Alireza Modirshanechi

We are hiring a new Ph. D. student on neuroimaging and/or computational modeling on motivation and emotion. Tübingen is a great place to pursue work on these topics!!

uni-tuebingen.de/fakultaeten/...

♥️

Best part about being a scientist is the people I get to work with. Valentin (@bio-emergent.bsky.social) and I got to give a talk at NeurIPS, bridging a gap between low- and high-dim perspectives of the brain. Thankfully, the audience was (somewhat) more awake than the San Diego desert 🏜️

🧠 New paper alert (the 1st one from our new lab)!
Led by 1st author & VR wizard @jaquent.bsky.social

@natcomms.nature.com

How do our brains distinguish novel from familiar places as we explore our environments, e.g., a new city?

🔗 doi.org/10.1038/s414...

🧵 Thread below with key findings ⬇️

One week left to apply to the EPFL computer science PhD program www.epfl.ch/education/ph.... It's an amazing environment to do impactful research 🧪 (with unparalleled compute)! My NeuroAI group is hiring 🧠🤖. Consider this review service by our fantastic PhD students: www.linkedin.com/posts/spnesh...

We tend to think of neurons as either excitatory or inhibitory, but some neurons chemically inhibit their downstream targets while electrically exciting their neighbors. What is gained by having an inhibitory neuron excite its neighbor?

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Are you unable to continue your research in the USA due to political pressure? 14 Postdoc fellowships (2 years) are available for relocating to Germany

I love how these discussion is evolving! It's so interesting, and I found the new results pretty cool!

Prakhar, in a recent thought-provoking paper and thread, boldly claimed that the learning-rate biases may be mere “statistical ghosts” of decaying learning rates
We took up the challenge and put this claim to the test. Here are our findings (w/ @romanececchi.bsky.social). 1/n
osf.io/preprints/ps...

Thrilled to start 2026 as faculty in Psych & CS
@ualberta.bsky.social + Amii.ca Fellow! 🥳 Recruiting students to develop theories of cognition in natural & artificial systems 🤖💭🧠. Find me at #NeurIPS2025 workshops (speaking coginterp.github.io/neurips2025 & organising @dataonbrainmind.bsky.social)

🧵Excited to present our latest work at #Neurips25! Together with @avm.bsky.social, we discover 𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐧𝐧𝐞𝐥𝐬 𝐭𝐨 𝐢𝐧𝐟𝐢𝐧𝐢𝐭𝐲: regions in neural networks loss landscapes where parameters diverge to infinity (in regression settings!)

We find that MLPs in these channels can take derivatives and compute GLUs 🤯

How distributed is the brain-wide network that is recruited for cognition? - Nature Reviews Neuroscience Both localized and distributed views on the functional organization of the brain have been put forward. In this Perspective, Rosen and Freedman examine the degree to which these two views account for ...

Thoughtful review with some good recent historical perspective on the ongoing paradigm shift that is radically changing the way we think about what brain areas do.

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

Can we achieve nonlinear multimodal neural fusion while also enabling real-time recursive decoding for #BCI?

In our third paper at #NeurIPS2025, we present MRINE, which does exactly that — improving decoding even for modalities w/ distinct timescales & distributions.

👏 Eray Erturk
🧵 Paper Code ⬇️

Joint modelling of brain and behaviour dynamics with artificial intelligence - Nature Reviews Neuroscience Artificial intelligence is rapidly advancing our mechanistic understanding of the shared structure between the brain and higher-order behaviours. In this Review, Mathis and Mathis synthesize state-of-...

Joint modelling of brain and behaviour dynamics with artificial intelligence

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

This really cool, and also so well-written!

I remember when we used to think that all neurons were specialized.
Mixed selectivity: when neurons stopped looking like specialists
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
#neuroscience

⚠️ Only two days left to apply! ⚠️
#science #psychology #AI #intelligence #cogsci #neurosky #neuroskyence #Postdoc #Postdoctoral #PostdocJobs #ScienceCareer #AcademicJobs #Researcher #ResearchOpportunities #JobSearch

Two posts from Bluesky. The first one shows a figure from a paper published in Nature Scientific Reports full of totally incoherent AI fabricated gibberish words. The other a comment on a recently published paper by eLife discussing the paper and its peer reviews which were published along with the paper.

Nature Sci Rep publishes incoherent AI slop. eLife publishes a paper which the reviewers didn't agree with, making all the comments and responses public with thoughtful commentary. One of these journals got delisted by Web of Science for quality concerns from not doing peer review. Guess which one?

The Transmitter’s New Lab Directory Learn about neuroscience labs launched in the past two years, plus a few opening their doors in 2026.

@thetransmitter.bsky.social’s “New Lab Directory” features a list of new neuroscience labs that opened in 2024-2025, and some set to launch in 2026. Check out the list to learn about the work of more than 50 new neuroscience labs. www.thetransmitter.org/community/th...

#StateOfNeuroscience

🚀 We are hiring! 🚀

🔍 Join us as a Postdoctoral Researcher (fully-funded) at the Helmholtz Institute for Human-Centered AI in Munich.

1/6 New preprint 🚀 How does the cortex learn to represent things and how they move without reconstructing sensory stimuli? We developed a circuit-centric recurrent predictive learning (RPL) model based on JEPAs.
🔗 doi.org/10.1101/2025...
Led by @atenagm.bsky.social @mshalvagal.bsky.social

This is a fantastic opportunity if you're interested in curiosity, exploration, and information-seeking!

Two weeks left to apply! MIT's Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences is seeking a tenure-track Assistant Professor, working with nonhuman animals in some way. Application deadline is Dec. 1. Full posting: academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/30586

📍Excited to share that our paper was selected as a Spotlight at #NeurIPS2025!

arxiv.org/pdf/2410.03972

It started from a question I kept running into:

When do RNNs trained on the same task converge/diverge in their solutions?
🧵⬇️

Biologically informed cortical models predict optogenetic perturbations A recurrent neural network fitted to large electrophysiological datasets may help us understand the chain of cortical information transmission. In particular, successful network reconstruction methods...

This year, perturbation testing is becoming a thing: Model fitted to neural activity can predict how stimulation changes the animal's behavior

By @mschrimpf.bsky.social & @hannesmehrer.bsky.social :
arxiv.org/abs/2510.03684

Our work (being published at elife)
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

The most-cited neuroscience papers from the past 30 years Highly cited papers reflect the surge in artificial-intelligence research in the field and other technical advances.

@thetransmitter.bsky.social gathered citation metrics for the top neuroscience papers published over the past 30 years and assembled a list of the top 20 to try to capture a different view of the field’s changing landscape. www.thetransmitter.org/publishing/w...

#neuroskyence #StateOfNeuroscience

Happy to share my new paper published in @nathumbehav.nature.com: A critical look at statistical power in computational modeling studies, particularly those based on model selection.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Two weeks left to apply. Join us as a Postdoctoral Researcher (fully funded) at the Helmholtz Institute for Human-Centered AI in Munich.

Characterizing neuronal population geometry with AI equation discovery The visual cortex contains millions of neurons, whose combined activity forms a population code representing visual stimuli. There is, however, a discrepancy between our understanding of this code at ...

1. New preprint resolving a conundrum in systems neuroscience with an AI scientist, and humans Reilly Tilbury, Dabin Kwon, @haydari.bsky.social, @jacobmratliff.bsky.social, @bio-emergent.bsky.social, @carandinilab.net, @kevinjmiller.bsky.social, @neurokim.bsky.social
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Looking for a #postdoc position? 🧠🔬🤖
Join our amazing lab in Munich! 🇩🇪👩‍🔬
We have a friendly, collaborative, and inclusive environment, where scientific rigour and curiosity are truly valued and celebrated. 🎉

#Jobs #ScienceJobs #cogsci #neuroskyence