Jonathan A. Michaels

Thanks for writing this! Would be curious to hear your thoughts on our recent paper: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Had a wonderful time as a keynote and debate speaker at Neuroscience Research Day at Western! Fantastic event.

Congrats!

Yes! The key is what feedback is necessary (if any) to allow that input to be intrinsically rewarding (e.g. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...)

Thrilled to finally share this work! 🧠🔊

Using a new reinforcement-free task we show mice (like humans) extract abstract structure from sound (unsupervised) & dCA1 is causally required by building factorised, orthogonal subspaces of abstract rules.

Led by Dammy Onih!
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Toronto supports the people of Iran.

CIHR funding rate: 13.6%.
Early 2000s: 30%+.

Canada’s new $1.7B Impact+ program recruits talent — but without increased Tri-Council base funding, we risk further strain on an already stretched system.

We’re calling for $1B over 5 years.
Support here: tinyurl.com/33c5av46

Eglinton Crosstown is live!

Claude Code is incredible, but if you push it far you will see it very quickly gets stuck in loops and I become its therapist.

Just wait until Schmidhuber discovers this thread.

Everyone deserves an obituary, but this woman especially.

Neuroscience Mentorship Program Directory Discover neuroscience mentorship opportunities through this living directory, connecting mentors and mentees at all stages of their careers.

Discover @thetransmitter.bsky.social's Mentorship Directory, connecting mentors and mentees at all stages of their careers.

#neuroskyence

www.thetransmitter.org/mentorship-d...

#Neuroscience
@jonathanamichaels.bsky.social
@jdcrawford.bsky.social
@bjorges.bsky.social
@connectedminds.bsky.social
@erezfreud.bsky.social

Why are we spending hundreds of millions of dollars on bringing in new people when we can't fund the ones we have?

Congrats!!

Don’t know if these things count since it’s debatable if they share anything in common with a human mind

NASA astronaut Eileen Collins, the first female Space Shuttle pilot, poses in an official portrait wearing her bright orange launch and entry spacesuit. She smiles warmly at the camera while holding her black-and-white NASA helmet in her lap. In the softly lit background, a model of a Space Shuttle orbiter with its distinctive orange external tank and white solid rocket boosters stands prominently. The American flag appears in the upper left corner of the frame.

#OTD in 1995, astronaut Eileen Collins became the first female pilot of a NASA space shuttle.

She piloted the Space Shuttle Discovery during mission STS-63, a mission that included the first-ever rendezvous between a US space shuttle & the Russian space station Mir. #WomenInSTEM #AstronautEnvy 🚀

February 1st. Finally

Great collboration from @mnlmrc.bsky.social: Multivoxel fMRI and neuropixel recordings show sensorimotor prediction errors in M1 / S1 in the input, but not in the spiking of output neurons!
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
With @andpru.bsky.social @jonathanamichaels.bsky.social @gribblelab.org

I’m not convinced

@andpru.bsky.social @neurobeats.bsky.social @mkashefi.bsky.social @sujayane.bsky.social

Huge congratulations to first author Sujaya Neupane for leading this effort, and to our collaborators at Western University – Jessica Grahn, Andrew Pruszynski, Mehrdad Kashefi, and Rhonda Kersten, for their ideas, expertise, and support.

Strikingly, this encoding persisted in the GPi even after rewards were withdrawn, suggesting that the basal ganglia could act as an interface where extrinsic rewards are transformed into 'intrinsic value', effectively unmasking latent audiomotor connections.

However, once tones were paired with reward, a profound reorganization occurred: robust encoding emerged across the motor network, particularly in PMd and globus pallidus interna (GPi).

We found that motor areas do not spontaneously respond to auditory patterns during passive listening, but care a lot about trial structure and reward.

Using high-density Neuropixels probes, we recorded from neural populations across the motor and auditory systems of a rhesus macaque – first during passive listening to see how these circuits respond to auditory patterns.

Reward-driven emergence of auditory pattern encoding in the primate motor system The ability to anticipate rhythmic patterns is fundamental to human experience, enabling music appreciation, speech comprehension, and dancing in sync to music. How the brain learns to use acoustic information to guide motor behavior remains a key question whose neural underpinnings and evolutionary origins are debated, especially in non-human primates. To understand how brain areas involved in motor control naively respond to predictable tone patterns, we recorded large single neuron populations across primary somatosensory (S1), primary motor (M1), dorsal premotor (PMd), supplementary motor (SMA), pre-supplementary motor (preSMA) cortices, globus pallidus interna (GPi), and medial geniculate body (MGB) of a rhesus monkey. During passive listening (Experiment 1) with a reward only at the end of each trial, primarily the MGB, not motor areas, responded to the auditory tone patterns, ruling out the spontaneous entrainment of motor activity to auditory patterns. Almost all areas robustly

While humans spontaneously dance to a beat, the evolutionary origins of this ability remain debated. Behavioral work has shown that primates can move to auditory rhythms after training.

Our question was: How does this association emerge in the brain?

www.biorxiv.org/content/10....

new version: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
#neuroskyence #sensorimotor #psychscisky

Supporting Research That Moves Us Forward: 2026 Connected Minds Seed Grant Recipients - Connected Minds Understanding how technology shapes our lives requires collaboration across disciplines and communities. Connected Minds Seed Grants play a critical role in cultivating this environment by enabling ne...

Wonderful to be a part of THREE Connected Minds Seed Grants that were just funded!
www.yorku.ca/research/con...

NCM Elections - NCM Society

If you're a member of the Society for the Neural Control of Movement, please vote in the upcoming Board Elections. I was nominated this year, but would honestly be very happy to see any of these people on the board!

ncm-society.org/ncm-elections/