François Deloche

Graph of award probability of R35 and R01 from NIH factbook as a function of review rank percentile. As is apparent, 2025 is a significant departure, with lower award probabilities at all scores <40 and significant departures from norm, where even being in the top 10% is no longer a nearly certain indicator of success. Data source: https://report.nih.gov/nihdatabook/report/302

The data is in: the NIH goalposts have shifted.

What were once almost certain fundable scores have become coin flips and what used to be likely grants have become aspirational, leading to fewer awards.

Another manifestation of how HHS policies have led to fewer awards and less science.

A fun (AI-enhanced) image of 12187 ABR waveforms. We used these data from our own lab and several others to train ABRA (PMID: 38948763) and are still using it to train next-gen machine learning models for cochlear studies. Stay tuned (no pun intended) for more!

Vectorized instructive signals in cortical dendrites - Nature Mice learning a neurofeedback brain–computer interface task show neuron-specific teaching signals in cortical dendrites, consistent with a vectorized solution for credit assignment in the brain.

This paper on how the brain may do gradient descent is very cool: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Hey #ARO2026, today we have a poster on an interesting participant who hears sounds when her eyes move! Board #134 1/

Bluesky Map Interactive map of 3.4 million Bluesky users, visualised by their follower pattern.

I made a map of 3.4 million Bluesky users - see if you can find yourself!

bluesky-map.theo.io

I've seen some similar projects, but IMO this seems to better capture some of the fine-grained detail

"How much of the brain's learned algorithms depend on the fact it is a brain?" arxiv.org/abs/2601.02063 The brain is a neural network, but also a biological organ (unlike artificial neural networks). How much does this matter to cognition?

Bye bye 2025, a divisive year,
with many divisors: 3, 5, 9, 15, 25, 27, 45, 75, 81, 135, 225, 405, 675.

Happy 2026 = 2*1013
Just two primes

Cheers!

YouTube video by CNRS Stéphane Mallat, bâtisseur de ponts mathématiques et informatiques | Talents CNRS

Du format de compression d’images JPEG 2000 aux fondements mathématiques de l’IA, Stéphane Mallat a façonné des outils devenus incontournables. Pour ses travaux exceptionnels, il reçoit la médaille d'or 2025 du CNRS. #TalentsCNRS 🏅

Son portrait vidéo 👉 youtu.be/m3zNvnGSjjk

left: inner ear; center: transverse section of the cochlear duct; right: section showing the cochlear duct spiraling around the modiolus/spiral ganglion

pumpkin carving representing the inner ear. left: inner ear, center: transverse section of the cochlear duct, right: spiral canal, modiolus and sprial ganglion

Each year amazed by the incredible carving work of Purdue Audiology student Isabella Huddleston 🤩🤩 via x.com/HeinzLab_Pur... #Halloween 🎃👻

Really interesting work by Bakhurin and colleagues challenging the reward prediction error hypothesis of dopamine:
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
I love this figure which both echoes and undermines the famous figure from Schultz et al. (1997).

Arousal as a universal embedding for spatiotemporal brain dynamics - Nature Reframing of arousal as a latent dynamical system can reconstruct multidimensional measurements of large-scale spatiotemporal brain dynamics on the timescale of seconds in mice.

Super proud of this collaboration with rockstar Ryan Raut - born out of playing in the sandbox in our last year of grad school! Multi-scale brain activity can be predicted from a simple measure of arousal like pupil diameter. Out with linear causality, in with dynamic systems to explain neurobiology

Mirror manifolds: partially overlapping neural subspaces for speaking and listening Participants in conversations need to associate words their speakers but also retain those words general meanings. For example, someone talking about their hand is not referring to the other speakers ...

New manuscript from the lab!

"Mirror manifolds: partially overlapping neural subspaces for speaking and listening"

Led by superstar grad student Anilu Chavez (not on Bluesky)!

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

Congratulations Prof. Mallat! 👏

I had the chance to have Stephane Mallat as a teacher. His course connected important ideas in statistical signal processing/machine learning with mathematical concepts. It was very inspiring I know him as a great mentor. His book 'a wavelet tour on signal processing' is a classic IMO :)

A. James Hudspeth, neuroscientist who unlocked secrets of hearing, has died - News A. James Hudspeth, a Rockefeller neuroscientist who discovered how sound waves are converted into electrical signals in the ear's cochlea, died Saturday at his home in Manhattan. A pioneering scientist and dedicated mentor, he was the university's F.M. ...

We are deeply saddened to share that our friend and colleague Jim Hudspeth passed away on Saturday. We will remember and continue to be inspired by Jim’s integrity, his humility, and his unwavering commitment to discovery.

Jim Hudspeth: The beautiful, mysterious science of how you hear Have you ever wondered how your ears work? In this delightful and fascinating talk, biophysicist Jim Hudspeth demonstrates the wonderfully simple yet astonishingly powerful mechanics of hair cells, th...

Jim Hudspeth has died 💔

I am so sad. He was probably my favorite hearing researcher of all time. Absolute genius and also generous - he spent hours on the phone advising me on my career even tho we barely knew each other.

May his memory be a blessing.
www.ted.com/talks/jim_hu...

I love this experience-sampling study on the absolute pitch of earworms! It's a really nicely done study conducted in everyday settings. The link to this paper (open access) is provided below. It is also featured in a podcast (tinyurl.com/4ydrw5zp) by the Psychonomic Society. Congrats!

🔵 Proud to share our new preprint 🔵

We compared humans and deep neural networks on sound localization 👂📍

Humans robustly localized OOD sounds even without primary interaural cues (ITD & ILD)

Models localized well only in-training distribution sounds, failing on OOD regime

Link & full story 🧵👇

1/N What are the organizational principles underlying crossmodal cortical connections?
We address this in this new preprint, led by @alexegeaweiss.bsky.social & ‪@bturner-bridger.bsky.social‬ in collab w/ ‪@petrznam.bsky.social‬ @crick.ac.uk
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

A major NIH grant to study ways to restore hearing was terminated by the Trump administration bc it was awarded through a DEI initiative—to a researcher who qualified bc of his own hearing loss www.cnn.com/2025/07/29/h... @manorlaboratory.bsky.social

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...

🧠📈 🧪

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Howdy! Today's paper spotlight comes from Chun Liang and was published in June. This paper shows that knocking out the ATP gated receptor P2X7 enhances hearing sensitivity but makes noise induced cochlea damage much worse! Adds info to those mysterious type II fibres 🔍 www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

AAV gene therapy for autosomal recessive deafness 9: a single-arm trial - Nature Medicine Preliminary results from an investigator-initiated clinical trial showed that an AAV-OTOF gene therapy was safe and led to hearing improvements in ten patients with congenital deafness with 6–12 month...

Gene therapy to treat deafness now a success in young adults!
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Delighted to have our newest paper out in #Jneurosci ! We looked at how much a single cell contributes to an auditory-evoked EEG signal. Big thanks to my co-authors Ira Kraemer, Christine Köppl, Catherine Carr and Richard Kempter (all not in Bsky). Here’s how: (1/13)
bsky.app/profile/sfnj...

Does anyone else find it perpetually annoying that what most folks would consider neural "computation" is Marr's "algorithmic" level, while his *computational* level is really just "what's the goal of this thing anyway?" AKA function.

This is just the beginning of this line of research. And other teams have developed different approaches to unravel the mechanisms of cochlear amplification. The field is moving fast! Definitely an exciting time for research on cochlear mechanics.

This could however explain several observations, including the orientation of collagen fibers in the tectorial membrane (stained in blue in the picture below), which conveys the velocity gradient in this hypothesis. bsky.app/profile/audi...