Cool results from Jieyu Zheng and Rogério Guimarães on rapid learning and generalization when mice navigate a new maze. Check out this video for an appetizer: youtu.be/ULZqNH9vWPA. Then come see their poster at #SfN2022 (VV10, 237.06)!

First report from an international collaboration to find magnetosensitive neurons. See our poster at #SfN2022 (551.09, X7). Includes an opportunity to stimulate the (putative) magnetoreceptors in your own retina! And an easy way to join the project.

TENSS 2023: a new iteration of a fun summer adventure. interested in building your own tools for discovery? discussing ideas on how the brain works? don't let it linger...apply! tenss.ro

New paper on visual response types among neurons in the superior colliculus of the mouse. Headlines: less functional diversity than in the retina + strange anatomical clustering of same-type cells. doi.org/10.7554/eLife.… eLife - the journal

Just finished reading "Models of the mind" by Grace Lindsay Grace Lindsay. Learned many things! Recommended it as a companion to our mathematical neuroscience course. More comments in this blogpost markusmeister.com/2023/04/.

Another problem: Glamour journals seduce scientists to submit eye-poppingly improbable claims, send them through perfunctory peer review, and then publish them as click bait. The reproducibility of this Sciency stuff is <50%, not because of overt fraud.

Imagine you're a struggling early-career pseudoscientist. Then one morning, out of the blue, you find the work you care about compared to Integrated Information Theory. That's harsh!

Hilarious prank! MIT students stealing Caltech branding for a fake university. Hey we're launching our own catholic school, and here's the logo. What do you think?

For more on our use of AI, check out these fake pictures we made of our students: apply.catholic.tech, apply.catholic.tech/contact (we don't have any real students). Still trying to get the app to draw the correct number of fingers, and books with straight edges...

Calling in the PI to fix faulty equipment. But only after exhausting all other options...

A few days ago, the journal eLife published a self-study on the first year of its new publishing model, and it is well worth a look. Here are some notes based on my own experience with the journal as author and reviewing editor: markusmeister.com/2024/03/17/a-y….

No neuronal fMRI after all. Impressive work from Jasanoff group debunking the recent glam report on "DIANA". Traced the claim down to a subtle artifact of pulse timing in MRI. On the plus side: DIANA is a cool acronym, now available again for other uses. science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…

Are you ready to question your beliefs about hippocampus and cortex? See Jieyu Zheng and Rogério Guimarães at #CCN2024.

Why is reality so slow? Why can we only have one thought at a time? Why do we need so many neurons? Will Elon Musk's Neuralink really speed up his cognition? For answers and more questions check out our new review: "The Unbearable Slowness of Being". arxiv.org/abs/2408.10234

This paper seems to be getting read, thank you! As Jieyu Zheng says, we're very interested in questions/comments/critiques. Maybe using this new discussion platform: alphaxiv.org/abs/2408.10234.