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neurophysics.bsky.social
@neurophysics.bsky.social
190 followers 840 following 17 posts
Arbores cerebro sunt radices mentis

A place to discuss:

Neurophysics
Causality
Natural and Synthetic Intelligence
Mind-Body Metaphysics
Philosophy of Mind, Science, and Physics

https://linktr.ee/neurophysics

Account run by:
@wisam.bsky.social
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neurophysics.bsky.social
neurophysics.bsky.social @neurophysics.bsky.social · Dec 10
Reading and discussing Peter Tse's new paper "Ontological conceptions of information cannot account
for consciousness" at 7 PM EST tonight on Clubhouse. Come listen in or join the discussion!

Event link (will link to the recording after the event):
tinyurl.com/Tse-Info-Ont...
Information Ontology Cannot Account for Consciousness - Clubhouse
Reading Peter Tse’s paper “Ontological Conceptions of Information Cannot Account for Consciousness”
tinyurl.com
Reposted
dlevenstein.bsky.social
The basal forebrain plays the cortex like a piano.
A cholinergic mechanism orchestrating task-dependent computation across the cortex
In an ever-changing environment, animals often need to switch between performing different tasks involving distinct sets of cognitive processes. Many such tasks involve neural activity distributed acr...
www.biorxiv.org
November 28, 2025 at 5:51 PM
Reposted
quantamagazine.bsky.social
Anticipating seasons may have emerged early in life’s evolution. It may have even predated the internal clocks that give an organism a sense of day and night.
Even a Single Bacterial Cell Can Sense the Seasons Changing | Quanta Magazine
Though they live only a few hours before dividing, bacteria can anticipate the approach of cold weather and prepare for it. The discovery suggests that seasonal tracking is fundamental to life.
www.quantamagazine.org
November 28, 2025 at 9:04 PM
Reposted
markjamesadams.bsky.social
One for the heredity scolds: construct a multi-tissue GRM where people
are differentially related to themselves.

www.nature.com/articles/d41...
We are all mosaics: vast genetic diversity found between cells in a single person
Technical advances allow researchers to trace the genetic changes that occur over time.
www.nature.com
November 28, 2025 at 10:16 AM
Reposted
philipcball.bsky.social
What a great story from Heidi. "“We need a molecular definition of what is normal.” In the light of this work, one has to wonder if the molecular is the right place to look for that at all.
November 28, 2025 at 10:53 AM
Reposted
nataliepeluso.com
🧠👀
'These findings reveal high-dimensional aspects of cortical representation undetectable with conventional methods, such as RSA, & contradict previous theories suggesting that high-level visual cortex representations are low-dimensional.' #neuroskyence

journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...
Universal scale-free representations in human visual cortex
Author summary The human cerebral cortex is thought to encode sensory information in population activity patterns, but the statistical structure of these population codes has yet to be characterized. ...
journals.plos.org
November 27, 2025 at 10:35 PM
Reposted
ribeirocarlitos.bsky.social
Thrilled to share our new paper!
With @tomtom-auer.bsky.social team, we asked how #evolution reshapes what animals #eat to match their ecological niches. Using pan-neuronal Ca2+ imaging, we show that the changes are in how the brain processes #taste.
Link @nature.com: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Evolution of taste processing shifts dietary preference - Nature
Calcium imaging of taste neurons and the ventral brain provides insight into evolutionary divergence of food choice in Drosophila species, supporting a role of sensorimotor processing in addition to p...
www.nature.com
November 26, 2025 at 4:33 PM
Reposted
coltoncasto.bsky.social
What does it mean to understand language? We argue that the brain’s core language system is limited, and that *deeply* understanding language requires EXPORTING info to other brain regions.
w/ @neuranna.bsky.social @evfedorenko.bsky.social @nancykanwisher.bsky.social
arxiv.org/abs/2511.19757
1/n🧵👇
What does it mean to understand language?
Language understanding entails not just extracting the surface-level meaning of the linguistic input, but constructing rich mental models of the situation it describes. Here we propose that because pr...
arxiv.org
November 26, 2025 at 4:26 PM
Reposted
What a privilege and a delight to work with @coltoncasto.bsky.social @ev_fedorenko and @neuranna
on this new speculative piece on What it means to understand language, nicely summarized in this
Tweeprint from @coltoncasto.bsky.social arxiv.org/abs/2511.19757
November 26, 2025 at 4:34 PM
Reposted
thetransmitter.bsky.social
During the later stages of learning, the mouse brain progressively activates transcriptional regulators that drive memory consolidation.

By @claudia-lopez.bsky.social

www.thetransmitter.org/memory/to-pe...

#neuroskyence
To persist, memories surf molecular waves from thalamus to cortex
During the later stages of learning, the mouse brain progressively activates transcriptional regulators that drive memory consolidation.
www.thetransmitter.org
November 26, 2025 at 4:11 PM
Reposted
shariliu.bsky.social
New perspective paper (w/ @sedaakbiyik.bsky.social, Joseph Outa, & @minjaek.bsky.social ) in @natrevpsychol.nature.com ⚽💭🧠👶 : www.nature.com/articles/s44...
How physical information is used to make sense of the psychological world - Nature Reviews Psychology
Reasoning about minds and reasoning about physical objects are governed by two distinct systems. In this Perspective, Liu et al. review research from developmental psychology and cognitive neuroscienc...
www.nature.com
November 24, 2025 at 11:14 PM
Reposted
thetransmitter.bsky.social
In @thetransmitter.bsky.social’s Rising Stars of Neuroscience 2025, we recognize 25 early-career researchers who have made outstanding scientific contributions and demonstrated a commitment to mentoring and community-building in neuroscience.

#neuroskyence #StateOfNeuroscience

bit.ly/4rnFnyQ
November 24, 2025 at 2:50 PM
Reposted
earlkmiller.bsky.social
Soon in Nature Comm. A biomimetic model NOT trained on data eerily matched neurophys data from animals performing the same task. It predicted a new neural property that was then found in the data! Plus, this model generated oscillatory rhythms that were functional.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
www.biorxiv.org
November 24, 2025 at 6:50 PM
Reposted
quantamagazine.bsky.social
Genome sequencing technology is introducing biologists to a world of quasi-life forms that they’ve never met before. @jakebuehler.bsky.social reports: www.quantamagazine.org/a-cell-so-mi...
A Cell So Minimal That It Challenges Definitions of Life | Quanta Magazine
The newly described microbe represents a world of parasitic, intercellular biodiversity only beginning to be revealed by genome sequencing.
www.quantamagazine.org
November 24, 2025 at 2:56 PM
Reposted
rdgao.bsky.social
hey I'm reposting this for no reason at all today...

www.cell.com/trends/cogni...
Processes and measurements: a framework for understanding neural oscillations in field potentials
Various neuroscientific theories maintain that brain oscillations are important for neuronal computation, but opposing views claim that these macroscale dynamics are ‘exhaust fumes’ of more relevant p...
www.cell.com
November 24, 2025 at 4:39 PM
Reposted
bensaunders.bsky.social
So excited to see our latest paper out today in @natcomms.nature.com! Studies led by the amazing @margestelzner.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41.... VTA GABA neurons have a unique role in economic decision making - they integrate reward seeking motivation and the current cost of seeking
Ventral tegmental area GABA neurons integrate positive and negative valence - Nature Communications
The role of ventral tegmental area GABA neurons in behavior is unclear. Here, authors show that VTA GABA but not dopamine neurons integrate positive and negative valence to encode motivational conflic...
www.nature.com
November 24, 2025 at 4:18 PM
Reposted
earlkmiller.bsky.social
Time, space, memory and brain–body rhythms
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
#neuroscience
Time, space, memory and brain–body rhythms - Nature Reviews Neuroscience
Understanding how the brain represents experienced time and how representations of space and time are integrated to form episodic memories has been a goal of much neuroscientific research. In this Per...
www.nature.com
November 22, 2025 at 7:46 PM
Reposted
matthiasmichel.bsky.social
New paper: Transcranial Focused Ultrasound for Identifying the Neural Substrate of Conscious Perception. With Dan Freeman, @brianodegaard.bsky.social, and Seung-Schik Yoo. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Transcranial Focused Ultrasound for Identifying the Neural Substrate of Conscious Perception
Identifying what aspects of brain activity are responsible for conscious perception remains one of the most challenging problems in science. While pro…
www.sciencedirect.com
November 22, 2025 at 4:03 PM
Reposted
sashagusevposts.bsky.social
I wrote a little bit about the "missing heritability" question and several recent studies that have brought it to a close. A short 🧵
The missing heritability question is now (mostly) answered
Not with a bang but with a whimper
theinfinitesimal.substack.com
November 21, 2025 at 10:34 PM
Reposted
achterbrain.bsky.social
Brains have many pathways / subnetworks but which principles underlie their formation?

In our #NeurIPS paper lead by Jack Cook we identify biologically relevant inductive biases that create pathways in brain-like Mixture-of-Experts models🧵

#neuroskyence #compneuro #neuroAI
arxiv.org/abs/2506.02813
November 21, 2025 at 12:01 PM
Reposted
earlkmiller.bsky.social
When someone says, "epiphenominal", I hear, "doesn't fit my theory". I'm not going to tell the brain how it works. I'm going to let the brain tell me how it works. If your theory can't explain the data, the problem is the theory, not the data.
November 20, 2025 at 10:05 PM
Reposted
earlkmiller.bsky.social
There is no evidence that spikes alone or oscillations alone are functional. Nor can there be. They are inseparable. They both correlate with function (but can give different messages). People who think it's only spikes are ignoring basic physics and artificially pulling apart a unified syatem
November 20, 2025 at 9:50 PM
Reposted
kordinglab.bsky.social
As we are having a discussion on neural codes: @earlkmiller.bsky.social is entirely right that the "only spike rates matter" idea that is so prominent in neuroscience has no credible evidence. We simply do not currently know how neurons code relevant information. Oscillations are likely part of it.
November 20, 2025 at 9:19 PM
Reposted
earlkmiller.bsky.social
New paper! Brains stretch representations along task-relevant dimensions. Spike timing is important.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
#neuroscience
Adaptive stretching of representations across brain regions and deep learning model layers - Nature Communications
How the brain adapts its representations to prioritize task-relevant information remains unclear. Here, the authors show that both monkey brains and deep learning models stretch neural representations...
www.nature.com
November 21, 2025 at 2:44 PM
Reposted
philipcball.bsky.social
In my latest column for @thenewworldmag.bsky.social I discuss the mixed legacy of James Watson. I have something longer in the works on this.
www.thenewworld.co.uk/philip-ball-...
James Watson's bigoted beliefs can't be neatly separated from his science
As was often the case before our villains became cartoonish, Watson’s flaws were complex
www.thenewworld.co.uk
November 21, 2025 at 10:17 AM
Reposted
hansonmark.bsky.social
We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing:

a 🧵 1/n

Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820
Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
A table showing profit margins of major publishers. A snippet of text related to this table is below. 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year. A figure detailing the drain on researcher time. 1. The four-fold drain 1.2 Time The number of papers published each year is growing faster than the scientific workforce, with the number of papers per researcher almost doubling between 1996 and 2022 (Figure 1A). This reflects the fact that publishers’ commercial desire to publish (sell) more material has aligned well with the competitive prestige culture in which publications help secure jobs, grants, promotions, and awards. To the extent that this growth is driven by a pressure for profit, rather than scholarly imperatives, it distorts the way researchers spend their time. The publishing system depends on unpaid reviewer labour, estimated to be over 130 million unpaid hours annually in 2020 alone (9). Researchers have complained about the demands of peer-review for decades, but the scale of the problem is now worse, with editors reporting widespread difficulties recruiting reviewers. The growth in publications involves not only the authors’ time, but that of academic editors and reviewers who are dealing with so many review demands. Even more seriously, the imperative to produce ever more articles reshapes the nature of scientific inquiry. Evidence across multiple fields shows that more papers result in ‘ossification’, not new ideas (10). It may seem paradoxical that more papers can slow progress until one considers how it affects researchers’ time. While rewards remain tied to volume, prestige, and impact of publications, researchers will be nudged away from riskier, local, interdisciplinary, and long-term work. The result is a treadmill of constant activity with limited progress whereas core scholarly practices – such as reading, reflecting and engaging with others’ contributions – is de-prioritized. What looks like productivity often masks intellectual exhaustion built on a demoralizing, narrowing scientific vision. A table of profit margins across industries. The section of text related to this table is below: 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year. The costs of inaction are plain: wasted public funds, lost researcher time, compromised scientific integrity and eroded public trust. Today, the system rewards commercial publishers first, and science second. Without bold action from the funders we risk continuing to pour resources into a system that prioritizes profit over the advancement of scientific knowledge.
November 11, 2025 at 11:52 AM