Harrison Ritz

Looks sick. You’ve been on a roll lately!

1/ New preprint out! “Control of cortical population activity with patterned microstimulation.” We show that brief training with multi-electrode stimulation pulses is enough to steer prefrontal population activity along desired trajectories in awake macaques. tinyurl.com/3d6kv26w

No! Swear I was taught like-urt.

I am totally pumped about this new work . "Task-trained RNNs" are a powerful and influential framework in neuroscience, but have lacked a firm theoretical footing. This work provides one, and makes direct contact with the classical theory of random RNNs:
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

The international boycott of ChatGPT has absolutely exploded.

2.5M people have already joined, and this is just the beginning.

Go to quitgpt.org.
Cancel your subscription, delete your account.
And tell at least one person why.

My op-ed: www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Let the record show that @lilweb.bsky.social is a badass for building the next generation of HGF

Raccoons optimally forage for information: exploration–exploitation trade-offs in innovation Animals in rapidly changing environments, such as cities, should optimize information gathering to learn about and efficiently forage in these heterog…

Trash pandas show effort-based discounting of “exploratory” decision making.

Optimally claims aside, I genuinely love this study.

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

Recently, van der Stigchel and colleagues posted a provocative commentary suggesting that we should be wary of bots in online behavioral data collection (🧵by @cstrauch.bsky.social here: bsky.app/profile/cstr...). But should we? Here is my response letter osf.io/preprints/ps.... 1/5

I find AR to be very strong, but probably depends on the task.

Great thread! Missed that their indices aren’t convergent, and agree that there should be better outlier stats (eg GESD). Think they’d argue for a mixture of bots, but you’re right that for many tasks any bot would be v hard.

With Eugene Koonin, we propose a concept of “the selfish ribosome”, under which evolution of life is viewed as a ribosomal takeover, where the ribosome evolved to consume most of the cell’s resources, while other cellular componentry ensures the propagation of the ribosome. arxiv.org/abs/2602.23268

Deadline is Friday! If you've been on the fence about BAMB! 2026 — jump. It's one of the best summer schools for behavioral & computational modeling out there, and I'd know 😄
Apply → bambschool.org
#Neuroscience #CogSci #ComputationalNeuroscience #SummerSchool #AcademicBsky

IMO:
- vscode with copilot and/or claude code
- work in bite-sized chunks
- use tests to reality-check

We have a paper, led by @ericwbridgeford.bsky.social:
www.poldracklab.org/10sr_ai_assi...

Russ is working on a longer book:
bettercodebetterscience.github.io/book/ai-codi...

Computational Neuroscience 3 Weeks, 6-24 July 20206

Applications are open for #CompNeuro, a live, intensive online course. Participants learn to combine modern #MachineLearning and causality frameworks with advanced modeling approaches to tackle real #neuroscience questions.

neuromatch.io/computationa...

phishing reported

Rutgers-Princeton Center for Computational Cognitive Neuropsychiatry Visit the post for more.

The Rutgers-Princeton Center for Computational Cognitive NeuroPsychiatry (ccnp.princeton.edu) is looking for a new clinical research coordinator! This is a long-term (at least 2 years, more is preferred) position for someone with a BA or MA who is interested in... /1

Endel: Your free Endel subscription Join the sound wellness revolution

Gotta be Endel
endel.sng.link/Ezeow/6l18q/...

But for the longest time it was Funeral

🚀 Postdoc Alert! Are you passionate about social learning & cultural evolution? @dominikdeffner.bsky.social & I have a 3-year position with freedom to develop your research and work on cutting-edge multiplayer and immersive experiments. Apply by March 30! hmc-lab.com/SocialLearni... Pls share 🙏

From the top of my head, here some recent ones:

"Two views on the cognitive brain" by @johnwkrakauer.bsky.social, @dlbarack.bsky.social

"Reconstructing computational system dynamics from neural data with recurrent neural networks" by @durstewitzlab.bsky.social et al

1/3

After several years of work, my lab is starting to put out our first papers on learning in a unicellular organism (Stentor coeruleus).

Here we show evidence for a form of associative learning in Stentor:
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

🚨 New Paper: Controlling the Human Connectome with Spatially Diffuse Input Signals

Now in press at Communications Biology!

www.nature.com/articles/s42...

Two-photon calcium imaging at 24,000 lines/s, with the resonant axis spanning 4x what other systems can do. Inertia-free. Diffraction-limited. No tradeoffs. Che-Hang Yu developed a 4x angle multiplier for laser scanning. His paper is out today: opg.optica.org/optica/fullt... 1/n #fluorescenceFriday

nothing more powerful!

How dynamics arise from the structure is my biggest interest. In this study, we started with a small step and asked how structure constrains dynamics. Spoiler: would that it were so simple… (1/6)

Awesome!

Looks very cool, congrats guys

Why is touch perceived as weaker during movement?

In our new preprint 📝, we examine tactile suppression during reaching.

Using optimal control theory, we show that tactile suppression reflects dynamic, uncertainty-dependent integration of forward model predictions and sensory feedback.

Triple paper drop from the inimitable @willydorrell.bsky.social :

1) A normative theory of prefrontal working memory slots.

2) A comprehensive review of normative theories of why grid cells look like grid cells.

3) A new theory of convex efficient coding.

(0/3)

cool people, follow them!

I built a bluesky labeler for neuroscience methods.

1️⃣ follow/subscribe to: @neuromethods.bsky.social
2️⃣ like the post with your favorite method
➡️ get a shiny methods label in your profile/posts. 🌟

nice work!

Very happy to share this new paper, published in @elife.bsky.social, the last one stemming from a PhD chapter 🥲. In it, @spk3lly.bsky.social and I show that an early V1 signal (the C1) can have direct influence on a perceptual decision.

Here's the link: doi.org/10.7554/eLif...