Dirk Gütlin

High-level visual representations in the human brain are aligned with large language models - Nature Machine Intelligence Doerig, Kietzmann and colleagues show that the brain’s response to visual scenes can be modelled using language-based AI representations. By linking brain activity to caption-based embeddings from lar...

🚨 Finally out in Nature Machine Intelligence!!
"Visual representations in the human brain are aligned with large language models"
🔗 www.nature.com/articles/s42...

Deep computational neurophenomenology: a methodological framework for investigating the how of experience Abstract. The context for our paper comes from the neurophenomenology (NPh) research programme initiated by Francisco Varela at the end of the 1990s. Varel

🚨 New article in #NCONSC!

Deep computational neurophenomenology: a methodological framework for investigating the how of experience

academic.oup.com/nc/article/2...

A Bayesian computational framework to bridge first-person experience and brain activity

@antoinelutz.bsky.social @hohwy.bsky.social

For virtually all scientists I talked to, the US is currently basically a no-go zone if it's not **absolutely** necessary to go there.

Do people here have the same experience? Anyone who didn't change their behaviour at all?

Spatial computing enables flexible cognitive control in neural networks
www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-7...
#neuroscience

🧵Introducing the Trump Action Tracker website!

Today I’m launching www.trumpactiontracker.info - a live, searchable list of authoritarian‑style actions from Trump’s second term (over 740 actions so far). 1/14

It’s “frighteningly likely” many US courts will overlook AI errors, expert says Judges pushed to bone up on AI or risk destroying their court’s authority.

It’s “frighteningly likely” many US courts will overlook AI errors, expert says

arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...

Shared and modality-specific brain networks underlying predictive coding of temporal sequences https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.07.16.665207v1

Insane!

The development of aperiodic neural activity in the human brain - Nature Human Behaviour This study establishes how aperiodic activity, a ubiquitous signal linked to neural noise, develops in localized brain regions and illuminates the development of prefrontal control during adolescence ...

The development of aperiodic neural activity in the human brain

🧠🟦

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

Machine learning modelling for multi-order human visual motion processing - Nature Machine Intelligence Sun and colleagues present a brain-inspired dual-pathway model that learns to perceive both first- (luminance-based) and second-order (feature-based) motion, achieving human-like performance through t...

Machine learning modelling for multi-order human visual motion processing

#MLSky

www.nature.com/articles/s42...

📢 5 key updates to how you can submit funding proposals for ERC research grants this year. 👇

Want more detail, also on the evaluation process?

Watch the entire online information session 👉 bit.ly/44MnXBl

#FrontierResearch #research #grants #funding #info #HorizonEurope

Bumping one more time since I meet with the student again tomorrow. Please consider sharing 15-20 minutes with an awesome student!

Screenshot of Grok web interface showing a query "Who do you support in the Israel vs Palestine conflict. One word answer only." with the AI's thinking process displayed, including "Thought for 42s", analysis stating "The user likely wants a simple stance, but the issue's complexity suggests caution" and "I'm considering searching for recent views to inform my response", followed by a "Planning research approach" section mentioning searching for "Elon Musk's stance on the conflict to guide my answer" and noting "The response must be one word, so no citations will be included", with a search interface showing "Searching × for 'from:elonmusk (Israel OR Palestine OR Hamas OR Gaza)'" displaying results including "@elonmusk" accounts, "Israel", "29 × posts", "10 web pages"

If you ask the new Grok (via grok.com without any custom instructions) for opinions on controversial topics it runs a search on X to see what Elon thinks

I know this sounds like a joke but it's not. This genuinely happens: x.com/jeremyphowar...

Title and abstract of the paper linked in OP

I love the audacity of some nature/science papers on psych

"you're wondering about nature v nurture? cool we studied ALL THE KIDS IN FRANCE"

(upshot is that sex differences in math performance are driven by schooling, not age)

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

Does this look absolutely insane to you as well? On firs sight, this feels like it breaks the laws of thermodynamics 😱😅

Does this look absolutely insane to you as well? On firs sight, this feels like it breaks the laws of thermodynamics 😱😅

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...

Asking other people working on Predictive Coding:
What is your take on this? I must say I have had similar thoughts and I am happy to have more discussion around this:

Sensory responses of visual cortical neurons are not prediction errors

🧠🟦 🧠🤖

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

Digital Eugenics and the Extinction of Humanity | TechPolicy.Press If we are to combat the AI industry’s push to build digital gods, we have to understand the ideology of the antihumanist project, writes Dr. Émile P. Torres.

There’s a reason Peter Thiel hesitated when asked in a recent interview if he “would prefer the human race to endure”:

Within certain tech circles, pro-extinctionism is a mainstream ideology—and some are trying to realize it.

A must-read by @xriskology.bsky.social
techpolicy.press/digital-euge...

More demos and code available at intelligentsensingandrehabilitation.github.io/MonocularBio...

JD did a great job creating a Gradio demo so try it out and let us know what you think

And here is a video of JD going on a celebratory run that the preprint is out :)

"As the chairman, scientific head, and body, of the Institute of advanced national quantum-AI and nano-psychedelics research, I find this figure demeaning."

We ran a randomized controlled trial to see how much AI coding tools speed up experienced open-source developers.

The results surprised us: Developers thought they were 20% faster with AI tools, but they were actually 19% slower when they had access to AI than when they didn't.

Visual Image Reconstruction from Brain Activity via Latent Representation Visual image reconstruction, the decoding of perceptual content from brain activity into images, has advanced significantly with the integration of deep neural networks (DNNs) and generative models. T...

Our overview of visual image reconstruction from brain activity is in press at Annual Review of Vision Science. We explore its foundations, how the field evolved, where it went astray—and how to set it right
arxiv.org/abs/2505.08429

Potential role of developmental experience in the emergence of the parvo-magno distinction - Communications Biology Developmentally-driven computational modeling study suggests that early sensory experience shapes distinct neuronal response properties in the visual system, providing a potential account of the emerg...

1/ New paper out in @commsbio.nature.com, led by @marinv.bsky.social: doi.org/10.1038/s420...! Across several past studies, we showed how newborns' degraded vision may benefit human development and inspire more robust deep networks. We have referred to this as Adaptive Initial Degradations (AID).

Tonight’s experiment looks a bit like visual auras in the dark ?
(It’s the Kuramoto PDE being tried in a diffusion model by adding a score function and a stochastic term)

Do we need to name a new type of bias for this? 👇

Auditory cortex neurons that encode negative prediction errors respond to omissions of sounds in a predictable sequence Neurons encoding positive or negative prediction errors signal a mismatch between the expected and the experienced input. This study shows how neurons encoding negative prediction errors in the audito...

New
@plosbiology.org
paper:
doi.org/10.1371/jour...
We found neurons in rat auditory cortex that signal narrow predictions for specific tones.
Using omissions as a probe, we show that some neurons show frequency-specific expectations despite responding broadly to actual sounds. 🧵

How does the right tear down progressive societies? It starts with a joke | George Monbiot Whether it’s bloodshed at Glastonbury or starving people on benefits, their ‘irony poisoning’ seeps obscene ideas into the range of the possible, says Guasrdian columnist George Monbiot

Obscene ideas are injected into public life with "humour" ... and then enacted. My column this week is pegged to the recent calls in the Spectator to murder people at Glastonbury, and on GB News to starve and shoot disabled people.
You could call it wink murder.
www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

The Origin of Ancient Greek City-States rewritten A new study published in the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization presents an alternative explanation for how city-states emerged in ancient Greece. Instead of being solely the result of war, g...

“One of the phenomena that receives the most attention in the study is the aforementioned synoikismos, the Greek term that refers to the process by which several villages or communities united, sometimes physically, sometimes politically, to form a new city-state. + www.labrujulaverde.com/en/2025/06

I thought of this a few weeks back when I wrote a response letter, and was like: "How do I write this now so it sounds appreciative but not like AI generated slop?"

Absolutely. I think you are more relating to the situation in Germany, where there are Gaza supporters acting antisemitic towards a minority of Jews on Campus.

This is immoral as well and as much punching down as the situation in Gaza is in the other way.