"A petavoxel fragment of human cerebral cortex reconstructed at nanoscale resolution" by Shapson-Coe et al. 2024 (Lichtman lab).
The reconstruction at its current state is already useful and very interesting. Here is to hoping the authors will put in more time and resources to further polish it.
A remarkable finding from Shapson-Coe et al. 2024 paper on human brain #connectomics: the presence of canalized connections in the human brain cortex. Canalized in the Kauffman boolean networks sense [1], which here means: among the many synaptic inputs that any one neuron integrates, some are far stronger (by number of synapses) than the rest.
[1] Canalisation as a term was introduced by Waddington in 1942 in the context of genetics to mean "some phenotypic traits are very robust to small perturbations" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canalisation_(genetics)
“Collaborative hunting in artificial agents with deep reinforcement learning” by Tsutsui et al. 2024.
“using computational multi-agent simulations based on deep reinforcement learning, we demonstrate that decisions underlying collaborative hunts do not necessarily rely on sophisticated cognitive processes.”
“This has implications for a reassessment, and perhaps a widening, of what groups of animals are believed to manifest cooperative hunting.”
This summer there will be four courses 😯:
Computational Neuroscience, NeuroAI, Deep Learning, and Computational Tools for Climate.
Mentors will hold a one-hour meeting every week with a small cohort of students, where they will discuss with them and help them progress in their journey in industry and academia.
Depuis l'invention du #cinéma, les grands réalisateurs savent captiver et émouvoir le public en manipulant les images et les sons. Des chercheurs en #neuroscience ont voulu comprendre ce qui se passe dans le cerveau lorsqu’on regarde un film, un domaine d’études appelé le #neurocinéma. Ces découvertes #scientifiques sont maintenant reprises par des cinéastes afin de réaliser des films encore plus puissants qu’avant.
Seeing the Mind: Spectacular Images from Neuroscience, and What They Reveal about Our Neuronal Selves by Stanislas Dehaene, 2023
A lavishly illustrated and accessibly explained deep dive into the major new findings from cognitive neuroscience.
Who are we? To this age-old question, contemporary neuroscience gives a simple answer: we are exquisite neuronal machines.
"Schreckstoff: It takes two to panic", a dispatch by @MarcusStensmyr 2024
"Schreckstoff (fear substance) is an alarm signal released by injured fish that induces a fear response. Its chemical nature has long been debated. A new study finds that zebrafish Schreckstoff is composed of at least three components, two of which elicit the fear response only in combination."
Happy birthday to #neurologist Santiago Ramón y Cajal (1852 - 1934), here in front of Purkinje and granule cells from a pigeon, based on one of his own drawings! Cajal &Golgi won the Nobel in 1906, "in recognition of their work on the structure of the nervous system". He was as much of an artist as he was a scientist & his 100s of drawings are still used for teaching purposes.
🧵1/n
#sciart#linocut#printmaking#histstm#PurkinjeCell#neuroscience#MastoArt
Spanish neuroscientist Santiago Ramón y Cajal was born #OTD in 1852.
His most significant contribution to science was his work on the structure of the nervous system. Through meticulous microscopic observations, he proposed that the nervous system is made up of "neurons". His drawings highlighted the complex arborizations of these cells, effectively mapping various parts of the brain & spinal cord, demonstrating the directional flow of nerve impulses in neurons.
If you’ve ever been out in the woods and sworn you’ve heard someone call your name, you might not be going crazy — just experiencing a condition called “auditory pareidolia.” Live Science explains more about this phenomenon of hearing intelligible voices or sounds in meaningless background noise. https://flip.it/KbQ8o- #Science#Hearing#Health#Mind#NeuroScience
Great write-up by @annaleen on the modern history of the pseudoscience of "brainwashing" and how it has been (/tried to be) used for mostly nefarious ends.
We can say this "psychopolitics" is part and parcel of what the great political scientist Richard Hofstadter termed the "paranoid style in American politics".
Awesome to see a mention of Liang Qichao and how his term "xinao" (wash-brain) which meant modernization was usurped and became a negative connotation. He was one of the great early reformers who wanted to modernize Chinese philosophy by seeking a radical break from Confucianism. Pankaj Mishra's "From the ruins of empire" does a great job of his intellectual response to western imperialism in remaking Asia.
First time also hearing/reading about "stochastic terrorism".
How the insect centre for learning and memory, the mushroom body, evolves. By Farnworth et al. 2024, using the example of "the Heliconiini (Nymphalidae), which show extensive variation in mushroom body size over comparatively short phylogenetic timescales, linked to specific changes in foraging ecology, life history and cognition."
Some key findings:
number of GABA cells change, concomitant with increase in Kenyon Cell number;
The honeybee brain hosts over 600,000 neurons, at a density higher than that of mammalian brains:
"Our estimate of total brain cell number for the European honeybee (Apis mellifera;
≈ 6.13 × 10^5, s = 1.28 × 10^5; ...) was lower than the existing estimate from brain sections ≈ 8.5 × 10^5"
"the highest neuron densities have been found in the smallest respective species examined (smoky shrews in mammals; 2.08 × 10^5 neurons mg^−1 [14] and goldcrests in birds; 4.9 × 10^5 neurons mg^−1 [16]). The Hymenoptera in our sample have on average higher cell densities than vertebrates (5.94 × 10^5 cells mg^−1; n = 30 species)."
Ants, on the other hand ...
"ants stand out from bees and wasps as having particularly small brains by measures of mass and cell number."
I'm happy to present the last paper from my thesis!
Lisa Li and I set out to build a model of fly walking which is based on 3D kinematics data, handles perturbations, and includes sensorimotor delays. (This was supervised by Bing Brunton and @tuthill )
We set up a new modeling framework, generated fly walking with kinematics matched to real data, a simple metric for quantifying similarity of trajectories, and found constraints on delays for robust walking!