Rui Ponte Costa

Why I left academia and neuroscience Don't worry, this isn't yet another story of rage-quitting.

Michael X Cohen on why he left academia/neuroscience.
mikexcohen.substack.com/p/why-i-left...

Faculty Position in Neuroscience The School of Life Sciences at EPFL invites applications for a Tenure Track Assistant Professor position in Neuroscience. At EPFL researchers develop and apply innovative technologies to understand br...

Come be our colleague at EPFL! Several open calls for positions 🧪🧠🤖

* Neuroscience www.epfl.ch/about/workin... (deadline Oct 1)

* Life Science Engineering www.epfl.ch/about/workin...

* CS general call www.epfl.ch/about/workin...

* Learning Sciences www.epfl.ch/about/workin...

GABAergic circuits reflect different requirements for sensory integration in postnatal mouse neocortex Information transfer in mammalian cerebral cortex is dependent on GABAergic interneuron circuits that are widely assumed to be uniform across the neoc…

A rather 'unique' paper from our lab is online in @cp-cellreports.bsky.social now. Unique in the sense that I don't think anyone else will be rushing to optotag cortical interneurons in the early postnatal brain... because it is nigh on impossible!

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Interested in doing a Ph.D. to work on building models of the brain/behavior? Consider applying to graduate schools at CU Anschutz:
1. Neuroscience www.cuanschutz.edu/graduate-pro...
2. Bioengineering engineering.ucdenver.edu/bioengineeri...

You could work with several comp neuro PIs, including me.

A multisensory, bidirectional, valence encoder guides behavioral decisions A key function of the brain is to categorize sensory cues as repulsive or attractive and respond accordingly. While we have some understanding of how sensory information is processed in the sensory pe...

How is valence computed in the brain? Check out our new preprint about a single cell that integrates excitatory and inhibitory input across modalities according to valence and impacts behavioral decisions. An exciting collaboration across many labs. Enjoy reading!
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

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...

Uauu! That's exciting! how much neuroscience/neuroAI will you/can you do there?

#Cosyne2026 is now open for business!

Show us what you got both for the main meeting & workshop proposals 🧠🥳🧠🥳🧠

This rule would have meant I couldn't do my Ph.D. in America.

I did do it in America. Became a professor. 12 thriving U.S. labs are now headed by trainees from my research lab. Like me, they are all working hard to enrich American knowledge and society.

With this self-harming rule, none of that.

🚨We believe this is a major step forward in how we study hippocampus function in healthy humans.

Using novel behavioral tasks, fMRI, RL & RNN modeling, and transcranial ultrasound stimulation (TUS), we demonstrate the causal role of hippocampus in relational structure learning.

I wrote a Comment on neurotheory, and now you can read it!

Some thoughts on where neurotheory has and has not taken root within the neuroscience community, how it has shaped those subfields, and where we theorists might look next for fresh adventures.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

where are my manners?! I should have used #CCN2025 and #CCN25 :)

Sorry to be missing CCN'25!! But if you are around come and check-out some of our work in the cogcompneuro space!
@cogcompneuro.bsky.social @achterbrain.bsky.social @Michal, @Angeliki and @Austin

Totally agree! We are working on it, but I think interneurons per se are probably not sufficient

Sensory responses of visual cortical neurons are not prediction errors Predictive coding is theorized to be a ubiquitous cortical process to explain sensory responses. It asserts that the brain continuously predicts sensory information and imposes those predictions on lo...

1/3) This may be a very important paper, it suggests that there are no prediction error encoding neurons in sensory areas of cortex:

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

I personally am a big fan of the idea that cortical regions (allo and neo) are doing sequence prediction.

But...

🧠📈 🧪

Dopamine encodes deep network teaching signals for individual learning trajectories Longitudinal tracking of long-term learning behavior and striatal dopamine reveals that dopamine teaching signals shape individually diverse yet systematic learning trajectories, captured mathematical...

Super excited to see this paper from Armin Lak & colleagues out! (I've seen @saxelab.bsky.social present it before.)

www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

tl;dr: The learning trajectories that individual mice take correspond to different saddle points in a deep net's loss landscape.

🧠📈 🧪 #NeuroAI

👨‍💻 Open PI position in our institute 👨‍💻 !! If you are an expert in Computational Neuroscience and want to start your lab in Bordeaux, contact us !
www.fens.org/careers/job-...
@neuromagendie.bsky.social
@neurobordeaux.bsky.social

@oxforddpag.bsky.social

Sharing this very cool drawing that Kevin Nejad generated using AI systems that have themselves been trained via self-supervision, which seems very fitting :)

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Resilient cortical maps - Nature Neuroscience Despite the loss of neurons during aging and the early stages of neurodegenerative disease, many cortical brain functions remain remarkably intact. Although this resilience is traditionally attributed...

Homeostasis can keep population-level responses stable in the face of neural drift and "vanishing neurons"

Nice write up of a paper I'm looking forward to reading but that seems to add more wood to the "populations are more than the sum of their neurons" fire

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Likewise, would any Bernstein member be willing to support me and @tgivanov.bsky.social 's membership application? Thanks!!

We are seeking two independent Max Planck Research Groups working in scientific disciplines relevant to our institute. Applications should be sent in PDF format no later than 15th August 2025. Visit our call for applications on our institute website for detailed information!

Is there any Bernstein member out there willing to support my membership application? 🙏

@bernsteinneuro.bsky.social is one of my favorite conferences and I have been going for a while, but never became a member and would like to.

Let's say you have a journal that isn't worried about protecting an impact factor, so it didn't need to package a million results into a single paper (to maximise citation-to-publication ratio). What would you do? Couple of suggestions below. Others very much appreciated!

Thanks Jonathan! :)

What a week @Global Tipping Points conference @gsiexeter.bsky.social

From stark warnings on very-near climate tipping points to identifying feedback loops, system rules (in finance, markets and culture) and mindset change we need for climate action 🌍

Heavy-hearted but determined & inspired ✊

Self-supervised predictive learning accounts for cortical layer-specificity - Nature Communications How the cortex learns an internal representation of the world and why the cortex relies on a layered structure remain poorly understood. Here, the authors propose a computational theory in which the n...

Pleased to say that our story of how a theory of self-supervised learning in cortical layers accounts for several experimental observations is now out 🎉
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Discovering cognitive strategies with tiny recurrent neural networks - Nature Modelling biological decision-making with tiny recurrent neural networks enables more accurate predictions of animal choices than classical cognitive models and offers insights into the underlying cog...

Thrilled to see our TinyRNN paper in @nature! We show how tiny RNNs predict choices of individual subjects accurately while staying fully interpretable. This approach can transform how we model cognitive processes in both healthy and disordered decisions. doi.org/10.1038/s415...

A cartoon-style illustration of a brain and a computer having a conversation. The brain has eyes and a mouth, and is animated to look like it's talking. It says, 'Have you heard about this comp neuro thing happening at Imperial College?'. The computer has a friendly face on its screen and is replying, 'Yeah it's going to be pretty hot'.

Almost last call to register for UK neural computation conference in London July 10-11. Registration deadline is July 1st. We have some great talks and posters as well as a session on funding with ARIA. 🤖🧠🧪

Look forward to seeing you all there. Now click here 👇

neuralcomputation.uk

Lecturer / Associate Professor - London, England job with University College London (UCL) | 12840324 About usThe Division of Biosciences at UCL is one of the world's foremost centres for research and teaching in the biological sciences. We have an out

🚨🚨Job Alert🚨🚨!! Neuroscience, Physiology and Pharmacology are recruiting a new lecturer/associate professor! an amazing opportunity to join our fantastic dept! @ucl.ac.uk @ucllifesciences.bsky.social @uclnpp.bsky.social post here:
www.nature.com/naturecareer...