David Barack

🚨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

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

Compositionality of social gaze in the prefrontal-amygdala circuits Each social gaze can be deconstructed into primitive components, including gaze content, social state, and gaze duration. To reduce dimensionality and facilitate generalization, the brain needs to rep...

Super excited to share this new work from the lab (led by Guangyao Qi)! We demonstrate compositional social gaze codes in the prefrontal-amygdala circuits, by testing three predictions from the compositionality hypothesis. 👇👇

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

incredible. you don't see the purple felt carrots? they are clearly purple felt carrots

Interesting. The idea I had was the same content but represented differently, on the assumption that the adverbial aspect implies a difference in how, but not what, is represented

Has anyone adverbialized the propositional attitudes? We don’t believe that snow is white; rather we represent beliefly (believely?) that snow is white. #philsky

The Drake no/yes meme with D-Money saying no to WashU PNP and Pitt CPS before viking with Purdue CAIC

Soft-launching Purdue's new hub for philosophy of cognitive science (the Cognition, Agency, and Intelligence Center) with the following overly-aggressive meme, as is recommended by the university media handbook

Like @cdutilhnovaes.bsky.social awesome work?

This summer my lab's journal club somewhat unintentionally ended up reading papers on a theme of "more naturalistic computational neuroscience". I figured I'd share the list of papers here 🧵:

Between the surge of papers on understanding in the past 20 years and the surge of papers on inquiry in the past 10, epistemology is very exciting right now! #philsky

Congrats!!

I did the thing you are never supposed to do. I wrote a (rough draft of a) textbook: Theories of Rational Decision

It's technical, but from a philosophical perspective. It focuses on the normative theory but touches on some behavioral issues as well.

raw.githubusercontent.com/kzollman/Rat...

Got prov. approval for 2 major grants in Neuro-AI & Dynamical Systems Reconstruction, on learning & inference in non-stationary environments, out-of-domain generalization, and DS foundation models. To all AI/math/DS enthusiasts: Expect job announcements (PhD/PostDoc) soon! Feel free to get in touch.

This might seem weird but this matters #T1D
www.reddit.com/r/Dolls/comm...

The University of Sydney is recruiting senior and mid-career academics "within the top 5–10% of academics in their field, with a strong track record and availability to relocate to Australia within 6-months".
If you're a psychologist/neuroscientist and are interested, get in touch with me soon.

As I'm sure you both know, there is a lot work in phil sci about this--specifically the semantic view of theories as collections of models. plato.stanford.edu/entries/stru...

Holy moly i had no idea... thi sis a super interesting case from a phil bio perspective

I am delighted to announce registration and abstract submission is open for "The Mechanistic Basis of Foraging 2025" to be held at the Edgbaston Park Hotel, University of Birmingham, UK on 3-5th November 2025. uobevents.eventsair.com/the-mechanis...

I’ll email you

Very curious to hear your thoughts. It’s only one part of my overall view; if you’re interested, I can send you several draft chapters of my in-progress book that digs much deeper!

Thank you!!!

I should add for my neuro folks: there’s no neuroscience here, although I use this account in the book I’m writing on neurodynamical systems. Also it is straight analytic philosophy of mind, so may be very unfamiliar!

In this paper, I present a novel analysis of the realization relation, the relation of filling a functional role. I present a defeasible test for when something fills a role, and I argue that this approach unifies a range of analyses of realization. Check it out!

Reasoning Goals and Representational Decisions in Computational Cognitive Neuroscience: Lessons From the Drift Diffusion Model // By: Ari Khoudary, Megan A.K. Peters, and Aaron Bornstein Reasoning Goals and Representational Decisions in Computational Cognitive Neuroscience: Lessons From the Drift Diffusion ModelBy: Ari Khoudary (UC Irvine), Megan A.K. Peters (UC Irvine), & Aaro…

New post on THE FEEDBACK featuring a new paper by Ari Khoudary & others titled: 'Reasoning Goals and Representational Decisions in Computational Cognitive Neuroscience: Lessons From the Drift Diffusion Model' out now in the European Journal of Neuroscience!

thefeedback.blog/2025/07/02/r...

The multiple action account of filling a role - Philosophical Studies Philosophical Studies - Functionalism, the doctrine that tokens realize types in virtue of filling a functional role, remains a dominant view in the metaphysics of mind and of science. At the heart...

New paper is out! This one is in analytic metaphysics of mind--I'm branching out!
link.springer.com/article/10.1...

More seriously, this raises key questions about what all those neurons are for? Language? But animals don’t speak (or do they?) and have lots of neurons. This big or small q also connects to questions raised by Michael Levin, @gershbrain.bsky.social and @neuroai.bsky.social about single cell cog

A foundation model to predict and capture human cognition - Nature A computational model called Centaur, developed by fine-tuning a language model on a huge dataset called Psych-101, can predict and simulate human nature in experiments expressible in natural language...

Ok, we need to decide, big or small?
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Discovering cognitive strategies with tiny recurrent neural networks - Nature Modelling biological decision-making with tiny recurrent neural networks enables more accurate predictions of animal choices than classical cognitive models and offers insights into the underlying cog...

This looks awesome!
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A Neuro-Philosophical Approach to Understanding the Brain

Check out this great article about SPAN2025 written by the Dana Foundation!

dana.org/article/a-ne...