Matt Perich

A big "get" for the Champalimaud! Excited to see what comes out of the Warehouse and the next phase of Juan's lab

Very excited and proud to share my postdoctoral research with @neurrriot.bsky.social looking at the context-specific encoding of social behavior 💃🕺 in hormone-sensitive, large-scale brain networks in mice!

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

#neuroskyence #compneurosky 🧪
1/12

Motor cortex flexibly deploys a high-dimensional repertoire of subskills Skilled movement often requires flexibly combining multiple subskills, each requiring dedicated control strategies and underlying computations. How the motor system achieves such versatility remains u...

Of potential interest to those keen on motor control and/or multi-task networks. Congrats to Elom and Eric.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Thanks!

Thanks!

More info on our funded project is here: webapps.cihr-irsc.gc.ca/decisions/p/.... In many ways, this directly follows our 2020 paper: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1.... But we have much broader ambitions too and are building a flexible platform for NHP motor ephys. Should be a fun 5 years!

IMO Montreal is one of the best cities out there for neuro, and everyone in my lab will get to enjoy learning from and interacting with the NeuroAI folks at Mila. If modeling the computations behind multi-modal sensorimotor integration and adaptation is of interest to you, please reach out!

🚨 I’m excited to say that my CIHR Project Grant was funded! My NHP lab is now full-speed-ahead, and I’m hiring experimentalists (postdoc, PhD student, and/or a tech/manager). We’ll do multi-region ephys during reaching/grasping in macaques, with behavioral and spinal perturbations.

Awesome work from @juangallego.bsky.social and lab. An interface from single motoneuron control in tetraplegia!

The Crearte Foundation | #ArtScience on Instagram: "When a neurobiologist is also a comic artist, science can have a whole new storyline. In a 2022 collaboration between the Rajan Lab at Harvard Med... 6 likes, 0 comments - crearte.ca on July 28, 2025: "When a neurobiologist is also a comic artist, science can have a whole new storyline. In a 2022 collaboration between the Rajan Lab at Harvard Med...

Check out @jordancollver.bsky.social’s‬ great illustration of modular RNNs training to work like a bio-brain🦾🧠

Thanks to Crearte for featuring our collaboration!

www.instagram.com/crearte.ca/p...

Very happy about my former mentor Sara Solla having received the Valentin Braitenberg Award for her lifelong contributions to computational neuroscience!

Sara will be giving a lecture at the upcoming @bernsteinneuro.bsky.social meeting which you shouldn't miss.

bernstein-network.de/en/newsroom/...

Could be a cell type difference (Gardner 2022 focused on grid cells) or a region difference? Methods difference? Lots of interesting possibilities!

Though I will say that some evidence suggests it's not going to always be 1:1 with environment. E.g. the 2022 Gardner ERC place cell paper we mention in the article has place cells mapping even square environments into a toroid shape. Though the Guo 2024 CA1 paper has environment-hspaed manifolds

There's a long and fun conversation to be had here 🙂. But I agree, the "many-to-few" nature of neurons to manifolds allows considerable drift in single neuron activity without changing the manifold. Important in next steps to find out when, and how, neural drift changes manifold-level properties!

Indeed, IMO behavior (and environment, etc) are inextricably linked to manifold properties. For this reason, comparative (e.g. for same behavior, are manifolds different in different regions?) and causal (e.g., move activity on the manifold and predict behavioral changes) experiments are essential.

Thanks for the kind words and really glad you enjoyed the article!

Thanks to @emilysingerneuro.bsky.social for another opportunity to work with The Transmitter (which is an awesome publication), and of course the many, many long conversations on manifolds with @juangallego.bsky.social that shaped these articles 🙂

📰 I really enjoyed writing this article with @thetransmitter.bsky.social! In it, I summarize parts of our recent perspective article on neural manifolds (www.nature.com/articles/s41...), with a focus on highlighting just a few cool insights into the brain we've already seen at the population level.

🚨New paper🚨

Neural manifolds went from a niche-y word to an ubiquitous term in systems neuro thanks to many interesting findings across fields. But like with any emerging term, people use it very differently.

Here, we clarify our take on the term, and review key findings & challenges rdcu.be/ex8hW

'manifolds', and the overall conception of the brain using a dynamical systems framework, have come a long way.

A lot has changed since we wrote our last perspective piece in 2017 (www.cell.com/neuron/fullt..., both in how we think about neural manifolds and in the prevalence in the field. We hope this paper provides a good primer for the ideas, and points towards some big open questions in this space.

A neural manifold view of the brain - Nature Neuroscience Recent advances in neuroscience have revealed how neural population activity underlying behavior can be well described by topological objects called neural manifolds. Understanding how nature, nurture...

Check out our new review/perspective (w/ @juangallego.bsky.social & Devika Narain) on neural manifolds in the brain! It was a lot of fun to think through these ideas over the past couple of years, and I'm excited it's finally out in the world!

🔗: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
📄: rdcu.be/ex8hW

I guess I wouldn't think of babies as "learning" a foundation model. IMO a better analogy is that evolution learned the foundation model and babies during development are fine-tuning it (albeit in a "multi-task" way) for their bodies/experiences .

Regional specialization of movement encoding across the primate sensorimotor cortex - Nature Communications How the cortex generates movement to achieve different tasks remains poorly understood. Here the authors show that the cortex serializes motor control by first performing task-specific computations in...

Finally out!
Eight years after initiating this study with Simon Borgognon, Nicolo Macellari, and Gregoire Courtine, we have uncovered neural population dynamics shared among premotor, motor, and somatosensory cortices during various types of locomotor tasks.

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

Our new approach for scalable, generalizable, and efficient neural population decoding is now online! Here we focus on real-time BCI but I'm excited about all of our next steps building on this. Awesome work led by @averyryoo.bsky.social @nandahkrishna.bsky.social @ximengmao.bsky.social

BluePrints, naturally

Subjectivity is hard to investigate, indeed. But if this is true then all "non-aphantasics" are equally misdescribing their subjective experience too... (said as someone with what I believe to be quite extreme aphantasia, and who cannot square my experiences with those described by others)

Very late, but had a 🔥 time at my first Cosyne presenting my work with @nandahkrishna.bsky.social, Ximeng Mao, @mattperich.bsky.social, and @glajoie.bsky.social on real-time neural decoding with hybrid SSMs. Keep an eye out for a preprint (hopefully) soon 👀

#Cosyne2025 @cosynemeeting.bsky.social

Neural manifolds: Latest buzzword or pathway to understand the brain? When you cut away the misconceptions, neural manifolds present a conceptually appropriate level at which systems neuroscientists can study the brain.

Many apparent disagreements over the utility of neural manifolds come from a lack of clarity on what the term really encompasses, argues @mattperich.bsky.social

#neuroskyence

www.thetransmitter.org/neural-dynam...

Human neural dynamics of real-world and imagined navigation - Nature Human Behaviour Seeber et al. studied brain recordings from implanted electrodes in freely moving humans. Neural dynamics encoded actual and imagined routes similarly, demonstrating parallels between navigational, im...

🧠 Our new (NIH funded!) paper reveals how the brain creates internal dynamics during both real- and imagined navigation. We recorded directly from the human hippocampus as participants moved through physical space and when they mentally navigated imagined routes.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...