Felix Taschbach

We're looking for a research assistant to work in our neuroscience lab at @princetonneuro.bsky.social @hhmi.org where we study learning and decision-making circuitry.

Apply here: research-princeton.icims.com/jobs/21001/r...

Pls share w/ anyone who might be interested!

because of the *limited* air traffic controller staffing levels the FAA limited the flight arrival rate in Newark a while ago. so it might be extra bad now

Representational drift without synaptic plasticity Neural computations support stable behavior despite relying on many dynamically changing biological processes. One such process is representational drift (RD), in which neurons' responses change over ...

When neurons change, but behavior doesn’t: Excitability changes driving representational drift

New preprint of work with Christian Machens: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Congratulations!

Proposal recommended for funding! Which means we have a fresh, 3-year-funded position available for a computational postdoc interested in studying dynamics of social interactions in rats, with simultaneous Neuropixels data to follow 🐀🐀🐀

Proper job ad pending, but email me if interested!

I just tried this with Sonnet 4 using white text. It immediately identifies it as a prompt injection attempt and suggests rejecting it :). (both as a pdf upload and copy paste of the text)

Congrats Marcelo!

Discovering cognitive strategies with tiny recurrent neural networks - Nature Modelling biological decision-making with tiny recurrent neural networks enables more accurate predictions of animal choices than classical cognitive models and offers insights into the underlying cog...

Thrilled to see our TinyRNN paper in @nature! We show how tiny RNNs predict choices of individual subjects accurately while staying fully interpretable. This approach can transform how we model cognitive processes in both healthy and disordered decisions. doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Ever wondered what gives rise to efficient neural population geometry? Our lab’s new work, led by Sonica Saraf (w/ Tony Movshon), shows how diversity in single-neuron tuning shapes population-level representation geometries to improve perceptual efficiency. Congrats
‪@sonicasaraf.bsky.social‬!

Cholinergic feedback for modality- and context-specific modulation of sensory representations The brain’s ability to prioritize sensory information is crucial for adaptive behavior, yet its mechanisms remain unclear. We investigated basal forebrain cholinergic neurons modulating olfactory bulb...

Our new paper is out in Science.

We identified a subgroup of cholinergic neurons that mediate sensory modality-specific attention. They change their funcitonal properties within secs of behavioral context change.

Congrats to Bin for the great thesis, and the team!

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

To be fair, what we didn’t anticipate was humanity’s willingness to meet AI halfway

Nation Can't Believe It On Harvard's Side

writing your own shaders is so much fun though

Impressive study from Richard Morris's group:

Hippocampal reactivation of planned
trajectories is required for effective goal
choice in an allocentric memory task

#hippocampus #neuroskyence #navigation #memory #planning

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

Motor learning refines thalamic influence on motor cortex - Nature Imaging and optogenetics in mice provide insight into the interplay between the primary motor cortex and the motor thalamus during learning, showing that thalamic inputs have a key role in the executi...

We recently created an extension to CCA for cross-session/cross-animal analyses. If you happen to have simultaneous recordings of the behavior it may be useful

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

Thrilled about our new paper with bluesky-less Assaf Ramot. Especially thank you to all the amazing collaborators that have made this happen.
x.com/assaframot/s...

C̶h̶i̶c̶a̶g̶o̶ ̶P̶o̶p̶e̶ Bayesian Pope

Motor learning refines thalamic influence on motor cortex - Nature Imaging and optogenetics in mice provide insight into the interplay between the primary motor cortex and the motor thalamus during learning, showing that thalamic inputs have a key role in the executi...

Our paper is out in Nature.

By examining various inputs to the motor cortex during learning, we found that thalamic inputs learn to activate the cortical neurons encoding the movement being learned.

Tour de force by Assaf in collab with Felix and Marcus. Congrats!

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

www.reddit.com/r/chronotrig...

what is your >realizing how good it's actually is response?
might need it if the chrono trigger remake rumors are true

‘Natural Neuroscience,’ an excerpt In his new book, Nachum Ulanovsky calls on the field to embrace naturalistic conditions and move away from overcontrolled experiments.

In his new book, published today, Nachum Ulanovsky calls on the field to embrace naturalistic conditions and move away from overcontrolled experiments.

#neuroskyence

www.thetransmitter.org/systems-neur...

Many of us use 2p scopes to image 3D volumes of brain. But then we analyze the data plane by plane, resulting in duplicated neurons, missed neurons, and low s/n. Let's go 3D!

Suite3D: Volumetric cell detection for two-photon microscopy
by @haydari.bsky.social & team.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

you should go on lemonade stand

A streaming brain-to-voice neuroprosthesis to restore naturalistic communication - Nature Neuroscience Naturalistic communication is an aim for neuroprostheses. Here the authors present a neuroprosthesis that restores the voice of a paralyzed person simultaneously with their speaking attempts, enabling naturalistic communication.

A paper in Nature Neuroscience presents a new device capable of translating speech activity in the brain into spoken words in real-time. This technology could help people with speech loss to regain their ability to communicate more fluently in real time. 🧪

Claims of necessity, sufficiency don’t work well for studies of complex systems Early studies on necessary and sufficient neural populations were done on simple invertebrate circuits. Does this logic work for complex outputs?

The earliest studies on necessary and sufficient neural populations were performed on simple invertebrate circuits. @neurograce.bsky.social asks: Does this logic still serve us as we tackle more sophisticated outputs?

#neuroskyence

www.thetransmitter.org/systems-neur...

Congrats @jiannacressy.bsky.social , @fleabrained.bsky.social !

Averaging is a convenient fiction of neuroscience But neurons don’t take averages. This ubiquitous practice hides from us how the brain really works.

Averaging over time hides what a neuron actually sees, what it actually gets to compute with, writes @markdhumphries.bsky.social.

#neuroskyence

www.thetransmitter.org/neural-codin...

Synaptic plasticity rules driving representational shifting in the hippocampus - Nature Neuroscience Madar et al. report that behavioral timescale synaptic plasticity (BTSP), not spike-timing-dependent plasticity, explains heterogeneous place fields shifting in the hippocampus. The probability of BTS...

Behavioral timescale synaptic plasticity (BTSP), not Hebbian spike-timing-dependent plasticity (STDP), explains heterogenous place field shifting in the mouse hippocampus 🧠🧪

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

Bracket City come visit bracket city

reminds me of bracket.city

Dr. Monique Smith — Stories of WiN studies the neural mechanisms of empathy

Our next profile is here! Dr. Monique Smith (@moeneuro.bsky.social) studies the neural mechanisms of empathy. Follow the link below to learn more!

www.storiesofwin.org/profiles/202...

#StoriesOfWiN #WomenInNeuroscience