Srividya Pattisapu
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drsissyfuss.bsky.social
Srividya Pattisapu
@drsissyfuss.bsky.social
PhD Student, Stony Brook University | Neuroscience, Science Communication.

Address all correspondence to Dr. SissyFuss, Valley of Despair, Dunning-Kruger Curve. Waiting for the boulder to roll back down.
Yes, this! I used em-dashes all the time and they made me so happy. They break a sentence in ways that commas just cannot do—aesthetically speaking—and now I worry that someone will think I used an LLM to write this post too. Ugh. LLMs use it because, well, they are trained on human data, right??
the internet has decided that em-dashes are a hallmark of llm writing, which is *extremely* annoying to me, as someone who uses em-dashes all the time.

dear internet please consider the possibility that LLMs use em-dashes a lot because they're, like, good
November 14, 2025 at 10:20 PM
Reposted by Srividya Pattisapu
This paper has now been published in PRX Life! journals.aps.org/prxlife/abst...

In this work I developed a scaling theory for spiking neural populations using a renormalization group approach -- the 1st, to my knowledge, applied to models of spiking neurons. See the thread for a brief summary.
October 10, 2025 at 7:31 PM
Reposted by Srividya Pattisapu
Reposted by Srividya Pattisapu
Two flagship papers from the International Brain Laboratory, now out in ‪@Nature.com‬:
🧠 Brain-wide map of neural activity during complex behaviour: doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09235-0
🧠 Brain-wide representations of prior information in mouse decision-making: doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09226-1 +
September 3, 2025 at 4:22 PM
Deeply chilling.
"At some level, AI does seem to separate good things from bad. It just doesn’t seem to have a preference."
Research by the nonprofit organization Truthful AI shows that a wide array of large language models like ChatGPT-4o are vulnerable to “emergent misalignment,” a phenomenon in which minor changes during training lead to “evil” outputs. Stephen Ornes reports:
The AI Was Fed Sloppy Code. It Turned Into Something Evil. | Quanta Magazine
The new science of “emergent misalignment” explores how PG-13 training data — insecure code, superstitious numbers or even extreme-sports advice — can open the door to AI’s dark side.
www.quantamagazine.org
August 21, 2025 at 9:50 PM
This "Everything, Everywhere, All at Once" simultaneously excites and terrifies me. Further evidence that we need to relegate the 'brain region = specialised function' philosophy to the status of an artefact from the times when we were only able to record from one brain region at a time.
Using the @intlbrainlab.bsky.social BWM dataset, which comprises electrophysiological recordings of 60 k neurons covering one mouse brain hemisphere, we find all brain regions contain most neural response types, i.e. function is widely distributed:

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
August 2, 2025 at 5:21 PM
😂😭
Replication Crisis

xkcd.com/3117/
July 22, 2025 at 12:26 AM
Reposted by Srividya Pattisapu
🚀 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/...
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
github.com
June 13, 2025 at 6:55 PM
Reposted by Srividya Pattisapu
This podcast was very interesting, but I think I have a dissatisfaction with the concept of representation in neuroscience that goes behind what they discussed in the podcast. I'd be interested to hear thoughts on whether this is interesting, wrong, obvious, etc. 🧵
Terrific podcast relevant to our debates here about “What is an emotion?” But in the case of emotion, it’s turned up to 11 b/c (unlike “representation”), everyone alive has intuition and interest about the answers (including the public).

www.thetransmitter.org/brain-inspir...
What do neuroscientists mean by the term representation?
A group of neuroscientists and philosophers discuss the use and misuse of the term “representation” across the cognitive sciences.
www.thetransmitter.org
June 4, 2025 at 11:46 PM
Reposted by Srividya Pattisapu
Contrary to popular belief, what is important in science is as much its spirit as its product: it is as much the openmindedness, the primacy of criticism, the submission to the unforeseen, however upsetting, as the result, however new that may be. – Francois Jacob
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
April 7, 2025 at 1:07 AM
Reposted by Srividya Pattisapu
In the latest essay in our human neurotechnology series, neuroethicist Karen Rommelfanger outlines practical questions that can help researchers recognize when to seek out ethical expertise.

www.thetransmitter.org/human-neurot...
Why the 21st-century neuroscientist needs to be neuroethically engaged
Technological advances in decoding brain activity and in growing human brain cells raise new ethical issues. Here is a framework to help researchers navigate them.
www.thetransmitter.org
May 12, 2025 at 2:07 PM
Reposted by Srividya Pattisapu
These boxes are not moving. A mind-bending optical illusion by Japanese artist Jagarikin.
May 7, 2025 at 1:03 AM
Reposted by Srividya Pattisapu
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! 😊
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...
www.cell.com
February 11, 2025 at 11:46 AM
We discussed this elegant methods paper by Arthur Pellegrino, @heikestein.bsky.social , and Alex Cayco-Gajic in our lab's journal club last week. Everybody really liked it, and we already have some data on which we are excited to try out sliceTCA. Some thoughts 🧵:
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Dimensionality reduction beyond neural subspaces with slice tensor component analysis - Nature Neuroscience
Neural activity does not always lie in a low-dimensional subspace. The authors extend this classic view to show that task-relevant information is distributed across multiple covariability classes and ...
www.nature.com
May 6, 2025 at 3:01 AM
Reposted by Srividya Pattisapu
In a recent podcast @dyamins.bsky.social argues: "We want to be able to use the model of the digital brain as a neurobiomedical discovery and diagnostic design platform." neuroscience.stanford.edu/news/buildin... - That view is popular and I believe that there is a fundamental logical error. Thread
Building AI simulations of the human brain
In which Wu Tsai Neuro faculty scholar Dan Yamins explores how foundation models of the human brain could
neuroscience.stanford.edu
May 5, 2025 at 1:11 PM
Reposted by Srividya Pattisapu
Our award-winning news team is seeking an enthusiastic science reporting intern to join our lively newsroom in New York City. For more information or to apply, please visit: simonsfoundation.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/simons...

#neuroskyence #jobs
Science Reporting Intern, The Transmitter
The Transmitter offers up-to-date news and analysis of neuroscience and is dedicated to helping scientists at all career stages stay current and build connections. Our award-winning news team is seeki...
simonsfoundation.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com
April 30, 2025 at 4:47 PM
Reposted by Srividya Pattisapu
It's kinda obvious. #AGIComics has already figured out which brain region is the most important. 😇
April 27, 2025 at 8:56 PM