Ian Stevenson

I considered writing a long carefully constructed argument laying out the harms and limitations of AI, but instead I wrote about being a hater. Only humans can be haters.

To study how animals understand the physical world (and the rules that govern its dynamics), @jinyao-y.bsky.social trains rats to play fetch with robots 🐀🤖🎾

To learn more, come to our poster Tuesday morning!
[Board W11] Rats learn and use intuitive physics knowledge to solve fetch tasks.
#SfN2025

FYI 🧠 -- We are recruiting for a postdoc interested in computational models of hearing at UConn. Reach out if you have questions jobs.hr.uconn.edu/en-us/job/49...

#JNeurosci: Clonan et al. investigated how people detect speech in environments with different background noises occurring at a consistent loudness.
https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1751-24.2025

Very happy about my former mentor Sara Solla having received the Valentin Braitenberg Award for her lifelong contributions to computational neuroscience!

Sara will be giving a lecture at the upcoming @bernsteinneuro.bsky.social meeting which you shouldn't miss.

bernstein-network.de/en/newsroom/...

YouTube video by minutephysics The Physics Of Dissonance

This is a pretty cool exploration of dissonance in music.

youtu.be/tCsl6ZcY9ag?...

InfoFlood: Jailbreaking Large Language Models with Information Overload Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across various domains. However, their potential to generate harmful responses has raised significant societal and regulatory con...

Just saw this this morning that may be related - arxiv.org/abs/2506.12274

a complicated curve from a pintograph

a complicated curve from a pintograph

a complicated curve from a pintograph

a complicated curve from a pintograph

some pintographs 4/∞

Screenshot of a single question and answer from interview in the Times Literary Supplement with Ursula K. Le Guin. Here is the quote: If you could make a change to anything you’ve written over the years, what would it be? In The Dispossessed, I would mention the communal pickle barrels at street corners in the big towns, restocked by whoever in the community has made or kept more pickles than they need. I knew about the free pickles all along, but never could fit them into the book.

Ursula K. Le Guin on the true pain of being a writer

I want everyone to how rapidly a euphemistic language of acquiescence has been codified among the administrative class, insulating the perpetrators of this chaos from blame.

Today! Hartford Stand Up For Science!
#nutmegsky

Yeah 300, I think our "simulation 2" would be easy enough to scale up to something like 3k simultaneously recorded spikes (or 3m serially recorded) to test your argument. The sparseness of spikes and timescale of synapses still makes me optimistic that you can at least get *some* real interactions

Model-based detection of putative synaptic connections from spike recordings with latency and type constraints | Journal of Neurophysiology | American Physiological Society Detecting synaptic connections using large-scale extracellular spike recordings presents a statistical challenge. Although previous methods often treat the detection of each putative connection as a s...

We did this here: journals.physiology.org/doi/full/10....
helps a bit!

In honor of today’s International Day of Women and Girls in Science, The Transmitter spoke with eight women neuroscientists leading initiatives that strive to promote women in the field.

www.thetransmitter.org/qa/how-eight...

#WomenInScience #February11

In case folks are interested in contacting their congresspeople about the NIH indirect cuts with some estimates of what they would mean for institutions in their state, here are some estimates based on published F&A rates and funding ... let me know if you want a particular state

INTRODUCTION

Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines?

Jevin West (@jevinwest.bsky.social) and I have spent the last eight months developing the course on large language models (LLMs) that we think every college freshman needs to take.

thebullshitmachines.com

A picture of a pink cartoon mouth with a nasal cavity, oral cavity, sort palate, hard palate, lip, and tongue

When teaching about speech production (which I'm doing today) I always enjoy this Pink Trombone demo

Also: If you really really really hate someone show this to their kids

dood.al/pinktrombone/

figure from Stark et al 2014, showing correlograms during spontaneous ripples in hippocampus

Also reminds me of ccgs you see if you look just during ripples. Here from Stark...Buzsaki (buried in supplement) - www.cell.com/neuron/fullt....

Figure from a neuroscience paper with cross-correlograms between pairs of spiking neurons. Shows examples where presynaptic dynamics affect the shape of the correlogram and model fit.

We have one model here for monosynaptic effects:
doi.org/10.51628/001.... Sometimes the monosynaptic model doesn't work well, though. I haven't really dug into these cases, but suspect there's probably high-frequency common input and/or reciprocal connections

I've seen (somewhat rarely) these types of oscillatory ccgs on this timescale. Sometimes you can get these types of effects when the neurons are just bursty. You might check ACGs or CCGs on isolated spikes or try to deconvole similar to work from Eggermont in the 90s.

ChatGPT is bullshit - Ethics and Information Technology Recently, there has been considerable interest in large language models: machine learning systems which produce human-like text and dialogue. Applications of these systems have been plagued by persist...

I liked this paper along these lines... link.springer.com/article/10.1...

the Few-shot Algorithms for Consistent Neural Decoding (FALCON) Benchmark

How can we build BCIs that operate robustly in the face of nonstationarities?

Our @neuripsconf.bsky.social Datasets and Benchmarks paper introduces the Few-shot Algorithms for Consistent Neural Decoding (FALCON) Benchmark!

Led by Brianna Karpowicz and @joelye.bsky.social

Faculty Position 🧠👩‍🏫 -- UConn BME is hiring for an Assistant/Associate Professor in ML including Neural Engineering... jobs.hr.uconn.edu/en-us/job/49...

#compneuro #MLSky

A passage from the book describing a heated debate

A figure from the book with hippocampal traces from different behavioral states

...what is known in the trade as a "vigorous discussion" 😂

Faculty Position 🧠👩‍🏫 -- UConn BME is hiring for an Assistant/Associate Professor in ML including Neural Engineering... jobs.hr.uconn.edu/en-us/job/49...

#compneuro #MLSky

A cartoon picture of two glasses with straws in them. The glasses are filled with milk tea (a light beige liquid). The left glass has round dark objects in it and is labeled "boba tea". The right glass has pointy or star shaped dark objects in it and is labeled "kiki tea"

I can't find where the original for this came from, but it made my day.

Fun to see this place coming a bit more alive! I tried my hand at a starter pack for neural engineering & computationally-leaning (systems) neuroscience. Super not exhaustive, so if you want to be added (or removed), just ping me. I'm still working on finding folks here.

go.bsky.app/Ty3ftme

Why does #compneuro need new learning methods? ANN models are usually trained with Gradient Descent (GD), which violates biological realities like Dale’s law and log-normal weights. Here we describe a superior learning algorithm for comp neuro: Exponentiated Gradients (EG)! 1/12 #neuroscience 🧪

Averaging is a convenient fiction of neuroscience But neurons don’t take averages. This ubiquitous practice hides from us how the brain really works.

We’re excited to welcome @markdhumphries.bsky.social, author of “The Spike,” as our new columnist. Check out his first piece, in which he explores how averaging is a convenient fiction of neuroscience.

www.thetransmitter.org/neural-codin...

A lot of my view comes from Harvey Swadlow's work and causal confirmation from the Kremkow lab www.pnas.org/doi/epub/10....