Rob Mok

22 years of Brain Science: what CoSyNe tells us about the evolution of Neuroscience Tracking the intellectual DNA of Computational and Systems Neuroscience through its flagship meeting

I tracked every keyword in 22 years of Cosyne abstracts to map how computational neuroscience evolved — from Bayesian brains to neural manifolds to LLMs — and where it's heading next.

Medial Pulvinar Nucleus as a Causal Hub for Heteromodal Naming Our ability to retrieve the names of objects in our environment is a fundamental aspect of everyday life. This process requires a complex, dynamic network of cortical and subcortical interactions. Whi...

Out now in #JNeurosci! We used direct recordings and stimulation in human pulvinar to probe its causal role during naming from pictures, and spoken and written descriptions. We found naming-selective responses and stim-induced pure anomia.

doi.org/10.1523/JNEU...

#NeuroSkyence #iEEG

🧵👇

New term: Badhart's Law

For Goodhart's law, the metric starts out moderately correlated with quality/performance. Then, when people work only for the metric, that correlation degrades.

For Badhart's law, the metric is shit from the start.

I think it is. Having reviewed for elife with senior folks I knew well, I felt pressure to do things properly (good), but also worried disagreeing with them too strongly (bad). It didn't happen much, but it was definitely on my mind.

Episode #38 in #TheoreticalNeurosciencePodcast: On extracting spiking network models from experiments - with Richard Gao @rdgao.bsky.social

theoreticalneuroscience.no/thn38

How to fit spiking network models to experimental data when there is no unique parameter set giving the best fit.

Evolution, Reward, Curiosity: The Three Sources of Learning Signals Learning requires training signals; where are they from?

Wrote a blog post on where the training signals for the brain come from. open.substack.com/pub/kording/...

If you want to tackle the "biggest problem holding neuroscience back right now" - comparing mechanisms of cognition across species - join us in @ox.ac.uk and @tcddublin.bsky.social . Please share!

3x Job Details below:

(fantastic article @suthanalab.bsky.social ) #neuroskyence #neurojobs

Next Stops for OHBM: Toronto, Canada in 2027 and Yokohama, Japan in 2028 — OHBM Communications We are thrilled to announce the locations for our next two upcoming Annual Meetings! The 2027 OHBM Annual Meeting will be held in Toronto, Canada, followed by the 2028 OHBM Annual Meeting in Yokohama,...

Future @ohbmofficial.bsky.social meeting dates just annouced:

* 2027 - Toronto, Canada
* 2028 - Yokohama, Japan

www.ohbm-com.com/blog/futurem...

What happens when we can't use recursive belief to compete? We can use anomaly detection instead!

Here, we (led by soon-to-be-Dr @nitalon.bsky.social ) devise a multi-agent account where compression & reward expectation are used to notice deception

jair.org/index.php/ja...

The revised version of our paper on the impact of top-down feedback is now out @elife.bsky.social:

doi.org/10.7554/eLif...

tl;dr: we show that using human-brain-like feedback/anatomy in a deep RNN leads to human-like visual biases!

This work was led by @tmshbr.bsky.social

#NeuroAI 🧠📈 🧪

[Cognitive capacity nobody understands] is very important.

However,

the underlying neural mechanisms remain enigmatic.

Here we show that

[stimuli somehow related to the capacity]

can be decoded from

[spatiotemporal description].

Our results show that we can do what we did.

bsky.app/profile/did:...

another custom bluesky feed using regular expressions, this time for jobs in the realm of neuroscience 🙃

matches: (brain|psycho|neur|cogni|physio) and (postdoc|phd|coordinator|professor|fellow|researcher) and some keywords like job/opportunity/hiring/...

I guess this is not unusual for an academic? Good to know.

Happy birthday to one of my favourite haters, Charles Darwin

NSD-synthetic, the out-of-distribution companion dataset of NSD consisting of 7T fMRI responses to 284 artificial images, is now published.

#NeuroAI #CompNeuro #neuroscience #AI

doi.org/10.1038/s414...

Our paper is out in @natneuro.nature.com!

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

We develop a geometric theory of how neural populations support generalization across many tasks.

@zuckermanbrain.bsky.social
@flatironinstitute.org
@kempnerinstitute.bsky.social

1/14

1/7 Can infants recognise the world around them? 👶🧠 As part of the FOUNDCOG project, we scanned 134 awake infants using fMRI. Published today in Nature Neuroscience, our research reveals 2-month-old infants already possess complex visual representations in VVC that align with DNNs.

Today I'd like to honor the memory of my mentor and friend, Roger Tsien, born 1952 February 1. Today would have been Roger's 74th birthday.

Most know Roger for his 2008 Chemistry Nobel Prize with Shimomura and Chalfie. Roger made GFP into the versatile imaging method it is now.

Postdoc position in Paris: come help develop new generation human brain computer interfaces ⚡🧠💻

Interested? Contact me if you have experience with machine learning (e.g. simulation-based inference, RL, generative/diffusion models) or dynamical systems.

See below for + details and retweet 🙏

🧠

Happy birthday Ogawa-sensei! We are proud to have him as our institute's (CiNet) advisor and I was lucky to meet him and present my research to him recently.

Over the years, I have written a few Jupyter/Rmd/Matlab notebooks that attempt to teach some statistical concepts, particularly in neuroimaging. You can find them here: www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/people/rik.h..., though I will say a bit more about each one in a number of posts over next few days.

Opportunity to move to Canada. 🍁 The Lifespan Institute @brocku.ca is looking to hire a Canada Excellence Research Chair In Healthy Development Across the Lifespan. More info in the job ad (salary negotiable).

brocku.wd3.myworkdayjobs.com/brocku_caree....

DNNs are the dominant AI paradigm with remarkable performance, but backpropagation, their main supervised learning method, faces challenges in feasibility and biological plausibility.
sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0893608025005088?via%3Dihub

How do hippocampal pathways contribute to learning regularities and exceptions?

To answer this, Melisa Gumus & @drmack.bsky.social use diffusion imaging to identify the endpoints of different hippocampal pathways, and then analyze functional activity within those "footprints". Super innovative!

I love this so much. After pushback on his recent "Medicine is the only field that reaches 6 sigma" with "my field, psychophysics is so awesome" he posted this. Hurray all Psychophysicists. LETS CELEBRATE PSYCHOPHYSICS. An island of large effects is us!

Nothing's Shocking Medicine is the only human-facing science that consistently finds five-sigma interventions. Change my mind.

Medicine is the only human-facing science that consistently finds five-sigma interventions. Change my mind.

1000 Hurts Psychophysics is a human-facing science with interventions arguably more robust than medicine.

Psychophysics is a human-facing science with interventions arguably more robust than medicine.

A unifying account of replay as context-driven memory reactivation A context-driven memory model simulates a wide range of characteristics of waking and sleeping hippocampal replay, providing a new account of how and why replay occurs.

Really thrilled that this paper led by @neurozz.bsky.social is now published in its final version in @elife.bsky.social!!

This is a memory-focused (as opposed to RL-focused) account of the detailed characteristics of forward and backward awake and sleep replay!

elifesciences.org/articles/99931