Mark H Johnson

Finally got around to this interesting exchange. Much to like! However, in my view neonate cortex is building a foundation model while sub-cortical sensorimotor routes support newborn behaviours and, importantly, bias the inputs to the foundation model (e.g. orienting toward faces).

thrilled to share this project over a decade in the making out now in @pnas.org! We show that precocious GABA boosting in neonates by early sevoflurane/propofol anesthetic exposure accelerates visual cortical maturation in human infants
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

<em>Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry</em> | ACAMH Pediatric Journal | Wiley Online Library Background There is a pressing need for research on neurodevelopmental conditions to focus on predictors of resilient or positive outcomes, rather than core symptoms and impairment. One promising av.....

Excellent work from my colleague Daniel Wechsler showing that "Mother–child autism trait similarity positively predicted both social functioning and psychological well-being in children..". Trait similarity may act as a protective or promotive factor.
acamh.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Potential role of developmental experience in the emergence of the parvo-magno distinction - Communications Biology Developmentally-driven computational modeling study suggests that early sensory experience shapes distinct neuronal response properties in the visual system, providing a potential account of the emerg...

1/ New paper out in @commsbio.nature.com, led by @marinv.bsky.social: doi.org/10.1038/s420...! Across several past studies, we showed how newborns' degraded vision may benefit human development and inspire more robust deep networks. We have referred to this as Adaptive Initial Degradations (AID).

DNA is often called a “blueprint for life”. In common parlance a blueprint refers to (e.g.) an architect plan, technical drawing or engineering design. DNA does indeed contain information to guide construction, in this case of a living organism. But beyond that, similarities rapidly break down. 2/n

The latest essay in our #NeuroAI series explores how inspiration from how babies learn language might improve language models.

Genome-wide association meta-analysis of age at onset of walking in over 70,000 infants of European ancestry - Nature Human Behaviour A genome-wide association study of age at onset of walking in over 70,000 infants found 11 significant loci. Age at onset of walking showed SNP heritability of 24%, a reliable polygenic score and gene...

Delighted to be part of the team on this breakthrough infant behaviour genetics study led by @angelicaronald.bsky.social and Anna Gui:
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

From our 'infant sibs' cohorts we are finding increasing evidence for Chronogeneity as a way to view heterogeneity in autism. In other words, different ages of onset may reflect different types of neurodiversity.
www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

Congratulations Karla! Great to see how much your research has grown from those PhD days...😀

Alan Turing's 'Delilah' papers saved for the nation Following his ground-breaking work on the Enigma machines at Bletchley Park, in 1943 Turing (KC 1931) turned to building a portable voice encoder for short-distance transmission to be used in military...

Along with the new statue, proud that my College (Kings) has now acquired some of Turing's notebooks (thanks to a generous donation). Kings was also an early career haven for David Marr and Geoff Hinton, so there must be something in the water?
www.kings.cam.ac.uk/news/2025/al...

The media circus on the slightly modified wolf mixed with the nonsensical hype of de-extinction only highlights the need to greatly shift how we talk about genes and genetic "information" in popular discourse. Oyama's groundbreaking book and Lewontin's prescient forward should be a starting point.

An intrinsic hierarchical, retinotopic organization of visual pulvinar connectivity in the human neonate Despite the immaturity of the visual cortex, infants exhibit remarkable perceptual abilities. The pulvinar is hypothesized to support perceptual abilities in infancy and even scaffold the initial deve...

Great paper adding to the recent evidence for pulvinar as an organiser of human cortical development, and potentially "training" cortical specialisation.
www.cell.com/current-biol...

Shocked at the cuts to University staff and research funding across UK, Netherlands and, of course, the situation in US. I'm old enough to remember the massive cuts to science in the early Thatcher years, but at least we young scientists could join the 'brain drain' to the US at the time.

But what is the solution? We certainly don't want to increase further the admin load on academics. A proportion of this is driven by new government and funder requirements. Some also responds to perceived threat of legal action. And some is self-generated as you say.

I agree with sentiments of the editorial, but also agree that there are some amazing and very hard working people in these roles. The question is what is driving this ever increasing administrative loads and how to curtail it.

There is still a week left to apply! www.jobs.cam.ac.uk/job/49974/

Understanding the development of a functional brain circuit: reward processing as an illustration - Translational Psychiatry Translational Psychiatry - Understanding the development of a functional brain circuit: reward processing as an illustration

So excited to share our Perspective out this week in Translational Psychiatry! We provide a conceptual framework for studying brain function in infancy. A true labor of love and hopefully useful for many related questions! @drbcallaghan.bsky.social
Open access link:
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Hi Przemek, I hope all is going well. By networks do you mean brain systems or computational neural models? I've just had a paper accepted in Nature Human Behaviour on the genetics of onset of walking that identifies some brain regions. I'll post it as soon as I am allowed...

The developmental emergence of reliable cortical representations - Nature Neuroscience Sensory experience transforms endogenously structured cortical networks with diverse and unreliable visual responses into reliable representations. This process is proposed to involve the alignment of feedforward and recurrent networks.

The developmental emergence of reliable cortical representations

🧠🤖

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

Trajectories of brain and behaviour development in the womb, at birth and through infancy - Nature Human Behaviour Recent advances in imaging reveal that birth is a punctuate event in the development of brain and behaviour, which begins in the womb and continues in infancy. Meredith Weiss et al. review our underst...

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

Understanding continuities and discontinuities between pre and postnatal behaviour in humans..

After 8 years as Head of Department (Cambridge, Psychology), I am standing down in September... which will give me time for things like Bluesky!