Mark D Humphries

Read yet another review today that ascribes GECIs' larger SNR vs GEVIs to their being evolved earlier (suggesting the GECIs are better optimized). This assumption is understandable but incorrect. GEVIs' photonic response per molecule per AP have been as good as GECIs since ASAP3.

Terrific work led by @emmaroscow.bsky.social showing that hippocampal replay reflects events with large prediction errors, all the better to bootstrap learning as we slumber

Congratulations to Matt Jones & Nathan Lepora for seeing this through to the end!

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

🧪Preprint!
How foragers depart from optimal models can tell us a lot about how they compute their decisions.

A strong but underexplored departure is that foragers widely vary when they leave identical patches.

A 🧵
doi.org/10.1101/2025...

With
@emmavscholey.bsky.social @brainapps.bsky.social

Excited to share our preprint on variability in patch leaving decisions! Check out the 🧵 below

Super pleased with this one, led by the amazing PhD student and foraging expert @emmavscholey.bsky.social!

A nice example of how sequential and simultaneous choice can fundamentally differ: in the latter, the longer a subject waits to decide, the more variable their decision time.

We show foraging decisions can have independence of decision time and variability, or even an inverted relationship!

End 🧵

In another weird prediction, we show that if the reward in a patch decays linearly when harvested, then the forager should be *more* variable the *earlier* they leave

Also exactly what we see in data: foragers leave earlier in rich environments but are more variable (data, solid; model, dashed)

Perhaps the weirdest prediction is that, under a wide range of conditions, foragers’ stochasticity is independent of when they leave. In other words, their variability is decoupled from their reward information

And that’s exactly what we see in the data (solid lines; model predictions: dashed)

We ask if foragers’ variability can be explained by them making deliberately stochastic leaving choices: basically, whether they flip a biased coin

We show deliberately stochastic choice makes weird predictions for how foragers’ respond to their environment, and test them across tasks and species

🧪Preprint!
How foragers depart from optimal models can tell us a lot about how they compute their decisions.

A strong but underexplored departure is that foragers widely vary when they leave identical patches.

A 🧵
doi.org/10.1101/2025...

With
@emmavscholey.bsky.social @brainapps.bsky.social

Efficient mixed representation of active and passive motion in the mouse visual thalamus during natural behaviour During natural behaviour, changes in the visual scene are largely driven by the subject’s own movements, which can be actively generated (e.g., walking) or passively imposed by external forces (e.g., ...

Delighted to share our latest preprint. It's been a long time coming. Thanks to all the authors for their unique contribution and for for their patience. We show how the visual thalamus deals with active and passive head motion in freely moving animals: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Okay, here are some first reflections on Watson.
Watson's life is a tragedy, really of Shakespearean proportions. He did not, as most bios will tell you, do one great thing when he was young and then collect laurels for it for the next 60 years. His career arc was unlike any in science.

Nearly ready to go! Mechanistic Basis of Foraging 2025!

Excited to share our new #biorxivpreprint:
“Sexual dimorphism in the complete connectome of the Drosophila male central nervous system” www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

We describe the #connectomics reconstruction and analysis of an entire adult #maleCNS #drosophila central nervous system. 1/10

🚨Registration for Mechanistic Basis of Foraging 2025 closes October 20th 🚨

Speakers
@mkflugge.bsky.social @aaronbornstein.bsky.social @benhayden.bsky.social @ellileadbeater.bsky.social
@davidrobbe.bsky.social @dlbarack.bsky.social @becketebs.bsky.social

uobevents.eventsair.com/the-mechanis...

We are looking for a postdoctoral fellow to join the lab to study how cortical microcircuits are organised at the single cell level using high throughput molecular methods. Please share and get in touch if interested!

www.crick.ac.uk/careers-stud...

Foraging as an ethological framework for neuroscience The study of foraging is central to a renewed interest in naturalistic behavior in neuroscience. Applying a foraging framework grounded in behavioral …

Pleased to have this review out in @cp-trendsneuro.bsky.social. In it we discuss various aspects of the intersection between foraging behaviors and neuroscience, and offer some future directions: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Plus, there's now a related conference organized by some wonderful people @unibirmingham.bsky.social in the UK, including @brainapps.bsky.social, @markdhumphries.bsky.social, and others. (Registration for this conference is still open until the 20th October!) uobevents.eventsair.com/the-mechanis...

#neuroskyence, a question for you:

Can you think of a paper that shows the latent dynamics of a network are robust to the loss of its neurons?

(Or, if you prefer, that the manifold is robust to the same)

Thank you, looks useful!

#neuroskyence, a question for you:

Can you think of a paper that shows the latent dynamics of a network are robust to the loss of its neurons?

(Or, if you prefer, that the manifold is robust to the same)

An ion channel omnimodel for standardized biophysical neuron modelling Biophysical neuron modeling is an indispensable tool in neuroscience research, with the combination of diverse ion channel kinetics and morphologies being used to explain various single-neuron propert...

“Mapping ion channel function” doi.org/10.7554/eLif... isn’t exactly a citation slayer, but it’s still one of my favourites (& my first independent project). Today we push pt 2, where we trace code origin & unite almost all channel models in a common expression. Boom! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Synaptic reverberation underlying mnemonic persistent activity Stimulus-specific persistent neural activity is the neural process underlying active (working) memory. Since its discovery 30 years ago, mnemonic acti…

#Neuroskyence hive mind: what’s the best single paper that explains the attractor theory of working memory?

For reference, my go to has been Wang’s 2001 TINS paper, but that’s nearly a quarter century old!

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Thanks! The NRN covers a lot, so may not be so accessible for the audience I’ve in mind; will revisit Wang’s follow up in TINs, may well be the answer!

Synaptic reverberation underlying mnemonic persistent activity Stimulus-specific persistent neural activity is the neural process underlying active (working) memory. Since its discovery 30 years ago, mnemonic acti…

#Neuroskyence hive mind: what’s the best single paper that explains the attractor theory of working memory?

For reference, my go to has been Wang’s 2001 TINS paper, but that’s nearly a quarter century old!

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Early-bird registration for "The Mechanistic Basis of Foraging 2025" ends September 30th

A meeting for everyone fascinated by the brain's role in foraging, 3-5 November 2025 at University of Birmingham.

Full speaker list, schedule and more now on the website
uobevents.eventsair.com/the-mechanis...

MRC Neurosciences and Mental Health Board (NMHB) member vacancies Closing date 14 September 2025 at 11:59pm (UK time) Number of positions Six Length of term Two years, plus additional two years after review Time commitment Two days per month Remuneration £160 per da...

The MRC are looking for a computational neuroscientist (anything from cognition to NeuroAI) to join their Neuroscience & Mental Health Board, to replace me as I step down next year.

Drop me a line if you want to know more

Deadline September 14th

www.ukri.org/who-we-are/w....

MRC Neurosciences and Mental Health Board (NMHB) member vacancies Closing date 14 September 2025 at 11:59pm (UK time) Number of positions Six Length of term Two years, plus additional two years after review Time commitment Two days per month Remuneration £160 per da...

The MRC are looking for a computational neuroscientist to join their Neuroscience & Mental Health Board, to replace me as I step down next year.

Drop me a line if you want to know more

Deadline September 14th

www.ukri.org/who-we-are/w....

Closing soon! Abstract submission for The Mechanistic Basis of Foraging 2025

A multidisciplinary meeting on the neural, behavioural and computational foundations of foraging across species:
uobevents.eventsair.com/the-mechanis...

Deadline: August 29