Benjamin Lévesque Kinder

Claude Code 27: Research and Publishing Are Now Two Different Things Some Claude Code fan fiction about the economics of publishing with AI agents set in the very near future

This post really put together the pieces in a way that floored me. Everything is about to change and we have to confront that reality causalinf.substack.com/p/claude-cod...

Low frequency oscillations – neural correlates of stability and flexibility in cognition - Nature Communications How the brain balances the flexibility and stability needed to both encode and maintain information during cognition remains poorly understood. Using MEG data and in-silico simulations, the authors sh...

2025 in @natcomms.nature.com
“Low frequency oscillations - neural correlates of stability & flexibility”

Theta/alpha oscillations can aid cortical information transfer in-silico - a mechanism in line with MEG network state transitions in several working memory tasks

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

Whether the system can be flexibly redirected to prioritize specific locations has been unclear. Using large-scale #Neuropixels recordings in freely behaving rats, we find that both sweeps – and the internal direction signals driving them – are dynamically modulated moment by moment. (4/6)

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 🙏

Great work by Roni Tibon (not on BlueSky) - surprising that negligible difference in fMRI correlates of semantic vs episodic retrieval?

Aperiodic 1/f noise drives ripple activity in humans - Nature Communications How aperiodic 1/f noise drives ripple activity in human brain and impacts on ripple detections is not fully understood. Here authors show that ripple detections should be driven by the 1/f noise, whic...

Ripple oscillations are central for memory and sleep.

But ripple detection in humans remains challenging. Here we introduce a simulation approach in @natcomms.nature.com as common ripple detectors mainly pick up 1/f noise and not genuine oscillations

👇
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

#neuroskyence

New paper in Imaging Neuroscience by Holly Schofield, Matthew J. Brookes, et al:

Towards a 384-channel magnetoencephalography system based on optically pumped magnetometers

doi.org/10.1162/IMAG...

Totally agree and the point is well taken. On a bayes account, although a negative result doesn’t prove ‘unnecessary’ it does lower the posterior p that C is necessary (depends on prior, n, etc. etc.)

Not easy (circuit out of a brain can’t behave). But wouldn’t up/do
wn modulation of a specific circuit (e.g. w/ opto) tightly controlling a behaviour (e.g. www.science.org/doi/epdf/10....) show ‘production sufficiency’ (to borrow from the TINS paper)?

Wouldn't demonstrating joint necessity/sufficiency for a set of circuit satisfy "causal production" as in TINS, below? Perhaps I misunderstood, but this seems like it fits that definition of causality (production) in distributed systems. Happy to be corrected if I’m missing anything!

The necessity/sufficiency distinction seems important here. A lesion in C with no effect tells you C is not necessary for b, but nothing about sufficiency (although brain stim in C could clarify). Likewise, C2 might be unnecessary when lesioned alone, but the set {C, C2} could be jointly necessary.

In my view there will be many such circuits, but if you don’t know how to look for them it will seem like everything is everywhere. But this view is not very fashionable at the moment. It will return. And then it will be unfashionable again :)

We are opening a FACULTY POSITION (tenure track, permanent) in the University of Cambridge at the interface of control and biology, interpreted broadly. Theorists and wet lab quantitative biologists with backgrounds in control, EE, applied math, ... apply by Jan 28!

www.cam.ac.uk/jobs/univers...

Well this is exciting!

The Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences at Johns Hopkins University (@jhu.edu) invites applications for a full-time tenured or tenure-track faculty member in Cognitive Psychology, in any area and at any rank!

Application + more info: apply.interfolio.com/178146

Prob a small effect, but the FAQ mentions they excluded multi-disciplinary journals from the sample. Some of these journals (esp. PNAS, Nat comms, etc.) tend to publish imaging > EEG afaik, it may partially reflect a shift in where imaging gets published…

Building compositional tasks with shared neural subspaces - Nature The brain can flexibly perform multiple tasks by compositionally combining task-relevant neural representations.

Nature research paper: Building compositional tasks with shared neural subspaces

go.nature.com/4ocRj3n

Oh man. Science Neural Circuits would be my new favorite journal.

Without monkeys, neuroscience has no future Research in primate brains has been essential for the development of BCIs, ANNs. New funding and policy changes put future such advances at risk.

Research in primate brains has been essential for the development of brain-computer interfaces and artificial neural networks. New funding and policy changes put future such advances at risk, write Cory Miller, @movshon.bsky.social and Doris Tsao.

#neuroskyence

bit.ly/47MXYLH

Whole-cortex in situ sequencing reveals input-dependent area identity - Nature BARseq interrogates the expression of 104 cell-type marker genes in 10.3 million cells over nine mouse forebrain hemispheres to reveal the role of peripheral inputs on cortical area development.

Still think brain regions don’t exist? That everything is everywhere? That cell types don’t matter and that everything is a dynamical phase portrait?

Wrong.

Interconnected brain modules exist at the level of fine grained transcriptomics. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

New brain atlas offers unprecedented detail in MRI scans A new AI-assisted brain atlas that can help visualise the human brain in unprecedented detail has been developed by UCL researchers, in a major step forward for neuroscience and neuroimaging.

A new AI-assisted brain atlas that can visualise the human brain in unprecedented detail has been developed by a team led by Dr Juan Eugenio Iglesias @uclengineering.bsky.social & Dr Zane Jaunmuktane @uclbrainscience.bsky.social, in a major advance in neuroimaging
www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2025/no...

Falling asleep follows a predictable bifurcation dynamic - Nature Neuroscience Li et al. propose a conceptual framework to study the phenomenon of falling asleep based on electroencephalogram data. They show that a tipping point marks the brain’s nonlinear wake-to-sleep transiti...

My co-authors have yet to move to Bluesky, so I'm pleased to announce our latest work has just been published in @nature.com Neuroscience. Amazing work led by Junheng Li, revealing that falling asleep follows a predictable bifurcation pattern #neuroskyence #sleep
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I’m super excited to finally put my recent work with @behrenstimb.bsky.social on bioRxiv, where we develop a new mechanistic theory of how PFC structures adaptive behaviour using attractor dynamics in space and time!

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

This is one of the most outstanding examples of circuit understanding I've seen in a long time. The unification of theory and experiment is beautiful.

When Malcolm presented this in my lab, the audience was cheering at the end, and one person shouted (non-ironically) "You did it!"

Transitions in dynamical regime and neural mode during perceptual decisions - Nature Simultaneous recordings were made of hundreds of neurons in the rat frontal cortex and striatum, showing that decision commitment involves a rapid, coordinated transition in dynamical regime and neura...

How does the brain decide? 🧠

Our new @nature.com paper shows that neural activity switches from an 'evidence gathering' to a 'commitment' state at a precise moment we call nTc.

After nTc, new evidence is ignored, revealing a neural marker for the instant when the mind is made up.

rdcu.be/eGUrv

Lab’s latest is out in Imaging Neuroscience, led by Kirsten Peterson: “Regularized partial correlation provides reliable functional connectivity estimates while correcting for widespread confounding”, where we demonstrate a major improvement to standard fMRI functional connectivity (correlation) 1/n

🚨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.

MARBLE: interpretable representations of neural population dynamics using geometric deep learning - Nature Methods MARBLE uses geometric deep learning to map dynamics such as neural activity into a latent representation, which can then be used to decode the neural activity or compare it across systems.

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

We put out this preprint a couple months ago, but I really wanted to replicate our findings before we went to publication.

At first, what we found was very confusing!

But when we dug in, it revealed a fascinating neural strategy for how we switch between tasks

doi.org/10.1101/2024.09.29.615736

🧵