Valentin Schmutz

A study led by Cina Aghamohammadi is now out in ‪@natcomms.nature.com‬! We developed a mathematical framework for partitioning spiking variability, which revealed that spiking irregularity is nearly invariant for each neuron and decreases along the cortical hierarchy.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Thanks, Matthijs!

Message for participants of the #SNUFA 2025 spiking neural network workshop. We got almost 60 awesome abstract submissions, and we'd now like your help to select which ones should be offered talks. Follow the "abstract voting" link at snufa.net/2025/ to take part. It should take <15m. Thanks! ❤️

New in @pnas.org: doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

We study how humans explore a 61-state environment with a stochastic region that mimics a “noisy-TV.”

Results: Participants keep exploring the stochastic part even when it’s unhelpful, and novelty-seeking best explains this behavior.

#cogsci #neuroskyence

Thanks, Dimitri!

Thanks a lot, Alireza!

Big shout out to co-authors Ali Haydaroğlu @haydari.bsky.social (co-first), Shuqi Wang @shuqiw.bsky.social, Matteo Carandini
@carandinilab.net, and Kenneth Harris
@kenneth-harris.bsky.social

Looking forward to meeting you in San Diego 🌴
2/2

🎉 "High-dimensional neuronal activity from low-dimensional latent dynamics: a solvable model" will be presented as an oral at #NeurIPS2025 🎉

Feeling very grateful that reviewers and chairs appreciated concise mathematical explanations, in this age of big models.

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
1/2

Submissions (short!) due for SNUFA spiking neural networks conference in <2 weeks! 🤖🧠🧪

forms.cloud.microsoft/e/XkZLavhaJe

More info at snufa.net/2025/

Note that we normally get around 700 participants and recordings go on YouTube and get 100s-1000s views.

Please repost.

Westlake University (西湖大学), a few hours before the start of this year's Summer School on Mathematical Neuroscience
its.westlake.edu.cn/info/1017/28...

YouTube video by Gerstner Lab From Spikes To Rates

Is it possible to go from spikes to rates without averaging?

We show how to exactly map recurrent spiking networks into recurrent rate networks, with the same number of neurons. No temporal or spatial averaging needed!

Presented at Gatsby Neural Dynamics Workshop, London.

🚨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

Glad to see my PhD work out! Thanks to all my collaborators and to Kenneth and Matteo for making this possible!

New by Agnès Landemard (@agnesland.bsky.social‬) & co

Brainwide blood volume reflects opposing neural populations

Brainwide fluctuations in blood volume arise from two populations with opposite relation to brain state and distinct relationships to blood supply

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

Out today in @nature.com: we show that individual neurons have diverse tuning to a decision variable computed by the entire population, revealing a unifying geometric principle for the encoding of sensory and dynamic cognitive variables.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Our preprint is finally out! How can we understand the role of Behavioral Timescale Synaptic Plasticity in credit assignment? Does it fit into existing supervised and unsupervised learning frameworks? What theoretical gaps are still left unexplained?

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

GitHub - Julie-Fabre/bombcell: Automated quality control, curation and neuron classification of spike-sorted electrophysiology data Automated quality control, curation and neuron classification of spike-sorted electrophysiology data - Julie-Fabre/bombcell

🚀 We are excited to share that bombcell is now available in Python! 🐍 Automatically sort your units into good/MUA/noise/non-somatic using quality metrics and interpretable & adjustable classification thresholds.
pip install and play around with our toy dataset:
🔗 github.com/Julie-Fabre/...

Interested in high-dim chaotic networks? Ever wondered about the structure of their state space? @jakobstubenrauch.bsky.social has answers - from a separation of fixed points and dynamics onto distinct shells to a shared lower-dim manifold and linear prediction of dynamics.

Our new preprint 👀

Two (tenure track) Junior Professorship Chair in Nice, France on:

'Modeling in Neurosciences and Cognition'

math.univ-cotedazur.fr/laboratoire/...

'Mathematics of Life"
math.univ-cotedazur.fr/laboratoire/...

Delighted to join the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge! It's been in the news since 1660, and more so lately. Grateful to all my collaborators over the years.

Excited to share my PhD paper! In it, we use targeted 2-photon optogenetic stimulation to determine how V1 activity is read-out in a detection task. We found that network influence, not visual coding properties, predicted the impact of ensembles on behavior - contradicting our expectations (1/5).

Spikes can transmit neurons' subthreshold membrane potentials Neurons primarily communicate through the emission of action potentials, or spikes. To generate a spike, a neuron's membrane potential must cross a defined threshold. Does this spiking mechanism inher...

Intriguing thread. In case you are interested, there is a follow-up preprint where the math is clarified and the message of the original paper strengthened: arxiv.org/abs/2501.13845.

Is there anything you would recommend me to read?

Thanks a lot for your interest and for sharing your thoughts!

Many of us use 2p scopes to image 3D volumes of brain. But then we analyze the data plane by plane, resulting in duplicated neurons, missed neurons, and low s/n. Let's go 3D!

Suite3D: Volumetric cell detection for two-photon microscopy
by @haydari.bsky.social & team.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

I am very proud to announce that my PhD paper finally came out in Cell! In this *very* collaborative study, we develop and release a deep-learning approach to predict neuron type identity from their electrical signature. doi.org/10.1016/j.ce... 1/16 🧵

Thrilled to share our latest work exploring new avenues for combining #Neuropixels with #Optogenetics! Congratulations to co-first author Anna Lakunina, the Neuropixels Opto Consortium and collaborators! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Symmetries and Continuous Attractors in Disordered Neural Circuits A major challenge in neuroscience is reconciling idealized theoretical models with complex, heterogeneous experimental data. We address this challenge through the lens of continuous-attractor networks...

(1/30) New preprint! "Symmetries and continuous attractors in disordered neural circuits" with Larry Abbott and Haim Sompolinsky
bioRxiv: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Dynamics of specialization in neural modules under resource constraints - Nature Communications The extent to which structural modularity in neural networks ensures functional specialization remains unclear. Here the authors show that specialization can emerge in neural modules placed under reso...

What's the right way to think about modularity in the brain? This devilish 😈 question is a big part of my research now, and it started with this paper with @solarpunkgabs.bsky.social, finally published after the first preprint in 2021! 🤖🧠🧪

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

I agree. Thanks, James!