Ladislas Nalborczyk

What do representations tell us about a system? Image of a mouse with a scope showing a vector of activity patterns, and a neural network with a vector of unit activity patterns Common analyses of neural representations: Encoding models (relating activity to task features) drawing of an arrow from a trace saying [on_____on____] to a neuron and spike train. Comparing models via neural predictivity: comparing two neural networks by their R^2 to mouse brain activity. RSA: assessing brain-brain or model-brain correspondence using representational dissimilarity matrices

In neuroscience, we often try to understand systems by analyzing their representations — using tools like regression or RSA. But are these analyses biased towards discovering a subset of what a system represents? If you're interested in this question, check out our new commentary! Thread:

On the responsibilities of intellectuals and the rise of bullshit jobs in universities You may never have considered yourself to be one. Why would you? But if you’re reading this, there is more than a likelihood that you are one. If you’re a

How to push back against the rise of endless administrative burden in academia?

A do-or-die moment for the scientific enterprise Reflecting on our paper “The entities enabling scientific fraud at scale are large, resilient, and growing rapidly”

Today, our article "The entities enabling scientific fraud at scale are large, resilient, and growing rapidly" is finally published in PNAS. I hope that it proves to be a wake-up-call for the whole scientific community.

reeserichardson.blog/2025/08/04/a...

Individual differences in decision-making shape how mesolimbic dopamine regulates choice confidence and change-of-mind - Nature Neuroscience Differences in neuroeconomic decision-making influence nucleus accumbens dopamine dynamics and reflect choice confidence during evaluation, as well as past and future value during re-evaluation, which...

Dopamine dynamics in the nucleus accumbens core reflected decision confidence during evaluation of decisions in an economic foraging task in mice, as well as both past and future value during re-evaluation and change-of-mind

@perothwell.bsky.social

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

Experimenter bias(es)!

...(for example) are excited by 'association' and a visual object is imagined, a current runs down to the retina also, and excites that sympathetically with the higher tracts? In other words, can peripheral sense-organs be excited from above, or only from without? Are they excited in imagination?"

About the neural processes of imagination: "[...] All currents tend to run forward in the brain and discharge into the muscular system; and the idea of a movement tends to do this with peculiar facility. But the question remains: Do currents run backward, so that if the optical centres...

...being realized at every moment of such duration, must be due to a permanently present cause. This cause-probably the simultaneous presence of brain-processes of different phase-fluctuates; and hence a certain range of variation in the amount of the intuition, and in its subdivisibility, accrues."

"Kant's notion of an intuition of objective time as an infinite necessary continuum has nothing to support it. The cause of the intuition which we really have cannot be the duration of our brain-processes or our mental changes. That duration is rather the object of the intuition which...

The same goes for the "perception of time" chapter and the discussion about temporal distortions, filled and unfilled ("vacant") intervals, and the putative cerebral processes of this "sense of time": psychclassics.yorku.ca/James/Princi...

Re-reading parts of "The Principles of Psychology", and I'm struck by how current the "Imagination" chapter still feels; especially the discussion on the diversity of mental imagery and inner speech experiences: psychclassics.yorku.ca/James/Princi...

Etienne Klein plagiats Publication : 25 juin 2025 Mise à jour : 30 juillet 2025 Par souci de clarté, je liste ici les plagiats nouvellement identifiés depuis quelques semaines chez Etienne Klein dans ses livres, articles ...

Je clos ici mon enquête sur Etienne Klein, faute de temps.

J'ai essayé d'être le + précis et nuancé possible. J'ai essayé de répondre à la plupart des questions. Désolé si j'ai oublié certains ou certaines.

⏩ Tout est ici, sourcé, vérifié et vérifiable. Bon été.

docs.google.com/document/d/1...

Got Butterflies in your Stomach? I am super excited to share the first major study of my postdoc @the-ecg.bsky.social - Now out in @natmentalhealth.nature.com! We report a multidimensional mental health signature of stomach-brain coupling in the largest sample to date www.nature.com/articles/s44...

A neural manifold view of the brain - Nature Neuroscience Recent advances in neuroscience have revealed how neural population activity underlying behavior can be well described by topological objects called neural manifolds. Understanding how nature, nurture...

Check out our new review/perspective (w/ @juangallego.bsky.social & Devika Narain) on neural manifolds in the brain! It was a lot of fun to think through these ideas over the past couple of years, and I'm excited it's finally out in the world!

🔗: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
📄: rdcu.be/ex8hW

A neural manifold view of the brain - Nature Neuroscience Recent advances in neuroscience have revealed how neural population activity underlying behavior can be well described by topological objects called neural manifolds. Understanding how nature, nurture...

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

Seeing the Mind, Educating the Brain

If you are in Paris on October 1-3 : we are organizing a fantastic cognitive neuroscience conference at Collège de France, on topics ranging from language to math, education and consciousness, with many of my favorite scientists !
Full program here:
www.unicog.org/seeing-the-m...

Call for papers @jneurolang.bsky.social: Towards a Deeper Understanding of the Relationship Between the Neurobiology of Language and Consciousness. 🧠🗨️

direct.mit.edu/DocumentLibr...

☎️ DM me for more details.

VICE: Variational Interpretable Concept Embeddings A central goal in the cognitive sciences is the development of numerical models for mental representations of object concepts. This paper introduces Variational Interpretable Concept Embeddings (VICE)...

VICE: Variational Interpretable Concept Embeddings

arxiv.org/abs/2205.00756

Our oscillations consensus paper is finally out as a preprint 🤩 thanks to everyone involved
arxiv.org/abs/2507.15639

After five years of confused staring at Greek letters, it is my absolute pleasure to finally share our (with @smfleming.bsky.social) computational model of mental imagery and reality monitoring: Perceptual Reality Monitoring as Higher-Order inference on Sensory Precision ✨
osf.io/preprints/ps...

A 2-dimensional plot showing trajectories in the first formant / second formant space. The title indicates "trajectories for vowel 'u' "

Hello everyone!
A master student in my team has developed a very nice vowel perception experiment, applying the concept of Markov Chain Monte Carlo to human behavior.
We are kindly looking for a few volunteers to take part in a short (~15-20 min) pilot test. If you're willing to help, the

📣 We are hiring! 📣

#BCBL has new PhD positions available for you!

🔸 1 PhD – #Neurolinguistics and #Aphasia Group
🔸 1 PhD – #PerceptualInference Group
🔸 1 PhD – #BrainRhythms and #Cognition Group

The application deadline is soon!

+info 👇

www.bcbl.eu/es/unete-a-n...

Some numbers seem to show up everywhere. Think of 10, 12, 24, 36...
Others—like 26 or 34—don’t get the same attention.Why? In our new paper with @standehaene.bsky.social and @mathiassablemeyer.bsky.social, we argue it's because of how the mind builds number concepts.
🧵
doi.org/10.1016/j.co...

New paper out in @commsbio.nature.com!
@elicastaldi.bsky.social, Evelyn Eger, @manpiazza.bsky.social

🔢 We reveal how the brain represents numerosity across the entire visual system, from early visual areas to high-level association cortices.

👇 A thread
🔗 www.nature.com/articles/s42...

👨‍💻 Open PI position in our institute 👨‍💻 !! If you are an expert in Computational Neuroscience and want to start your lab in Bordeaux, contact us !
www.fens.org/careers/job-...
@neuromagendie.bsky.social
@neurobordeaux.bsky.social

New on the blog: Using Bayesian tools to be a better frequentist

Turns out that for neg. bin. regression with small samples, standard frequentist tools fail to achieve their stated goals. Bayesian computation ends up providing better frequentist guarantees. www.martinmodrak.cz/2025/07/09/u...

Major updates to our ConversationAlign R package - submitted to CRAN and JOSS today. If you're interested in computing alignment and main effects for >40 psycholinguistic dimensions in naturalistic conversation, this is the package for you reilly-conceptscognitionlab.github.io/Conversation...

Does Anybody Really Know What Time Is? Yes, your brain does. It created it.

Physicists have a lot to say about time, but so do neuroscientists -- after all, it's the brain which in some sense creates time, and enables our remarkable capacity for "mental time travel." I spoke with neuroscientist @deanbuono.bsky.social for @nautil.us:
nautil.us/does-anybody... #science

Binz et al. (in press, Nature) developed an LLM called Centaur that better predicts human responses in 159 of 160 behavioural experiments compared to existing cognitive models. See: arxiv.org/abs/2410.20268