Laureline Logiaco @LaurelineLogiaco@qoto.org

We are hiring a new postdoc in cerebellar imaging! Come join the imaging group that is most serious and obsessed about the most irrelevant (according to some) part of the brain :-)

https://diedrichsenlab.org/open_postdoc_cerebellum.htm

@NicoleCRust
I think some of the most exciting ideas in neuroscience start out as half-baked ideas that where 'not even wrong'.

But I think we should have a time-limit on them. 5 years I'd say. If a new idea still doesn't make any testable prediction after 5 years of being written about and discussed, maybe it wasn't such a good idea after all.

My prime example: "The cerebellum is a forward model for motor control and cognition". A really cool idea, influential, and has motivated tons of experiments. However, it has also become clear that without additional specifying assumptions the idea in itself does not make actual predictions - or can 'predict' anything.

So we need to stop pretending that "cerebellum is a forward model" is a theory - it's not. It's a hazy make-me-feel-good notion that may become testable with additional assumptions - and it is those assumption that form the real theory.

Mind blown yesterday by George Sugihara, who explained that variables can causally influence one another but also be uncorrelated. It happens with a Lorenz attractor, where variables flip between correlated and anticorrelated (so no net correlation). Video here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6i57udsPKms

These types of mirage correlations that come and go also happens in the wild - such as in the factors that combine to form the red tide and in gene expression networks.

Hi all 😃​
Our latest #Review on #SplitterCells is now published in @eLife !!
I will probably write a real thread on it when I get a chance... for now:

link: https://elifesciences.org/articles/82357

why: some neurons in the #Hippocampus (and other brain regions) of #Rats (and other mammals) have the fascinating ability to discriminate not just different presents, but different past or future states or trajectories in the same current situation. They could be related to #EpisodicMemory or #DecisionMaking 🤔​They are called 'trajectory-dependent cells' or Splitter Cells. 🔀​ We tried to make sense of them!

what: Hippocampal Splitter cells do a lot of puzzling stuff. For example there's a lot of them even in tasks that do not require the Hippocampus to be solved. They spread asymmetrically on a linear track leading to a choice point - 'past' splitters around the start and 'future' splitters towards the choice point. #TimeCells cells can be splitter cells (but they're usually #PlaceCells). Splitter cells evolve with experience, or maybe it is performance, nobody really knows. ​⁉️​ ... and a lot more weird stuff

conclusion: Two different computational models, the temporal context model and the latent state model, each explain a subset of the properties of splitter cells... so perhaps the Hippocampus implements both! But more experiments are needed to disentangle them 😄​

now what: questions or comments? Please let us know!! ✍️​

#Neuroscience #Cognition #NeuroPaper

Delighted to write a preview w/@sainsbury_tom in Cell about the latest cool finding from Yang, Kanodia & Silvia Arber about the cortical control of brain stem during forelimb behaviors https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1gNBfL7PXiqy8

What happens when you give Recurrent Neural Networks brain-inspired constraints of 3D spatial structure & neural communication during learning?

🧠🌐🤖

In our new project we show typical structural & functional #neuroscience motifs like modularity, small-worldness, functional clusters, mixed selectivity & efficiency emerge in these spatially-embedded RNNs

#Preprint
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.11.17.516914v1

#PaperThread / Summary
https://www.jachterberg.com/seRNN

#AI #neuralnetwork #NeuroAI #RNN #newpaper @neuroscience

🚨 Our story on a AI-inspired model of cerebro-cerebellar networks is now out in @NatureComms with a few (useful) updates after peer review:
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-35658-8
---
RT @somnirons
New preprint by @boven_ellen @JoePemberton9 with Paul Chadderton and Richard Apps @BristolNeuroscience! Inspired by DL algorithms @maxjaderberg @DeepMind we propose that the cerebellum provides the cerebrum with task-specific feedback pred…
https://twitter.com/somnirons/status/1493881849055227906

🧠🐒🐐🦘🦙🦌🐷🐻‍❄️🦫🦁🐑🐇🐈🦔🐕🦇🦭🦥🦓
We’ve been diving into the mesmerising anatomical diversity and evolution of cerebellar folding across 56 mammalian species with @r3rt0 Nicolas Traut @AleAliSousa @sofievalk
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.12.30.522292v1

Check it out in a short tooting thread 🔽

2022 saw a whirlwind of #neuroAI research. Brain Dall-E. Neurons in a dish playing pong. GPT predicts how brains process language. I read through a bunch of papers so you don't have to. Read my review of 2022. Featuring the work of @kordinglab , @tyrell_turing , @TimKietzmann and many others.

https://xcorr.net/2023/01/01/2022-in-review-neuroai-comes-of-age/

Is there yet a mastodon alternative for #tweeprint?
Anyway, here goes a #mastoprint 🪩

"Evaluating the statistical similarity of neural network activity and connectivity via eigenvector angles"

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biosystems.2022.104813
#NeuralNetworks #Neuroscience #Statistics #CompNeuro

I'm very excited to finally see this published. Let me tell you about it:
🧵 1/5

No wonder I always feel like the end gets further away the more I walk towards it. 🤔

Hippocampal spatial representations exhibit a hyperbolic geometry that expands with experience https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-022-01212-4

#Introduction
Hi all, I'm a spatial cognition postdoctoral researcher and will post about rats (like these), #PlaceCells (yes it's a new hashtag) and other cool things that the #Hippocampus does, as well as random stuff.

If I have bad habits from "that other site", please help me correct them, and as a Mastodon newbie, do send me your tips or tutorials!

PS: do rats need content warning?

Academics in psychology, neuroscience, cognitive science, etc.: I've created a repository for our accounts to help people find and bulk-follow each other on mastodon:
https://kaitclark.github.io/mastodon-psychology/

Please let me know if you want to be added!

(based on the repository by https://social.tchncs.de/@perspektivbrocken in Sociology)

An examination of over 1 million funding proposals to the National Science Foundation from 1996 to 2019 reveals that white principal investigators are consistently funded at higher rates than most non-white PIs and relative funding rates for white PIs have been increasing. https://elifesciences.org/articles/83071?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=organic_features