Last Tuesday, late April 2025, the NIH announced a new initiative that prioritizes human-based research technologies…

My initial thoughts on the NIH + FDA refocus on human subjects research

medium.com/neuroenginee...

Why linearize?

I assume a requirement of consistency? "The sky is blue and not any other color. The sky is red and not any other color." can be written mathematically, but it's quite different than a sentence that doesn't contradict itself.

Funny enough, I think they meant "in a set theoretic way" informally...

$100 I can guess their demographics... best not to conflate conditional distributions with joint distributions...

as one of those "we" you keep bringing up - I found that abstract + literature quite interesting and important.

NIH to prioritize human-based research technologies New initiative aims to reduce use of animals in NIH-funded research.

So, how are feeling about the NIH prioritizing human subjects research? www.nih.gov/news-events/...

What, if anything, makes mood fundamentally different from memory? To better understand mood disorders—and to develop more effective treatments—should we target the brain, the mind, the environment or all three?

I believe this (friendly piece) aligns with your question about the absurdity of reducing strong emotions & compulsions to happenings in the brain. Bonus: it captures a diversity of researcher perspectives about the best ways to think about it.

www.thetransmitter.org/the-big-pict...

I love the model comparison approach (closer to the medical inference engine) - but if your models are hyperparametrized, there's an implicit "big data" in there, no?

Maybe not "foundation" since that's tighter linked to Transformer/LLM, but I still don't see an explicit "small data" vision.

I'd put these on the NeuroAI vision board:

@tyrellturing.bsky.social's Deep learning framework
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

@tonyzador.bsky.social's Next-gen AI through neuroAI
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

@adriendoerig.bsky.social's Neuroconnectionist framework
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Yup (where foundation ≡ big data derived).

Has anyone outlined + whipped up votes + published an alternative vision in a similarly public way?

Ilya Sutskever, ex-OpenAI, gets $2b funding not to release anything until he has ‘super intelligence’ Ex-OpenAI cofounder Ilya Sutskever’s new startup Safe Superintelligence just closed another funding round. For $2 billion, Sutskever promises not to release any product at all until SSI has develop…

Let it be known that I too will accept $2 billion in funding on the promise that I will not release anything until I have created God.

pivot-to-ai.com/2025/03/06/i...

I want to be supportive of my NeuroAI colleagues, but who is working on alternative visions?

What about one that seeks to bring ML/AI to where clinical neuro(engineering) is already working magic?

The main NeuroAI vision is anchored in the "big data" approach of LLM/NLP - even as it's becoming increasingly unclear whether LLM/NLP even works as anything but a language mimic.

Mimicry is not what neuroscience was every aiming for...

been saying it for a while but anything about "Ai replacing employees" is a marketing exercise, and if I'm honest I lump in most AI safety conversations with it, because they never seem concerned with the actual harms. It's all so cynical.

I’m hearing that some MOSAIC fellows are not only losing their grants (and for some in the postdoc phase their livelihoods), but also that their LRPs are now being cancelled. To have this population of scientists be targeted in such a manner should be unacceptable to everyone 😤

My PhD student's NSF grant was terminated today. Her dissertation investigates why air pollution monitoring, metrics, and regulations don't properly capture the harms experienced by marginalized communities--esp in the most polluted Detroit neighborhoods. She and I are happy to talk with press etc.

There are plenty folk out there trying to trace every single axon in every cubic millimeter of the brain - even though that never factors into any clinical decision-making whatsoever.

What might be more impactful is starting with the patient and pulling back.

The brain is a massive tangle, so it's always welcome when we can simplify the challenge of understanding it.

One of the best steps to simplify: anchor in *patients* and *physician* dynamics.

How would you answer the question: "What do Physicians Do?"

INCREDIBLE opinion by Wilkinson refusing to stay Judge Xinis's orders in the Abrego Garcia case, condemning DOJ's arguments as "shocking not only to judges, but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear."
storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...