Akanksha Gupta

former kids who read too many books and didnt know how to pronounce the words you learned gang say hey

Steve Furber powerpoint slide showing picture of Ada Lovelace and a quote: "I have my hopes, and very distinct ones too, of one day getting cerebral phenomena such that I can put them into mathematical equations--in short, a law or laws for the mutual actions of the molecules of brain. .... I hope to bequeath to the generations a calculus of the nervous system."

incredible Ada Lovelace quote highlighted in a talk by Steve Furber. She spells out the dream of computational neuroscience, 2 centuries ago. The sheer ambition 🤩

NWB just turned 10 years old! Researchers worldwide have downloaded 1.9 PB of NWB data from @dandiarchive.org. This animation shows the reach of NWB, facilitating collaboration across the globe. What impact has open neurophysiology data had on your science? Share your stories! 🧠

@openscience

Large-scale multi-site study shows no association between musical training and early auditory neural sound encoding - Nature Communications Widely cited studies have claimed that musical training is associated with enhanced neural encoding for sound at early stages of the auditory system. Results from this large-scale multisite study do n...

It has been "known" that musical experience improves auditory coding in the brainstem. But...a new multilab study concludes

"Our findings provide no evidence for associations between early auditory neural responses and either musical training or musical ability."

👀

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

Reflections on the ‘Science for Social Good’ Satellite Event at CCN 2025 by Georgia Turner The day before the CCN 2025 conference kicked off in Amsterdam, attendees from career stages ranging from pre-PhD students to keynote speakers gathered together for an event focus…

@anne-urai.bsky.social , @weijima.bsky.social , Ili Ma and @tsonj.bsky.social organised an amazing workshop on 'Science for Social Good' at #CCN2025 @cogcompneuro.bsky.social

We wrote a blog reflecting on it:

anneurai.net/2025/08/14/r...

5-panel comic. (1) [teacher with long hair next to whiteboard] TEACHER: I’m supposed to give you the tools to do good science. (2) [teacher addressing students] But what *are* those tools? Methodology is hard and there are so many ways to get incorrect results. What is the magic ingredient that makes for good science? (3) TEACHER: To figure it out, I ran a regression with all the factors people say are important: [embedded list in sub-panel, cut off at end] Outcome variable: correct scientific results. Predictors: collaboration; skepticism of others’ claims; questioning your own beliefs; trying to falsify hypotheses; checking citations; statistical rigor; blinded analysis; financial disclosure; open data (4) TEACHER: The regression says two ingredients are the most crucial: 1) genuine curiosity about the answer to a question, and 2) ammonium hydroxide. (5) STUDENT: Wait, why did *ammonia* score so high? How did it even get on the list? LONG HAIR: ...And now you’re doing good science!

Good Science

xkcd.com/3101/

🔥 New episode of the Night Science podcast! The brilliant Eve Marder, professor at Brandeis University, talks with us about how "Recipe Science" ruins creativity.
Apple: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/n...
Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/4mSv...

Africans lost nearly $70M to denied visas applications to Europe in 2024 | CNN Non-refundable fees from failed Europe visa applications are costing African countries millions of dollars, with applicants complaining of a baffling system of approvals.

Ask anyone from the Global South: it’s not just the lost money, it’s the humiliation and immense effort

Africans lost nearly $70M to denied visas applications to Europe in 2024

amp.cnn.com/cnn/2025/05/...

Info theory offers powerful measures for capturing complexity & interaction among elements of a complex system, like the brain! 🧠 Here's our new unified reference for key info-theoretic time series measures ft. 📊 visuals, ➗equations, & 💬descriptions:

arxiv.org/abs/2505.13080

Dopaminergic processes predict temporal distortions in event memory Our memories do not simply keep time - they warp it, bending the past to fit the structure of our experiences. For example, people tend to remember items as occurring farther apart in time if they spa...

New from our lab: your brain doesn’t just remember time - it bends it.

We show that the dopamine system responds to natural breakpoints in experience, and this relates to more stretched memories of time. Blinking also increases, signaling encoding of new memories.

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

Your periodic reminder that one way to think about privilege is: who's allowed to make mistakes?

Human high-order thalamic nuclei gate conscious perception through the thalamofrontal loop Human high-order thalamic nuclei activity is known to closely correlate with conscious states. However, it is not clear how those thalamic nuclei and thalamocortical interactions directly contribute to the transient process of human conscious perception...

Using direct, intracranial brain recordings in humans, a new study in Science finds that the thalamus, a small region located deep within the brain, plays a pivotal role in conscious perception.

Invisible Baggage: The Mental Health Crisis Among International Students In a world increasingly divided by borders and barriers, empathy is our strongest bridge. International students don’t need pity—we need visibility, community, and systems that support us.

Powerful @plosglobalpublichealth.org blog post by Ankita, an international student @mcgill.ca

Invisible Baggage: The Mental Health Crisis Among International Students

speakingofmedicine.plos.org/2025/04/11/i...

Learning and language in the unconscious human hippocampus Consciousness is a fundamental component of cognition, but the degree to which higher-order perception relies on it remains disputed. Here we demonstrate the persistence of learning, semantic processi...

New paper from the Neurosurgery Research Team at BCM! "Learning and language in the unconscious human hippocampus"
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

(1/n) Excited to announce FrugalScience 2025 (www.frugalscience.org). In its 5th year - Frugal science is a global community of creators engaged in bringing affordable solutions to the world. Anyone around the world can sign up (for free): form here docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Brain implant translates thoughts to speech in an instant Improvements to brain–computer interfaces are bringing the technology closer to natural conversation speed.

A brain-reading implant that translates neural signals into audible speech has allowed a woman with paralysis to hear what she intends to say nearly instantly

https://go.nature.com/3QStZtI

Musical neurodynamics - Nature Reviews Neuroscience In this Perspective article, Edward Large and colleagues examine the neuroscience of music, placing their focus on neural resonance theory, which summarizes how the dynamics of fundamental neural mech...

It's all about the waves, cats
Musical neurodynamics
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
#neuroscience

A bit delayed, but I'm happy to announce my first paper as a postdoc in the Jazayeri lab! We discuss recent insights into the neurobiology of timing and why timing is a useful platform to understand flexible control of behavior more generally. We hope the review is useful!

tinyurl.com/5n8yhxet

63 studies: women who assert their ideas, make direct requests, and advocate for themselves are liked less.

They're also less likely to get hired—and it hasn't improved over time.

When will we stop punishing women for violating outdated gender stereotypes?

Individual variability of neural computations underlying flexible decisions - Nature Behavioural experiments to study decision-making in response to context-dependent accumulation of evidence provide testable models that are consistent with the heterogeneity in neural signatures among...

1/7 Our paper on individual variability in decision-making is finally out in @nature.com! Inspired by the classic work by Mante and Sussillo, we trained many rats to solve context-dependent decision-making, and we found that different brains use different neural mechanisms to solve the same task!

Science is not individuals makings discoveries. It’s communities acquiring knowledge.

YouTube video by DW Documentary How Germany's elite research institution fails young scientists | DW Documentary

www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5nE...
Important and painful

Scientific progress depends on exchanging ideas with other experts and getting feedback from them. Academic freedom is necessary to enable that progress. Restricting how scientists can interact with other scientists impedes scientific progress — and development of future cures.

Gain insights on accessibility challenges & more as researchers share firsthand experiences & practical advice on how to improve accessibility in science in this webinar w/ @umarchatterjee.bsky.social, Kimberly Fiock, PhD, Billie Goolsby, BA, @brittgratreak.bsky.social, & @dwwilliamslab.bsky.social.

Big news: we are setting up a new non-profit organization to run bioRxiv and medRxiv. It's called openRxiv [no it's not a new preprint server; it's dedicated organization to oversee the servers] openrxiv.org 1/n

Human neural dynamics of real-world and imagined navigation - Nature Human Behaviour Seeber et al. studied brain recordings from implanted electrodes in freely moving humans. Neural dynamics encoded actual and imagined routes similarly, demonstrating parallels between navigational, im...

🚨 New lab paper!🚨

A dream study of mine for nearly 20 yrs not possible until now thanks to NIH 🧠 funding & 1st-author lead @seeber.bsky.social

We tracked hippocampal activity as people walked memory-guided paths & imagined them again. Did brain patterns reappear?🧵👇

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

Being disabled isn’t some abstract concept. It’s not a moral failing. It’s not something you can “try harder” their way out of.

It’s something that can happen to anyone at any time.

Once it happens to you, you will understand how little support exists. Help us & your future self will thank you.

There have been people less than helpful in my journey here. I wanted to acknowledge those too, bc I know I am not unique in this experience. No thank you to the physics study assoc that made me sing songs about how women couldn't study physics without sleeping with the professor, the day I stepped into university life. No thank you to the 5th year physics student that decided to assign me a stripper name within the first minute of meeting me in the physics coffee corner in my first year. No thank you to the technician that was responsible for onboarding me on the use of the cluster in my third year who raised his eyebrows and asked me if that meant I was some sort of computer girl. No thank you to the senior researcher that sent me utterly inappropriate texts after a conference, then proceeded to apologise months later by telling me they had not been meant for me anyway so no hard feelings remain hopefully And no thank you to him for attending every conference I've been to since. No thank you to the people who told me that it was surprising that I was doing a PhD since I was a girl. No thank you to the man who mistook me for a coffee lady at a conference, and after having to correct him two times that I did not work there, responded with you should consider it. No thank you to the researcher that asked me what I was wearing underneath my outfit during a conference. No thank you to the physicist who declared to a room full of other physicists that biologists don't know how to design an experiment. No thank you to the people who have called me scary instead of strong and intimidating instead of intelligent. And finally, no thank you to the exec board of the TU Delft, whose knee-jerk reaction to being held up a mirror about the social safety at the university, was to sue the party holding up the mirror instead of looking at the problems they highlighted. ... You have made me feel like I do not belong in science & I cannot forgive you for that.

A friend included this anti-acknowledgement section on her PhD thesis. She also added the proposition: “Systematic bullying and undermining of girls and women in STEM starts early on and is the reason why they do not stay in science and related fields.”
Absurd we still need to go through this
🧪👩‍🔬