Ahmet Çeşmeci

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).

Curriculum learning is the way!

Developmental science holds a lot of potential for the neuro-to-AI direction.

bsky.app/profile/timk...

Predicting upcoming visual features during eye movements yields scene representations aligned with human visual cortex Scenes are complex, yet structured collections of parts, including objects and surfaces, that exhibit spatial and semantic relations to one another. An effective visual system therefore needs unified ...

🚨New Preprint!
How can we model natural scene representations in visual cortex? A solution is in active vision: predict the features of the next glimpse! arxiv.org/abs/2511.12715

+ @adriendoerig.bsky.social , @alexanderkroner.bsky.social , @carmenamme.bsky.social , @timkietzmann.bsky.social
🧵 1/14

Introducing CorText: a framework that fuses brain data directly into a large language model, allowing for interactive neural readout using natural language.

tl;dr: you can now chat with a brain scan 🧠💬

1/n

Falling asleep follows a predictable bifurcation dynamic - Nature Neuroscience Li et al. propose a conceptual framework to study the phenomenon of falling asleep based on electroencephalogram data. They show that a tipping point marks the brain’s nonlinear wake-to-sleep transiti...

My co-authors have yet to move to Bluesky, so I'm pleased to announce our latest work has just been published in @nature.com Neuroscience. Amazing work led by Junheng Li, revealing that falling asleep follows a predictable bifurcation pattern #neuroskyence #sleep
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Semantic Tuning of Single Neurons in the Human Medial Temporal Lobe The Medial Temporal Lobe (MTL) is key to human cognition, supporting memory, emotional processing, navigation, and semantic coding. Rare direct human MTL recordings revealed concept cells, which were ...

🚨Preprint: Semantic Tuning of Single Neurons in the Human Medial Temporal Lobe

1/8: How do human neurons encode meaning?
In this work, led by Katharina Karkowski, we recorded hundreds of human MTL neurons to study semantic coding in the human brain:

doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Recurrence affects the geometry of visual representations across the ventral visual stream in the human brain The specific roles of feedforward and recurrent processing in human visual object recognition remain incompletely understood. In this neuroimaging and computational modelling study the authors isolate...

By utilizing the visual backward masking paradigm, this study aimed to disentangle the contributions of feedforward and recurrent processing, revealing that recurrent processing significantly shapes the object representations across the ventral visual stream.
journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

I've been arguing that #NeuroAI should model the brain in health *and* in disease -- very excited to share a first step from Melika Honarmand: inducing dyslexia in vision-language-models via targeted perturbations of visual-word-form units (analogous to human VWFA) 🧠🤖🧪 arxiv.org/abs/2509.24597

OK, time for a CCN runup thread. Let me tell you about all the lab’s projects present at CCN this year. #CCN2025

the Bayesian Models of Cognition book can teach you a lot about intuitive physics, e.g.:

I think the paper is referenced in the first two paragraphs of the Methods

Complex negative emotions induced by electrical stimulation of the human hypothalamus Stimulation of the ventromedial hypothalamic region in animals has been reported to cause attack behavior labeled as sham-rage without offering information about the internal affective state of the an...

(buried in a reply, but) This is mind-blowing & deserves a post. Scroll to "video" in this article to watch what happens when the human hypothalamus is stimulated: it's a combo of embarrassment/shame and intense body sensations emanating from the heart. WOW.

www.brainstimjrnl.com/article/S193...

Many people think of the brain as a hierarchical system, and in many ways it is. But there is also a lot of non-hierarchical processing going on. Check out this pre-print where we review and propose functional roles for the different long-range connections in the neocortex 🧠

Exciting new preprint from the lab: “Adopting a human developmental visual diet yields robust, shape-based AI vision”. A most wonderful case where brain inspiration massively improved AI solutions.

Work with @zejinlu.bsky.social @sushrutthorat.bsky.social and Radek Cichy

arxiv.org/abs/2507.03168

Now out in Nature Human Behaviour @nathumbehav.nature.com : “End-to-end topographic networks as models of cortical map formation and human visual behaviour”. Please check our NHB link: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Can seemingly complex multi-area computations in the brain emerge from the need for energy efficient computation? In our new preprint on predictive remapping in active vision, we report on such a case.

Let us take you for a spin. 1/6 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

These Strange New Minds Stunning advances in digital technology have given us a new wave of disarmingly human-like AI systems. The march of this new technology is set to upturn our economies, challenge our democracies, and r...

I am a bit bashful about sharing this profile www.thetimes.com/uk/technolog... of me in @thetimes.com, but will do so because it kindly refers to my new book which is coming out in early March. www.penguin.co.uk/books/460891.... The tech titans pictured seem to be decoration (and not my co-authors)

Tim's ML4CCN lecture was the highlight of my semester. It introduced me to the NeuroAI space and showcased how promising this line of work truly is! His passion for the field and the way he structured the lecture made it super inspiring.

Also glad our "DistractedV4" meme got a few chuckles :D