Blake Porter

Pay us a visit at #SfN2025 🧠 in San Diego ☀️!

🧠🌟🐭 Excited to share some of my postdoc work on the evolution of dexterity!

We compared deer mice evolved in forest vs prairie habitats. We found that forest mice have:
(1) more corticospinal neurons (CSNs)
(2) better hand dexterity
(3) more dexterous climbing, which is linked to CSN number🧵

New preprint led by @debyee.bsky.social: "Neurocomputational mechanisms underlying the distinct motivational influences of reward and punishment on cognitive control".
🔗 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

I am excited to share my PhD work on head-direction cells recorded in the wild, now published in @science.org, where we recorded neurons in bats flying outdoors on an island.

doi.org/10.1126/sci...

With @ray-neuro.bsky.social, Shir Maimon, Liora Las, Nachum Ulanovsky and many others

This 4-year-old's heart is failing. A federal grant that might help him was canceled A Cornell University researcher has been developing an artificial heart for children for more than 20 years. Now, his research is on hold and his lab is shut down.

A Cornell University researcher has been developing an artificial heart for children for more than 20 years. Now, his research is on hold and his lab is shut down.

🚀 New Preprint from our team: comparing place cells across species!
Disentangling methods from biology provides a roadmap for cross-species insights into spatial coding 🌍
👉 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Did NIH cancel all the NOSIs? I first noticed that NOT-MH-24-100, which had a prior expiration date of May 2027, now shows as expired (as of September 9, 2025). I then realized there are no active NOSIs...
. @rosalafersousa.bsky.social

Like...this is the biggest corruption scandal the NIH has experienced in its entire history and its not even close. Half of a BILLION dollars to a single project as a result of political spoils. That's the equivalent of several hundred R01s.

I'm recruiting a PhD student to study how enkephalins affect cognitive processing in the rodent frontal cortex. The project uses pharmacology, multi-electrode recordings, and fiber photometry, and is funded by NIDA. Please share with trainees applying this cycle. Thanks!

Ca2+ Plateau Potentials Reflect Cross-Theta Cortico-Hippocampal Input Dynamics and Acetylcholine for Rapid Formation of Efficient Place-Cell Code A central tenet of Systems Neuroscience lies in an understanding of memory and behavior through learning rules, but synaptic plasticity has rarely been shown to create functional single-neuron code in...

Interesting new data on BTSP mechanisms from my old Janelia colleague @hiallen72.bsky.social
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

I’m pleased to share our new paper, “Hippocampal ripple diversity organizes neuronal reactivation dynamics in the offline brain”, out in @cp-neuron.bsky.social !

With @vitorlds.bsky.social and David Dupret, we show that diversity in ripple current profiles shapes reactivation dynamics

Events

Thinking about which neuroscience conferences to attend in 2026? Check out our recently updated calendar, featuring top neuroscience meetings and events through April 2027.

Are you organizing a conference? Share it with us at community@thetransmitter.org.

www.thetransmitter.org/events/?utm_...

I’m super excited to finally put my recent work with @behrenstimb.bsky.social on bioRxiv, where we develop a new mechanistic theory of how PFC structures adaptive behaviour using attractor dynamics in space and time!

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

Mirror manifolds: partially overlapping neural subspaces for speaking and listening Participants in conversations need to associate words their speakers but also retain those words general meanings. For example, someone talking about their hand is not referring to the other speakers ...

New manuscript from the lab!

"Mirror manifolds: partially overlapping neural subspaces for speaking and listening"

Led by superstar grad student Anilu Chavez (not on Bluesky)!

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

Evidence for an active handoff between hemispheres during target tracking The brain has somewhat separate cognitive resources for the left and right sides of our visual field. Despite this lateralization, we have a smooth and unified perception of our environment. This rais...

New paper!
Evidence for an active handoff between hemispheres during target tracking
www.jneurosci.org/content/earl...
#neuroscience

Not a global map, but a local hash: grid cells decorrelate the representation of position and scramble long-range distance information Grid cells in the medial entorhinal cortex construct an intriguing multiperiodic representation of space whose properties have been the subject of much theoretical speculation. Here we combine modelin...

Grid cells are "more like a hash function than a global map or metric" www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Grid cell representation is ideally set up to decorrelate and assign easily distinguishable labels to inputs

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🚨 New preprint! 🚨

Excited and proud (& a little nervous 😅) to share our latest work on the importance of #theta-timescale spiking during #locomotion in #learning. If you care about how organisms learn, buckle up. 🧵👇

📄 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
💻 code + data 🔗 below 🤩

#neuroskyence

The Hippocampus Rapidly Integrates Sequence Representations During Novel Multistep Predictions Memories for temporally extended sequences can be used adaptively to predict future events on multiple timescales, a function that relies on the hippocampus. For such predictions to be useful, they sh...

How do we update our predictions when our environment changes?

The hippocampus rapidly integrates previously distinct sequences to support updated predictions.

Proud of this work with Hannah Tarder-Stoll & @chrisbaldassano.bsky.social!

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

RetINaBox: A hands-on learning tool for experimental neuroscience An exciting aspect of neuroscience research is developing and testing hypotheses via experimentation. However, due to logistical and financial hurdles, this compelling part of neuroscience research is...

For those interested in open neuroscience learning tools, check out the preprint for “RetINaBox: A hands-on tool for experimental neuroscience" that a couple students in my lab worked on in collaboration with the Trenholm lab:

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

🧠📈 🧪

Thrilled to share that our work is now published in Science! ✨

We found a preference for visual objects in the mouse spatial navigation system where they dynamically refine head-direction coding. In short, objects boost our inner compass! 🧭

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

🧵1/

🚨New preprint alert🚨
We used closed-loop optogenetics to causally test the importance of inhibitory spike timing in network function and found that manipulating PV+ cell theta phase locking in the dentate gyrus can shift seizure susceptibility (both ways!)

A neuronal correlate for time interval estimation in the crow’s telencephalon - Nature Communications It is unknown how birds estimate time using brains organized differently from mammals. Here, the authors show that neurons in the crow NCL encode duration categories, supporting abstract, cue-independ...

I'm delighted to share that, together with @crowbrain.bsky.social our paper on time estimation in crows is now published in @natcomms.nature.com

We found that crows not only keep track of time, but individual neurons prefer different time durations 🐦⏱️🧠

Check it out:
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Linking neural population formatting to function Animals capable of complex behaviors tend to have more distinct brain areas than simpler organisms, and artificial networks that perform many tasks tend to self-organize into modules (1-3). This sugge...

New results for a new year! “Linking neural population formatting to function” describes our modern take on an old question: how can we understand the contribution of a brain area to behavior?
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
🧠👩🏻‍🔬🧪🧵
#neuroskyence
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Someone came into my house, stole my big and tiny lego mansions, and sold them for parts

Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece, we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to relevant work to further inform our colleagues.

Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI (black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf. Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al. 2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).

Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.

Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
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Come find out what we discovered in our science expedition to Aur Atoll my first online talk next Friday (12th of Sept):

mailchi.mp/stir/spring-...

In New Zealand and Australia, it’s the norm that you need a Masters or an Honors thesis with your bachelors to be admitted.

Grid cells encode reward distance during path integration in cue-rich environments https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.03.674124v1

Mice navigate scent trails using predictive policies Animals actively sense their environment to extract features of interest to guide behaviors. For mammals, odors are prominent environmental features which are sampled by active modulation of sniffing ...

Thrilled to share this work, long time in the making! Carried through creatively by @siddjakes.bsky.social after initial design & piloting by @trackingskills.bsky.social, with help from @trackingactions.bsky.social. Modeling in collaboration with Massimo Vergassola & Nicola Rigolli.

𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁'𝘀 𝗰𝗼𝗴𝗻𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗶𝘀 𝗶𝘁 𝗲𝗺𝗲𝗿𝗴𝗲𝗻𝘁?
Don't miss the Neuroscience and Philosophy Salon.
Earl Miller and team will discuss recent paper and we'll have plenty of discussion. Open to all.
Sept 12, noon EST-US
umd.zoom.us/meeting/regi...
#neuroskyence
@earlkmiller.bsky.social