Blake Richards

Please repost: another kind of Black-Friday deal!

I always suggest that people think about what urban centres like New York or London were like 150 years ago — dangerous, unbelievably polluted air and water, desperately inequitable, few trees or green space.

And then imagine building the cities where we look back to *today* and see the same thing.

A cholinergic mechanism orchestrating task-dependent computation across the cortex In an ever-changing environment, animals often need to switch between performing different tasks involving distinct sets of cognitive processes. Many such tasks involve neural activity distributed acr...

The basal forebrain plays the cortex like a piano.

Universal scale-free representations in human visual cortex Author summary The human cerebral cortex is thought to encode sensory information in population activity patterns, but the statistical structure of these population codes has yet to be characterized. ...

🧠👀
'These findings reveal high-dimensional aspects of cortical representation undetectable with conventional methods, such as RSA, & contradict previous theories suggesting that high-level visual cortex representations are low-dimensional.' #neuroskyence

journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...

A hardwired neural circuit for temporal difference learning The neurotransmitter dopamine plays a major role in learning by acting as a teaching signal to update the brain’s predictions about rewards. A leading theory proposes that this process is analogous to...

It's more than additive feedback.

For example, Uchida's group has even traced out the circuit that implements the reward prediction error calculation:

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

There are researchers who still think this is unsettled of course, but it's way more solid than you're implying.

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

Task learning is compositional, so would behavior be!
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Um, there's actually pretty strong empirical evidence that the brain does something akin to TD learning. Terry knows what he's talking about.

And I'm pretty sure Gemini 3.0 would crush it.

Predicting upcoming visual features during eye movements yields scene representations aligned with human visual cortex Scenes are complex, yet structured collections of parts, including objects and surfaces, that exhibit spatial and semantic relations to one another. An effective visual system therefore needs unified ...

🚨New Preprint!
How can we model natural scene representations in visual cortex? A solution is in active vision: predict the features of the next glimpse! arxiv.org/abs/2511.12715

+ @adriendoerig.bsky.social , @alexanderkroner.bsky.social , @carmenamme.bsky.social , @timkietzmann.bsky.social
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1/6 New preprint 🚀 How does the cortex learn to represent things and how they move without reconstructing sensory stimuli? We developed a circuit-centric recurrent predictive learning (RPL) model based on JEPAs.
🔗 doi.org/10.1101/2025...
Led by @atenagm.bsky.social @mshalvagal.bsky.social

Ada, Countess of Lovelace, daughter of Lord Byron, mathematician & a pioneer of computing; born 1815, died #OTD 1852. #WomeninStem
Painted by Margaret Sarah Carpenter 1836
UK Government Art Collection

People on BlueSky: AI is useless! A stochastic parrot!

Mathematicians/biologists/physicists: It is already helping us do frontier technical research and in some cases solve open problems arxiv.org/pdf/2511.16072

(There are of course, as always, many caveats, but the paper is genuinely remarkable)

Like, this is already out of date, to be clear...

Two posts from Bluesky. The first one shows a figure from a paper published in Nature Scientific Reports full of totally incoherent AI fabricated gibberish words. The other a comment on a recently published paper by eLife discussing the paper and its peer reviews which were published along with the paper.

Nature Sci Rep publishes incoherent AI slop. eLife publishes a paper which the reviewers didn't agree with, making all the comments and responses public with thoughtful commentary. One of these journals got delisted by Web of Science for quality concerns from not doing peer review. Guess which one?

If you enjoyed The Verge essay, a new paper just dropped that further explores how our brains connect language to our broader understanding of the world. Shout out to @coltoncasto.bsky.social @neuranna.bsky.social @evfedorenko.bsky.social & @nancykanwisher.bsky.social for derailing my Wednesday.

The Transmitter’s New Lab Directory Learn about neuroscience labs launched in the past two years, plus a few opening their doors in 2026.

@thetransmitter.bsky.social’s “New Lab Directory” features a list of new neuroscience labs that opened in 2024-2025, and some set to launch in 2026. Check out the list to learn about the work of more than 50 new neuroscience labs. www.thetransmitter.org/community/th...

#StateOfNeuroscience

New preprint alert!

Cognitive maps are flexible, dynamic, (re)constructed representations

#psychscisky #neuroskyence #cognition #philsky 🧪

A tale of the need for flexible cognition... 😂

AGI is just astrology for smart computer boys

PSA to academics posting threads about your paper here: you can (and should) post the link to the paper in the first post. Your X/Twitter brain rot have have you thinking otherwise, but please free yourself of that. (Also you can call them 'blue-prints' if you want).

Big +1 to this! The current strategy of always mixing them is sub-optimal - for both research and education.

I think almost all scientific projects should be planned carefully. And I think an app can dramatically improve that. So I wrote an app for that (free for now, if you can fund this let me know). I tested it quite a bit (>8000 users in beta so far). try it: planyourscience.com

Y'all should just do like we do in Canada and move Thanksgiving to early October!

my little take on whole-brain neurophysiology and what it tells us about global coordination of neural activity on behavioural timescales

(I steered clear of tasteless analogies for this one...)

authors.elsevier.com/a/1m7H5_LsQS...

We went back to the drawing board to think about what information is available to the visual system upon which it could build scene representations.

The outcome: a self-supervised training objective based on active vision that beats the SOTA on NSD representational alignment. 👇

Putting the figures at the end of your preprint is one thing, but separating the CAPTIONS from the figures (with both at the end of the paper) is just plain cruel

Congratulations @sueyeonchung.bsky.social !

South Korean decision to close all coal-fired power plants by 2040 sounds alarm for Australian exports Decision announced at Cop30 climate conference signposts risks for Australia’s reliance on fossil fuel exports, analysts say

Coal isn't cost-effective anymore, and countries recognize it. Huge, since South Korea has been relying on coal for ~30% of their electricity.

www.theguardian.com/environment/...

I don't know much about Schmitt's theories... But my wife and I have long discussed how the current incarnation of left-wing politics resembles Nietzsche's slave morality. There is definitely an undercurrent of thought which posits, essentially, that to be oppressed is to be virtuous.

This is an excellent blueprint on a very fascinating use of AI scientist! And the results and super cool and interesting! 🤩
I have been asked this when talking about our work on using powerlaws to study representation quality in deep neural networks, glad to have a more concrete answer now! 😃