Dimitra Maoutsa

penguin classics cover for Crash by JG Ballard, but the cover image is the blue screen of death from older windows systems

Penguin Classics cover of A Good Man is Hard to Find and other Stories by Flannery O'Connor. cover image is a page of Where's Waldo (on the beach)

The NeurIPS 'celebrity tagging' posts are landing a bit strange with me. "I saw Hinton! ZOMG!!!" You... saw him? Made a saccade, your retina captured light that bounced off him? Vicarious clout band of the electromagnetic spectrum? You are an academic, at an academic conference.

Fantastic thread on voltage vs calcium imaging. Via photon flux change per molecule per action potential, they’re similar.

What makes voltage imaging so much harder, then?
Integration time (EPSPs/APs are short), lim ability to jam GEVIs into membrane, and small size of subthreshold Vm changes.
🧪🧠🤖

I've been exposed to enough peer review that I think we can look at two classes of reviewers:

1. Constructive peer review
2. Adversarial peer review

I'm looking at this mostly from a psychology/methodology perspective (but wonder what other fields experience)

🧵 1/

Could cognition emerge from matter at scales far below neurons? This @nature.com paper explores whether molecular self-assembly can perform neural-like classification. The work suggests that even physical processes may carry out sophisticated information processing.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

There are way too many people in the world that have not heard 'fuck off' enough.

really unfortunate*

*that we don't get to watch her break them

LMAOOOOO

🧵Excited to present our latest work at #Neurips25! Together with @avm.bsky.social, we discover 𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐧𝐧𝐞𝐥𝐬 𝐭𝐨 𝐢𝐧𝐟𝐢𝐧𝐢𝐭𝐲: regions in neural networks loss landscapes where parameters diverge to infinity (in regression settings!)

We find that MLPs in these channels can take derivatives and compute GLUs 🤯

How distributed is the brain-wide network that is recruited for cognition? - Nature Reviews Neuroscience Both localized and distributed views on the functional organization of the brain have been put forward. In this Perspective, Rosen and Freedman examine the degree to which these two views account for ...

Thoughtful review with some good recent historical perspective on the ongoing paradigm shift that is radically changing the way we think about what brain areas do.

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

Tomorrow at #NeurIPS2025! Oral at 10 am in UL Ballroom 20D and poster #2016 at 11 am. @haydari.bsky.social and I are looking forward to hearing your thoughts.

Authors greeting their reviewers after the OpenReview leak

Frances Egan: Some Physical Systems (Literally) Compute — The Brains Blog Some Physical Systems (Literally) ComputeFrances Egan  Rutgers University  In his ambitious new book, Michael Kirchhoff argues that computational models cannot be literally true&nbsp…

Day 3 of the Brain's Blog symposium of 'The Idealized Mind'. Attached are links to Frances Egan's commentary and my response:

philosophyofbrains.com/2025/12/03/s...

philosophyofbrains.com/2025/12/03/a...

Should we think that nervous systems compute? That's the topic of Day 3!

Some good news for non native English speakers who manage to speak English well 😄

Exciting new work from @lindenmp.bsky.social and friends!

Inferring intrinsic neural timescales using optimal control theory
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

This paper changed my life: Nancy Padilla-Coreano on learning the value of population coding The 2013 Nature paper by Mattia Rigotti and his colleagues revealed how mixed selectivity neurons—cells that are not selectively tuned to a stimulus—play a key role in cognition.

“I will die on the hill that population coding is the relevant level of encoding information in the brain.” In the latest “This paper changed my life,” Nancy Padilla-Coreano discusses a paper on mixed selectivity neurons.

#neuroskyence

www.thetransmitter.org/this-paper-c...

0/10 Thanks for the interest in our preprint. Some takes say it negates or fully supports the “manifold hypothesis”, neither quite right. Our results show that if you only focus on the manifold capturing most of task-related variance, you could miss important dynamics that actually drive behavior.

The whole paper is thought provoking, and congrats to @ulisespereirao.bsky.social. I recommend people to read it entirely before claiming it against the manifold hypothesis, out of ~thousands of cells, 10 dimensions explained most of the variance

Positive reward prediction errors during decision-making strengthen memory encoding - Nature Human Behaviour Jang and colleagues show that positive reward prediction errors elicited during incidental encoding enhance the formation of episodic memories.

1/3 How reward prediction errors shape memory: when people gamble and cues signal unexpectedly high reward probability, those incidental images are remembered better than ones on safe trials, linking RL computations to episodic encoding. #RewardSignals #neuroskyence www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Post-learning replay of hippocampal-striatal activity is biased by reward-prediction signals Nature Communications - It is unclear which aspects of experience shape sleep’s contributions to learning. Here, by combining neural recordings in rats with reinforcement learning, the...

New(ish) paper!

It's often said that hippocampal replay, which helps to build up a model of the world, is biased by reward. But the canonical temporal-difference learning requires updates proportional to reward-prediction error (RPE), not reward magnitude

1/4

rdcu.be/eRxNz

Fig. 6: Mathematical model

A cholinergic mechanism orchestrating task-dependent computation across the cortex In an ever-changing environment, animals often need to switch between performing different tasks involving distinct sets of cognitive processes. Many such tasks involve neural activity distributed acr...

The basal forebrain plays the cortex like a piano.

A study finds that cats meow harder to greet their male caregivers than female. Females are more verbally interactive, more skilled at interpreting cat meows. Apparently males require more meows to notice and respond to the needs of their cats.

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

But do we know how long was this vulnerability there? Was it for years, and people have been exploiting this route to get their papers accepted (not surprised at all) or is it a newish bug?

I won't look up the names of the reviewers. But I would look up the names of the people who looked up the names of the reviewers.

Interesting remark. I think there's a difference between looking up the names of past reviewers out of curiosity, without having any consequence (eg, don't bully them), and looking up the names of current reviewers in order to bias the process. The later would be a big integrity failure.

OpenReview was breached. The names of authors, reviewers, ACs, etc, for all past and current conferences were visible for a time, making nothing anonymous anymore. These data have been released for this year's ICLR, but I fear it's also the case for the past 10 years of conferences.

In case someone missed it, an account called OpenReviewers has started posting public comments at ICLR submissions revealing the identity of reviewers. We are in a crazy time.

A trillion dollars is a terrible thing to waste The machine learning community is finally waking up to the madness, but the detour of the last few years has been costly.

"An old saying about such follies is that “six months in the lab can you save you an afternoon in the library”; here we may have wasted a trillion dollars and several years to rediscover what cognitive science already knew."

garymarcus.substack.com/p/a-trillion...