neuroecology

I wanted to know how to find other scientists doing similar (but different!) work to me. I like to think that I know most of the people working on nearby topics, but what about people who take similar approaches on totally different problems? There were a lot of good suggestions (especially the neuromatch algorithm), but I want to highlight two in particular: Michael Hendricks mentioned the Journ…

I was curious how people got into neuroscience. Random happenstance? A lifelong love of gap junctions? So I asked about it on twitter and got hundreds of responses. I did a quick analysis of about half the responses, putting them in different categories. It quickly became clear that certain themes were popping up again and again: It doesn’t surprise me too much that a lot of people became interes…

Cosyne is the largest COmputational and SYstems NEuroscience conference. Many many years ago, I thought it would be a good idea to study the conference. Who goes? Who dominates the conference? If this is the place where people come to exchange ideas, it is useful to know who is doing that and who is dominating the conversation. The first thing I look at is who is most active (who is an author on …

I am in Berlin for the Cognitive Computational Neuroscience (CCN) conference. It is an interesting collection of people working on more human (though some animal) cognitive neuroscience, often using neural network models. In its third year, CCN is an interesting contrast to Cosyne, a conference more focused on traditional systems neuroscience along with computational modeling. While I’m here, I t…

At a meeting in New York last week [edit: many months ago by the time I got around to posting this], we were discussing the recent push in neuroscience for more naturalistic behaviors. One of the problems, someone pointed out, is that they are difficult to analyze. But surely there must be whole fields devoted to understanding natural behaviors? Why do we, as neuroscientists, not interact with th…

For the past two years, I tried to crowd-source a complete list of everyone who got hired into a neuroscience faculty job over the previous year. I think the list has almost everyone who was hired in the US… let’s see if we can do better this year? I posted an analysis of some of the results here – one of the key “surprises” was that no, you don’t actually need a Cell/Nature/Science paper to get …

As some of you might know, there’s been a lot of tumult surrounding this year’s Cosyne (Computational and Systems Neuroscience) conference. The number of submissions skyrocketed from the year before and the rejection rate went from something like 40% to something like 60% – there were over 1000 abstracts submitted! Even crazier, there is a waitlist to even register for the conference. So what has…

It seems like it might be useful to catalogue the interesting twitter threads that pop up from time to time. They can be hard to parse and easy to miss but there is a lot of interesting and useful stuff. I am going to focus on *scientific result*-related threads. I don’t know if this will be useful – consider it an experiment. Click on the tweets to read more of the threads. (Click below the fold…

Everyone should tweet about their science. Not only will other scientists on Twitter see it, but plenty of other scientists who are not active on Twitter – but pay attention to it! – will see it as well. But the way that you write your tweet will make a huge difference in the amount of attention it gets. No matter how interesting your science is, no matter how finely crafted your paper is, if a t…

tl;dr: - Deep neural networks are forcing us to rethink what it means to understand what a neuron is doing - Does it make sense to talk about a neuron representing a single feature instead of a confluence of features (a la Kording)? Is understanding the way a neuron responds in one context good enough? - If a neural response is correlated with something in the environment, does it represent it? -…

See last year’s post. As always, if you are a postdoc looking for a faculty job I maintain the neurorumblr with crowdsourced information on open jobs + helpful information. You should also add yourself to The List which lets faculty search committees contact you. … Continue reading →

Quick announcement – I’ve refreshed the NeuroRumblr for the 2018 – 2019 job season. If you are a postdoc looking for an academic job, add yourself to The List so that search committees can reach out to you. Note that … Continue reading →

Some rough notes from a personal attempt to clarify my own thinking. Consider this a work-in-progress and probably wrong. Principles underlying feeling of freedom of will (note that this is different from freedom of action or actual agency): Bayesian updating (distribution … Continue reading →

Last year, I tried to crowd-source a complete list of everyone who got hired into a neuroscience faculty job over the previous year. I think the list has almost everyone who was hired in the US… let’s see if we … Continue reading →

A few people have sent this my way and asked about it: In a paper published Monday in the journal eNeuro, scientists at the University of California-Los Angeles reported that when they transferred molecules from the brain cells of trained snails … Continue reading →

Twitter thread here. Do mice use vision much? They have pretty crappy eyesight and their primary mode of exploration seems to be olfactory/whisker-based How much is mouse cortex like primate cortex? Mouse cortex is claimed to be more multimodal than … Continue reading →

The brain represents the world in particular ways. Here are a few: 1. The visual world on the retina The retina is thought to whiten images, or transform them so that they always have roughly the same average, maximum and minimum … Continue reading →

In my opinion, THE most important shift in neuroscience over the past few years has been the focus on how behavior changes neural function across the whole brain. Even the sensory systems – supposedly passive passers-on of perfectly produced pictures … Continue reading →

How many types of neurons are in the brain? Not just number, but classes that represent some fundamental unit of computation? I tweeted an article about this a couple days ago and (justly) got pilloried for saying it counted classes in the brain rather … Continue reading →

The pessimist: These quotes give you a sense of these two books, both of which build on what Alan Richardson calls “one of the great lessons of the cognitive revolution”: “just how much of mental life remains closed to introspection.” … Continue reading →