Atri Ghosh

New Method Is the Fastest Way To Find the Best Routes | Quanta Magazine A canonical problem in computer science is to find the shortest route to every point in a network. A new approach beats the classic algorithm taught in textbooks.

This is very impressive. Breaking the sorting barrier for directed single source shortest paths
search.app/wnEUo

How easy is it to fudge your scientific rank? Meet Larry, the world’s most cited cat “Exercise in absurdity” reveals flaws in Google Scholar’s productivity metrics

Larry Richardson appeared to be an early-career mathematician with potential, racking up more than 130 citations in 4 years.

It would all be rather remarkable—if the studies weren’t complete gibberish. And if Larry wasn’t a cat. #InternationalCatDay scim.ag/4lg3wTp

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...

Constructing future behavior in the hippocampal formation through composition and replay - Nature Neuroscience A model of compositional state spaces in the hippocampus shows latent learning and rapid generalization. Bakermans et al. show that this model predicts the emergence of place responses in replay.

Happy to share the latest version of our work on compositional maps in hippocampus with Jo Warren, @jcrwhittington.bsky.social, @behrenstimb.bsky.social. We propose hippocampus constructs maps from cortical building blocks in replay – now with empirical support! www.nature.com/articles/s41... 1/9

Hippocampal reactivation of planned trajectories is required for effective goal choice in an allocentric memory task https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.05.10.653115v1

Our work, out at Cell, shows that the brain’s dopamine signals teach each individual a unique learning trajectory. Collaborative experiment-theory effort, led by Sam Liebana in the lab. The first experiment my lab started just shy of 6y ago & v excited to see it out: www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

📢 BottiniLab is hiring!

Join our ERC-funded team in Trentino to study memory, attention & cognitive maps (fMRI, MEG, EEG, iEEG).

🧠 3 postdocs, 3 PhDs, 2 RAs
🌍 Int’l, dynamic lab
🗓️ Deadline: July 10, 2025
📍Workplace: g.co/kgs/Ysyne4V
🔗 Info & how to apply: pdf.ac/2Ppzmw

#ERC #NeuroscienceJobs

🚨New in @cellpress.bsky.social
We discovered that hippocampal replays in natural-scale environments are highly fragmented, not full-length.
doi.org/10.1016/j.ce...
👇🧵

Pleased to say "Space, Time, and Memory", an academic book by Oxford University Press edited by the inimitable Lynn Nadel & Sara Aronowitz is now out.
I contributed a chapter, "Memory and Planning in Brains and Machines".
You can download the entire book for free:
library.oapen.org/bitstream/ha...

Occhi specchio dell'anima? Studiarli per capire il cervello 15/05/2025 servizio Silvia Fabbi, montaggio Matteo Tiozzo

🧠 Occhi, memoria e cervello: il Prof. Roberto Bottini
@cimecunitrento.bsky.social su RaiNews parla di movimenti oculari, MEG, fMRI e nuove possibilità diagnostiche per malattie neurodegenerative.

📺 Guarda l’intervista: shorturl.at/tkA5m

#Neuroscience

Our paper in @natcomms.nature.com, we show how cognitive maps in the hippocampal system could solve the general problem of representing and relating multiple alternative action plans. 
doi.org/10.1038/s414...

With @doellerlab.bsky.social, Patrick Haggard, @vigano.bsky.social, Daniel Reznik

🧠✨How do we rebuild our memories? In our new study, we show that hippocampal ripples kickstart a coordinated expansion of cortical activity that helps reconstruct past experiences.

We recorded iEEG from patients during memory retrieval... and found something really cool 👇(thread)

Lucina Uddin - Wikipedia

I had no idea Lucina was fighting the publishers on behalf of the scientists and taxpayers -- good on ya! [link to the case on her Wiki page] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucina_...

‘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...

YouTube video by Boston Dynamics Walk, Run, Crawl, RL Fun | Boston Dynamics

Oh boy... Boston Dynamics pushing sci-fi on us, ready or not.
youtu.be/I44_zbEwz_w?...

Search LibGen, the Pirated-Books Database That Meta Used to Train AI Millions of books and scientific papers are captured in the collection’s current iteration.

Search the LibGen database here, and peer inside a pirated library of millions of books and research papers used by Meta and others:

go.bsky.app/LdtUYZS

I created a starter pack for the growing community of hippocampus physiologists that have joined the great migration. Also included the physiology-adjacent.

Tell me who I haven’t found yet

The dynamic version is even more disturbing...

In order to understand cognition, we often recruit analogies as building blocks of theories to aid us in this quest. One such attempt, originating in folklore and alchemy, is the homunculus: a miniature human who resides in the skull and performs cognition. Perhaps surprisingly, this appears indistinguishable from the implicit proposal of many neurocognitive theories, including that of the 'cognitive map,' which proposes a representational substrate for episodic memories and navigational capacities. In such 'small cakes' cases, neurocognitive representations are assumed to be meaningful and about the world, though it is wholly unclear who is reading them, how they are interpreted, and how they come to mean what they do. We analyze the 'small cakes' problem in neurocognitive theories (including, but not limited to, the cognitive map) and find that such an approach a) causes infinite regress in the explanatory chain, requiring a human-in-the-loop to resolve, and b) results in a computationally inert account of representation, providing neither a function nor a mechanism. We caution against a 'small cakes' theoretical practice across computational cognitive modelling, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence, wherein the scientist inserts their (or other humans') cognition into models because otherwise the models neither perform as advertised, nor mean what they are purported to, without said 'cake insertion.' We argue that the solution is to tease apart explanandum and explanans for a given scientific investigation, with an eye towards avoiding van Rooij's (formal) or Ryle's (informal) infinite regresses.

Figure 1 in https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/24834/

Box 1 in https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/24834/

Box 2 in https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/24834/

Tired but happy to say this is out w @andreaeyleen.bsky.social: Are Neurocognitive Representations 'Small Cakes'? philsci-archive.pitt.edu/24834/

We analyse cog neuro theories showing how vicious regress, e.g. the homunculus fallacy, is (sadly) alive and well — and importantly how to avoid it. 1/

A top view of a coffee cup filled with coffee. The surface of the coffee features foam that resembles a smiling face, complete with two eyes and a wide mouth.

🧵 A bit late, but excited to share insights from our new publication in PLOS Comp Biol by Pranjul Gupta (journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...). Here, we explored the phenomenon of face pareidolia—like seeing faces in our morning coffee! What might explain this effect?

It's very little we understand! There's the data gap but also very little done about the known and existing gaps

Groundhog day

Curious about the history of the manifold/trajectory view of neural activity.

My own first exposure was Gilles Laurent's chapter in "21 Problems in Systems Neuroscience", where he cites odor trajectories in locust AL (2005). This was v inspiring as a biophysics student studying dynamical systems...

Google Ad-Tech Users Can Target National Security ‘Decision Makers’ and People With Chronic Diseases Google enables marketers to target people with serious illnesses and crushing debt—against its policies—as well as the makers of classified defense technology, a WIRED investigation has found.

Google enables marketers to target people with serious illnesses and crushing debt—against its policies—as well as the makers of classified defense technology, a WIRED investigation has found.

Gulf Map Generator - MapQuest Explore and customize your own Gulf region map with our interactive map tool.

Because you TOTALLY asked for this… and MapQuest has NOTHING better to do…

We’ve granted you exclusive access to a place very dear to our heart: gulfof.mapquest.com

Think of it as the Upside Down but more... minimalist. Pls share so we can behold your genius (or judge you, lovingly) 😘

A captivating speech. Must have influenced some.

Map of Western Hemisphere from Britannica 1st Edition.

Anyway, here's a map from our 1st Edition (1768).

YouTube video by Weinan Sun Learning produces an orthogonalized state machine in the hippocampus

1/12 How do animals build an internal map? In our new paper, we tracked thousands of mouse CA1 neurons over days/weeks as they learned a VR navigation task. @nspruston.bsky.social & co-1st author @johanwinn.bsky.social
Video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=yw_4...
Paper: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Learn more and apply here: compneurosci.com/Neuro4Pros/i...
Great lecturers for key skills: Hannah Bayer, Patrick Mineault, Yael Niv, Megan Peters, and your hosts Gunnar Blohm and Konrad Kording, and of course networking with an amazing group of 30 other professors.

Prior knowledge changes initial sensory processing in the human spinal cord High-frequency signals at a neuronal population level reveal a cognitive influence on sensory processing in the human spinal cord.

Prior knowledge changes sensory processing in the spinal cord?! 🤯 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... #neuroskyence