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…

#cosyne2020, by the numbers

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…

#CCN2019 by the numbers

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…

An ethology reading list

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…

Please help me identify neuroscientists hired as tenure-track assistant profs in the 2018-19 faculty job season

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 a…

#Cosyne19, by the numbers

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…

Interesting neuro/ML discussions on twitter, 1/9/19

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 paperis, if a…

Can we even understand what the responses of a neuron ‘represent’?

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?

There…

Monday Open Question: what did you need to do to get a neuroscience job in 2018?

[Link to rumblr]

See last year’s post.

First, I put up a poll on the neurorumblr twitter account to see what conceptions people had about being hired in neuroscience. I’m going to give answers a bit out of order. First, what percent of faculty job applicants do you think are male?

https://twitter.com/NeuroRumblr/status/1019572664111980545

The median was 50-60% (roughly even) with a heavy tail…

NeuroRumblr, 2018 – 2019

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 I refresh the list yearly, so if you have added yourself in the past you should fill out the form again for the new season. If you are on a faculty committee, please feel free to…

Thoughts on freedom of will

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 of decisions)

State/neural dynamics are unpredictable in the future

Accessibility of internal state

Web of concepts

Feedforwa…

Please help me identify neuroscientists hired as tenure-track assistant profs in the 2017-18 faculty job season

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 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 a faculty job.

Learn by consuming the brains of your enemies

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 to untrained snails, the animals behaved as if they remembered the trained snails’ experiences…

In experiments by Dr. Glanzman and colleagues, when…

Controversial topics in Neuroscience

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 primate cortex which is more specialized

“The brain does deep learning”

Deep learning units aren’t exactly like neurons, plus we resent the hype…

What HASN’T Deep Learning replicated from the brain?

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 (so that you can see in very bright and very dark environments. This was originally shown very nicely in two papers from Atick and Redlich (1990, 1992). Essentially, you…