Ignacio Castillejo (ϕ)

📚 Reading Women in Cognitive Science 📚 Occasionally, I make threads on social media about papers and books that I read. It helps me focus and process deeper when I share highlights and thoughts with others. In this blogpost, I compile a…

📚 Reading Women in Cognitive Science 📚

“Recommendations for readings are welcome, especially in the history of cognitive science (prior to 1950s, and the older the better).”

irisvanrooijcogsci.com/2026/02/15/%...

Tomorrow night After Dark at the MIT Museum
It's gonna be geeky cool fun.
Matt Wilson and I will tell you about minds and memory. Clever Hans will play songs of the mind. And perogies and beer!
tickets.mitmuseum.org/events/019b3...

Cortical traveling waves in time and space: Physics, physiology, and psychology Cruddas et al. reviewed how core concepts from wave physics relate to cortical wave physiology and psychology. They examined how cortical waves emerge, how they facilitate coordinated, hierarchical, a...

Traveling waves. Your brain has them. There must be a reason.
Cortical traveling waves in time and space: Physics, physiology, and psychology
www.cell.com/neuron/abstr...
#neuroscience

Once Thought To Support Neurons, Astrocytes Turn Out To Be in Charge | Quanta Magazine New experiments reveal how astrocytes tune neuronal activity to modulate our mental and emotional states. The results suggest that neuron-only brain models, such as connectomes, leave out a crucial la...

Spiking is not all there is to brain function. Astrocytes propagate electric field influences, like neurons, but do not spike. And they are a large fraction of brain cells.
www.quantamagazine.org/once-thought...
#neuroscience

Applications will be opening soon for BAMB! 2026

The summer school will take place from 12 - 23 July 2026

www.bambschool.org

This a small first step in my PhD, but I am glad to bring something to the scientific community that might make neural circuit models a bit more reproducible, efficient and stable.

And with our refined models... we will get hands-on with cognitive stuff soon😉

Stay tuned!

We show an example of this effect by reproducing a simulation study already published. Found nets can lose up to 95% of connections (the image above was an example) and impair training!

And we also show a good simple alternative (check the preprint!😉)

A 'perfect storm' unleashed upon my simulations. Our RNNs set excitatory-inhibitory nodes by applying ReLU on weights... and leads to "dying ReLU weights"💀. Lit like pruning a tree.

So nets can break in some cognitive tasks with high energy demand (e.g., many memory items)...

Imagine you build an RNN with all node-to-node connections that mimicks the brain with excitatory-inhibitory nodes. Then, you plot the weight matrix and see this... All purple dots are weights = zero. My network barely has any excitatory (EXC) connections left after training?🥲

A new trend in neurocomputational models is adapting the power of machine learning tools to mimick the brain: you trade a bit of realism for the flexibility to train networks in many tasks 🚀

But with great tech comes great responsibility.

From my psych + methodology/stats background wanted to hop into computational cogsci and study memory and consciousness in neural circuits.

But I found my simulated networks were... dying?😅

My first PhD work is now out as a pre-print! 💫

Reluctant to ReLU: Uncontrolled Connectivity Pruning Underlying Trainable Excitatory-Inhibitory Recurrent Neural Networks (with @mavadillo.bsky.social )

We dive into an issue in a neural circuits framework...

Two years ago, I had an idea, one that evolved over time as I kept reading and learning. Today, a major first part of that idea has just become my first PhD preprint, now publicly available on PsyArxiv.

Let me tell you a bit more about the story behind it... while I prepare the submission.

Reluctant to ReLU: Uncontrolled Connectivity Pruning Underlying Trainable Excitatory-Inhibitory Recurrent Neural Networks: https://osf.io/9uzhq