Venkat Ramaswamy

Ian, how about a bit of intellectual honesty in posting the full official statement by India, so your readers can make their own judgement about the rationale for India's position?

Will start my posts here with a preprint!
First preprint from my postdoctoral work—where we redefine and remap the isocortical efferent projectome through two foundational neurogenic mechanisms.
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(1/5)

Our new paper out now in Science explores how neural activity in the lateral entorhinal cortex (LEC) *drifts* over time - and *jumps* at key boundaries - to help organize events in memory.

🔗 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Here's a quick summary of what we found 🧵👇

(1/7) New preprint from Rajan lab! 🧠🤖
@ryanpaulbadman1.bsky.social & Riley Simmons-Edler show–through cog sci, neuro & ethology–how an AI agent with fewer ‘neurons’ than an insect can forage, find safety & dodge predators in a virtual world. Here's what we built

Preprint: arxiv.org/pdf/2506.06981

Foundations of Computer Vision The print version was published by

Our computer vision textbook is now available for free online here:
visionbook.mit.edu

We are working on adding some interactive components like search and (beta) integration with LLMs.

Hope this is useful and feel free to submit Github issues to help us improve the text!

Exendin-4, the first GLP1 receptor agonist on market came from Gila Monster's venom that contains a mammalian GLP1 homolog. Without it we wouldn’t have had the current medical revolution that Ozempic etc. wrought.

Almost all Nobel Prizes are awarded for work that is exploratory, or absolutely basic science with no obvious commercial or medical benefit.

You cannot predict where advancements come from, so you have to invest in science and scientists.

Targeted (corporate) science investment will never do this.

Memory by a thousand rules: Automated discovery of functional multi-type plasticity rules reveals variety & degeneracy at the heart of learning Synaptic plasticity is the basis of learning and memory, but the link between synaptic changes and neural function remains elusive. Here, we used automated search algorithms to obtain thousands of str...

We just pushed “Memory by a 1000 rules” onto bioRxiv, where we use clever #ML to find #plasticity quadruplets (EE, EI, IE, II) that learn basic stability in spiking nets. Why is it cool? We find 1000s!! of solutions, and they don’t just stabilise. They #memorise! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Subcortical correlates of consciousness with human single neuron recordings Subcortical brain structures contain neurons encoding subjective reports of stimulus detection in human participants, suggesting a role for conscious perception.

New “version of record” in @elife.bsky.social! ‬

We recorded neurons in the thalamus and subthalamic nucleus of humans and found both sensory- and perception-selective neurons with two distinct latencies!

7-year project with @nfaivre.bsky.social + @foscobernasconi.bsky.social.

A short thread 👇

Conserved brain-wide emergence of emotional response from sensory experience in humans and mice Emotional responses to sensory experience are central to the human condition in health and disease. We hypothesized that principles governing the emergence of emotion from sensation might be discovera...

This! This the type of work that makes me so optimistic that the next 3 decades of brain research will be more impactful that the last for understanding/treating mental conditions. We finally have the right measurement tools & analyses (eg for emotion).

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

#neuroskyence What are your favorite papers on the idea of redundancy in the brain? E.g. how a different neural circuit can step in when the "original" is damaged? Or just how the same function can be executed in different ways within the same brain?

Acute off-target effects of neural circuit manipulations - Nature Transient manipulation of neural activity is widely used to probe the function of specific circuits, yet such targeted perturbations could also have indirect effects on downstream circuits that implem...

This one: www.nature.com/articles/nat...

Banner of the ARMADA website: "ARMADA Reliable Conversational Domain-specific Data Exploration and Analysis"

📣 Join us at IBM Research for a PhD position on Reliable Multimodal LLMs, combining language, vision & advanced reasoning!

Located in Zurich🇨🇭 & co-supervised by @katjahose.bsky.social at TU Vienna🇦🇹 as part of the cool new MSCA ARMADA Doctoral Network

Apply at www.zurich.ibm.com/careers/2025...
🧪

Cholinergic blockade reveals role for human hippocampal theta in encoding but not retrieval Cholinergic dysfunction is a hallmark of Alzheimer's disease and other memory disorders. Yet, the neurophysiological mechanisms linking cholinergic signaling to memory remain poorly understood. In thi...

Hi Bluesky! First post here. Kicking things off with a new preprint.

🧠 Using human iEEG + pharmacology, we asked: is hippocampal theta required for retrieval?

Turns out it’s not. Instead, it may reflect a reinstated encoding mode.

Thread below.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Very interesting use of X-rays for connectomics!

i have uploaded this preprint a while back, but hadn't promoted it directly here. in this piece i explain why i can no longer recommend trainees to participate in my former home field.

The End of Conscioussness - osf.io/preprints/ps...

but i've learned a lot. thank you for everything.

🧠📈

Mood

Happy weekend!

I wrote a thing for @thetransmitter.bsky.social. The attack on scientific infrastructure happening in the US shows that relying on any one country is not a good option for science. We need to start supporting and building international, decentralised infrastructure for science.

Merely meant to attribute the term neurobabble to you, which I first saw you using in the other bird site

Or to generate the neuro babble cover story, once you've done the technical work and written the comp neuro paper.
@sussillodavid.bsky.social

Congratulations 🎉

Fwiw, you'll always have India

Today, I modified the definition of plagiarism to keep with the times

The Genomic Code: the genome instantiates a generative model of the organism How does the genome encode the form of the organism? What is the nature of this genomic code? Inspired by recent work in machine learning and neuroscience, we propose that the genome encodes a generat...

The Genomic Code: the genome instantiates a generative model of the organism www.cell.com/trends/genet... - really delighted to see this in print in @cp-trendsgenetics.bsky.social! 😊

Propositional Interpretability in Artificial Intelligence Mechanistic interpretability is the program of explaining what AI systems are doing in terms of their internal mechanisms. I analyze some aspects of the program, along with setting out some concrete c...

a draft paper (for an invited talk at AAAI next month) with a philosophical analysis of work on mechanistic interpretability, with special attention to methods for propositional interpretability.

arxiv.org/abs/2501.15740

If you've been waiting for a sign, this is it

Spiros Chavlis and I are very excited to share our latest #dendritic ANN research published in Nature Comms. @natureportfolio.bsky.social. We show that adopting the structure and sparse sampling features of biological #dendrites makes ANNs accurate, highly efficient and robust to overfitting.

Reflective piece by Eve Marder – "What happened to the pursuit of truth"
rupress.org/jgp/article/...

Configuration of electrical synapses filters sensory information to drive behavioral choices Sensory information can be differentially processed, enabling similar sensory stimuli to elicit different, context-specific behavioral strategies. This study uncovers a conserved configuration of elec...

Sharing our most recent paper, in which we find that electrical synapses in C. elegans drive action selection by "filtering" sensory information. C. elegans can learn temp, move across the temp. gradient and then track that temp. How? Configuration electrical synapses www.cell.com/cell/fulltex... 1/