Timothy O'Leary @Timothy0Leary Twitter profile

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Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

2 months

C elegans has 302 neurons. Show me an artificial neural net with 302 units that can do everything a worm can.

Nat Friedman

@natfriedman

2 months

Crows have about 1.5B neurons. Assuming each neuron connects to ~7k other neurons on average, that's roughly equivalent to 10T parameters in an artificial neural network. Is this a useful analogy?

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Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

11 months

Can we introduce the concept of "fake rigor"? e.g. demanding gratuitous analyses/experiments, or arbitrary levels of modelling detail in situations that will make no material difference? And while doing these, failing to recognise fundamental flaws in the overall question?

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Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

5 years

As a PhD student I was always nervous about smart peer reviewers finding problems in my research that I missed. As an advisor I now realise the stupid peer reviewers are infinitely more terrifying.

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Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

3 years

"Unfortunately this PhD funding is only open to UK students" I have written this to around 20-30 brilliant young people around the world in the last two months. I'm sure they will do great things. It is just a shame they can't do them in this country.

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Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

4 years

To everyone doing a PhD: it's hard. It's hard in ways that aren't obvious until you are deep into a question. You may not even know the question until you answer it. You'll understand the question better than anyone but you won't realise that either. This makes it a lonely path.

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Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

1 year

We locked ~100 neuroscientists in a building somewhere near the Potomac river and asked them what they thought about Representational Drift. Here’s how they leaned on the Philosophical, Mechanistic and Practical levels:

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Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

3 months

are neurons noisy? or does the noise come from the neuroscientists?

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Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

2 months

As a grad student I was told ANNs were an unprincipled waste of time, and that serious ML research (e.g. that deployed in industry) used SVMs, Gaussian Processes etc. The bitter lesson seems to be that we aren't smart enough to know what works, so we should research *broadly*.

Irina Rish

@irinarish

2 months

It's mind-boggling that many AI researchers are still not quite aware of this Bitter Lesson. Unbelievably hard to overcome this mental attitude of sticking to small models/data and focusing on overly complex models/methods. Especially in academia...

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Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

11 months

What are the top 3 unsolved problems in neuroscience? Technical or scientific.

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Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

3 years

Young & aspiring researchers & students everywhere: though it may feel intimidating, you never, never need to apologise for emailing another researcher out of the blue to discuss science or propose a research project. Be reassured: these emails are gems amongst all the spam.

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Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

10 months

I'm excited to be taking on a new role as Reviewing Editor for J Neurosci, where I want to help build up the journal's representation of computational and theoretical neuroscience. Send us your best!

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Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

3 years

Turns out that publishing tons and tons of papers might actually be slowing down scientific progress... who knew? Slowed canonical progress in large fields of science

Slowed canonical progress in large fields of science | PNAS

In many academic fields, the number of papers published each year has increased significantly over time. Policy measures aim to increase the quanti...

www.pnas.org

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Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

11 months

Neuroscientist: we ignore the role of glia in neural circuit function Theoretical neuroscientist: ok I've relabelled a bunch of units as "glia" - are you happy now?

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Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

4 years

What proportion of baseline synaptic fluctuations is attributable to noise vs systematic plasticity processes? Surprisingly, to maintain memories the optimal proportion typically lets noise dominate!

Optimal synaptic dynamics for memory maintenance in the presence of noise

Synaptic connections in many brain areas have been found to fluctuate significantly, with substantial turnover and remodelling occurring over hours to days. Remarkably, this flux in connectivity...

www.biorxiv.org

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Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

1 year

Representational drift as a window into neural and behavioural plasticity

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Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

11 months

For the 1000th time: HOMEOSTASIS DOES NOT IMPLY OR REQUIRE ANY SPECIFIC PHYSIOLOGICAL VARIABLE TO BE HELD CONSTANT. Unless of course you need a handy straw man to make a paper or grant appealing.

Are physiological oscillations physiological?

Abstract figure legend Mechanisms and functions of physiological oscillations.

physoc.onlinelibrary.wiley.com

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Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

2 years

Self-healing codes: How stable neural populations can track continually reconfiguring neural representations We asked whether a continually evolving neural representation can be read out by circuits with more rigid tuning....

Self-healing codes: How stable neural populations can track continually reconfiguring neural...

As an adaptive system, the brain must retain a faithful representation of the world while continuously integrating new information. Recent experime...

www.pnas.org

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Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

1 year

I'm bewildered. The argument here seems to be that if a statistical model of a phenomenon provides accurate predictions, then this is evidence that the phenomenon itself is nothing more than that same statistical model + the means used to fit it.

Russ Poldrack

@russpoldrack

1 year

I seriously can’t remember reading a paper that excited me as much as this one did. It is such a distillation of our current moment and so beautifully done.

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Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

3 years

Synapses carry a lot of the burden of learning and memory, yet they are tiny bags of jelly subject to wild fluctuations in the molecules they are built from. How can reliable decisions to potentiate/depress emerge in such a small, noisy system? #tweeprint

Autoregulation of switching behavior by cellular compartment size

Many kinds of cellular compartments comprise decision making mechanisms that control growth and shrinkage of the compartment in response to external signals. Key examples include synaptic plasticity...

www.biorxiv.org

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Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

5 years

Adding apparently redundant neurons and connections to a network can boost learning performance. This is because redundancy 'flattens out' the error landscape, making it easier to descend.

Fundamental bounds on learning performance in neural circuits | PNAS

How does the size of a neural circuit influence its learning performance? Larger brains tend to be found in species with higher cognitive function ...

www.pnas.org

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Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

5 years

Dear Peer Reviewers When did 'surprising' become a requisite for publishing a new and important finding? Was the discovery of the Higgs Boson surprising? Or the crystal structure of the potassium channel? Or the latest data dump from a neuropixels probe? Stick to your job.

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Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

7 months

@vectorgen You got offered a job and taken to a brewery and *that's* your worst seminar experience??

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Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

1 year

What is the most overloaded/abused technical term in neuroscience? I vote for "neuromodulation"

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Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

4 years

Stable task information from an unstable neural population

Analysis and modelling of sensorimotor neural activity shows how ongoing plasticity and appropriately tuned weights can cope with substantial ongoing changes in the neural code.

elifesciences.org

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Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

2 years

to restore a bit of cosmic justice I'd like to share this beautiful paper from Shahaf & Marom > 20 years ago that wasn't even cited by a certain recent paper in Neuron that has news outlets in a tizz:

Learning in Networks of Cortical Neurons

The results presented here demonstrate selective learning in a network of real cortical neurons. We focally stimulate the network at a low frequency (0.3–1 Hz) until a desired predefined response is...

www.jneurosci.org

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Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

4 years

Eve Marder on theory (and experiment): "it is important to not be fooled by complexity of method when evaluating the value of a scientific result."

Living Science: Theoretical musings

The best theory papers help experimentalists to identify which of their results might be general and to plan a path through the maze of all possible future experiments.

elifesciences.org

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Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

3 years

Why is daily life in New Zealand *not* headline news in UK? If more people in the UK could see the possibilities we'd be able to achieve this in a couple of months. Enforced lockdown for 6 weeks, vaccinations/tests targeting med/contact workers, full quarantine at border.

WicMar

@WicMar

4 years

@AnnaKorhonen3 In New Zealand we have been virus free 8 months out of 10. We live a normal life with big events, no restrictions on groups etc. We wear face masks on planes and public transport in Auckland only as a preventative measure. It is surreal to live here and I consider myself lucky.❤️

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Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

5 years

Are neural representations of learned tasks and environments stable? Should we expect the to be? We review the evidence and implications of unstable, continually drifting representations.

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Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

3 years

Efficient learning is not only about synaptic plasticity mechanisms: circuit architecture matters. The connectome of a neural circuit can boost learning performance, compensating for imperfections in plasticity mechanisms and/or noisy learning signals.

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Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

1 year

A lot of our research suffers from 60% ennui: you get about 60% to nailing a result then start doubting and telling yourself it is obvious, boring or otherwise worthless. It's a killer. Aside from ruthless self discipline or self belief, how do you cope with this?

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Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

3 years

We have this idea that we shouldn't "salami slice" our findings into multiple papers. I claim that this is largely misguided, and paradoxically stems from us valuing QUANTITY over quality, not the reverse. I also think this *might* be changing for the better. Here me out: (1/n)

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Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

6 years

Fundamental bounds on learning performance in neural circuits

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Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

1 year

With some regret I have resigned as reviewing editor at eLife. This wasn't done in protest, I just felt I couldn't continue with things as they are at the moment. In general I feel even more pessimistic and disempowered about scientific publishing. Frustrated and sad.

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Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

1 year

Maybe I'm naive but I don't understand the panic around this. If a tool writes some fluent, accurate text and an author reads, edits and oks it, who cares? Papers are about communication, they're not about inventing sentences that never existed before.

Eric Topol

@EricTopol

1 year

This week's editorial @Nature is on large language #AI models, such as #ChatGPT , in science, confronting critical issues

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Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

3 years

Optimal plasticity for memory maintenance during ongoing synaptic change A beautiful analysis led by my postdoc, Dhruva Raman (who will be on the job market soon - DM me!) @eLife

Optimal plasticity for memory maintenance during ongoing synaptic change

Simple mathematical reasoning shows that the large amount of synaptic turnover seen in many parts of the brain is in fact optimal for memory retention.

elifesciences.org

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Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

3 years

Representational Drift is unsurprising in the same way that synaptic plasticity is unsurprising: something must change when the brain learns. But this conclusion misses several important points:

John W. Krakauer

@blamlab

3 years

The Brain Isn’t Supposed to Change This Much - The Atlantic by ⁦ @edyong209 ⁩. Where I comment that I find the results a bit 🤷🏻‍♂️

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Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

2 years

I always force myself and my co-authors to try to write as clearly and accessibly as possible. I sometimes drive my students crazy. There's a debate about whether this really helps or whether scientists prefer clunky, jargon-laden tosh. Unfortunately:

Ten Simple (Empirical) Rules for Writing Science

journals.plos.org

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Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

4 years

If there was a groundbreaking theoretical result in neuroscience would we even recognise it?

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Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

3 months

Have a PhD (or nearly)? Want to come to Cambridge, UK to work on: (1) control for neural circuits? (2) spike-based computation? (3) brain-machine interfaces? (4) other :) ? We have space, projects, ideas and can help with a proposal (deadline May 15):

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Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

3 years

@KordingLab It should try to figure out which big questions it actually answered in the last decade.

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Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

2 years

I think perhaps the biggest point of confusion in neuroscience (all science?) is the use of "noise" sometimes it is a placeholder for variables that we are don't account for, while other times it refers to a genuinely random process both senses used interchangeably = confusion!

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Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

1 year

a couple of years ago I had a fuzzy suspicion that realtime feedback was missing from biological theories of learning - luckily some brilliant people have clarified that fuzz with what I think might be some of the most important research in decades:

The least-control principle for local learning at equilibrium

Equilibrium systems are a powerful way to express neural computations. As special cases, they include models of great current interest in both neuroscience and machine learning, such as deep...

arxiv.org

Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

4 years

@neuro_data @KordingLab @tdverstynen @danilobzdok @lakens @TonyZador @ylecun @criticalneuro @IrisVanRooij @neurograce @achristensen56 @AudeOliva @BlackInNeuro @BlackWomenInAI @tyrell_turing Feedback. (My serious answer)

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Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

1 year

Can someone please explain to me why editors at top journals can tell me that "in silico" work on neural circuits is not of broad interest while the rest of society is melting down over fears that superintelligent neural networks will take over the world?

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Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

1 year

dear peer reviewers everywhere, I really do appreciate your time and effort, but if "this idea has been put forward before" is grounds for rejecting a paper then we might as well pack up the science and go to the beach because we'd only be allowed one paper for each topic

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Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

4 years

Many of us are waiting long times to have manuscripts reviewed, particularly the last few months. Here are a few insights/observations from being an editor, reviewer and author - and still 'young' enough to remember what it feels like to bewildered by the peer review process 1/n

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Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

1 year

The joy of being truly interdisciplinary is that any time I get dismissed by neuroscientists as being "just an engineer" I can refer them to my engineering colleagues who will laugh and tell them I'm not an engineer. And vice versa.

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Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

3 years

Neuroscientists seem to frequently confuse: "systems-level" vs "reductionist" with "large vs small" systems-level thinking can be applied at the molecular, cellular, network, brain and social scales.

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Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

6 months

I have come to believe that building some kind of functioning robot should be a compulsory educational requirement for every neuroscientist.

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Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

1 year

The treaty of Verona has been signed. Don't ask me what it means.

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Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

3 years

An insidious fallout of the Human Brain Project is that many (computational) neuroscientists now have this knee jerk heuristic that asking questions about physiology, ion channels etc is evidence of unprincipled "detailed" modelling, as though HBP embodies such questions.

Uta Frith

@utafrith

3 years

Why have neuroscientists become salesmen? Time to get out of corporate hierarchy and self-promotion. Cries out for #Slowscience @ERC_Research @UKRI_News would do well to read the thoughtful and sobering review of @In -Silico-Film

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Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

1 year

Astrid Prinz and Eve Marder pointed out this basic fact 20 years ago in one of the simplest network architectures imaginable (and faced pointed derision and dismissal, including from her PhD advisor). Uncited. Will we ever learn?

Brian Cheung ✈️ #ICML2024

@thisismyhat

1 year

What if we benchmarked AI/neuroscience model comparisons using artificial NNs as ground truth instead of Brains? Presenting: "System Identification of neural systems: If we got it Right, would we know" at ICML this week. Work led by Yena Han, Tommy

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Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

1 year

The static over eLife's publishing model shows us that we don't need to worry about Big Journals enforcing gate-keeping and a broken peer review system: academics will willingly do this to themselves.

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Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

1 year

@earth_andrew so many of the responses make me sad - will we ever get (back?) to the point where people can follow their passions and curiosity because they are simply passionate and curious? our economics is slowly killing human creativity.

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Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

2 years

Interested in how neural representations evolve in time? Drift into our Janelia Conference in April. *Application deadline January 13*

Causes and Implications of Representational Drift

Organizers Andrew Fink, Columbia University Sue Ann Koay, Janelia Research Campus/HHMI Leenoy Meshulam, University of Washington Timothy O’Leary, University of Cambridge Carl Schoonover, Columbia

www.janelia.org

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Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

4 years

The more time that passes from finishing my thesis the prouder I am of what I achieved. It remains my best work, not because of citations and other BS, but because I completed it by transforming myself. I learned to trust my judgement & learned that ultimately that's all we have.

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Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

2 years

Why do neuroscientists keep asking whether X is causal for Y in situations where there is clear feedback between X and Y?

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Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

1 year

Apparently a paper that overturns Marr Albus theory and explains dense cerebellar activity is not enough of a conceptual advance for Neuron. I usually take editorial triage on the chin, but I have to wonder what *would* count as a big enough conceptual advance?

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Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

13 days

Claim: our research culture of 'productivity' (i.e. churning out papers) has the side effect of keeping straw men alive so that findings look like paradigm shifts. Net progress can be zero or even negative in the pursuit of healthy numbers. Can this be quantified? Tested? How?

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Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

1 year

I'm starting to wonder if I've been too dismissive of the Blue/Human Brain Project. I can begin to see important scientific use cases for this type of work and the infrastructure supporting it.

EPFL Blue Brain Project

@BlueBrainPjt

1 year

📢 #PreprintAlert Our state-of-the-art models of rat somatosensory cortex and hippocampus CA1 are out! These atlas-based, biophysically detailed models exhibit in vitro and in vivo-like activity and replicate laboratory experiments.

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Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

4 years

How do neurons move cargo like receptors & channels around complex morphologies to maintain function? Take a snapshot: you see cargo where you expect. Measure transported cargo & you might be surprised - it tends to be in places where it isn't needed!

Paradoxical relationships between active transport and global protein distributions in neurons

Neural function depends on continual synthesis and targeted trafficking of intracellular components, including ion channel proteins. The detailed biophysics active ion channel transport are increas...

www.biorxiv.org

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Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

3 years

Why is neuroscience so prone to framing questions as having a hard yes/no answer? And how many person-years of research would we rescue if we were to accept non-binary outcomes?

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Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

9 months

Is there a life lesson you wish you could teach your younger self - one that your younger self would almost certainly fail to accept or even comprehend? Mine is: committing to something liberates you. Avoiding commitment imprisons you.

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Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

8 months

Mmmmm, rotational dynamics... Phantom oscillations in principal component analysis | PNAS

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Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

5 years

Neural activation in repeated, learned tasks drifts continually over days, which seems to be a problem for encoding stable behavior. We used data from @lndriscoll in mouse PPC and tried to resolve this... 1/n

Stable task information from an unstable neural population

Over days and weeks, neurons in mammalian sensorimotor cortex have been found to continually change their activity patterns during performance of a learned sensorimotor task, with no detectable...

www.biorxiv.org

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Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

3 years

Every gene can (and possibly will) be associated with cancer. The penny has dropped at last.

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Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

2 years

Insightful thread. And it isn't just a rant about Big Tech or hype; it identifies the huge lingering problem in steering resources away from boom/bust cycles. For the 1000th time: we need diverse research ecosystems with lots of differing, complementary approaches and people!!!

James Wu ➡ 🦣

@analogist_net

3 years

Every time El*n M*sk or Neur*link trends in neural tech, I get a sinking feeling in my stomach. It's difficult to explain all the reasons behind the sheer depth of the despair I feel, but I must try.

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Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

7 months

Neuroscience *is* pre-paradigmatic, and that's OK actually. There's no better sign of a work in progress, making progress, than a litany of revised ideas.

Erik Hoel

@erikphoel

7 months

1. Not much going on today, so here's a personal magnum opus on how neuroscience is pre-paradigmatic and its results are not even wrong. (link in image, also a 🧵)

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Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

1 year

Once again I'm completely lost and confused about my fellow neuro/cognitive scientists' views: why the collective dump on Chomsky et al's (very tight IMO) op ed? It was an op ed. In a newspaper. And it was pretty good considering the complexity of the topic. What am I missing?

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Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

21 days

@KordingLab Because it is utterly incoherent. Example: I go to lengths to explain to students how "learning and memory" is distributed, multifaceted and impossible to reduce to a single mechanism. Then they go and read a paper claiming a molecule is "necessary and sufficient " for memory.

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Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

1 year

just had a long, emotional discussion with [unnamed but very senior and influential scientist recognised for their dedication to mentorship...] and we agreed that an unresolved barrier to true DEI is our inability to see past people's academic track record, especially students

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Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

1 year

Here is a problem with post-publication peer review that I can't find a fix for: the majority of papers won't get read, let alone "evaluated". In the current model there's a constraint that at least forces someone's eyes across a manuscript. Is it a problem? Is there a fix?

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Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

3 years

I think the problem is at least twofold: 1. can't keep up with literature 2. can't simultaneously do quality research AND publish at a frenetic rate So we can't filter the signal from the noise AND effort that could have been put into real science is spent generating noise!

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Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

8 months

On long, dark evenings when I'm struggling to make sense of the world - when all I can think about is the absurdity and cruelty of existence - the thing I surely need is a long form podcast featuring a 30 something tech bro who has figured it all out.

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Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

1 month

It's understandable to be cynical about peer review. But many of us take it seriously and try to help authors improve their work and reach their audience. On balance, my work has benefited from it, notwithstanding pain and frustration. I think that's true for most of us.

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Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

10 months

Undergraduates in my department think that research is funded my university. This is a perfectly logical assumption, and those that I discussed this with were shocked that we have to seek external funding *and* that their tuition fees don't even cover the cost of tuition.

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Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

11 months

This sums up neuroscience

Daniël Lakens

@lakens

11 months

@aazadmmn @WiringTheBrain If you have not read it yet, you will like 'Chaos in the Brickyard"

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Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

4 years

And for several years I hated my thesis work. I was embarrassed by the mistakes I made, by how little I knew and how little the field cared about it. If I had met my future self and read what I'm writing now I would have baulked. So I guess the hard way is the only way.

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Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

10 months

This is a lesson that never gets old. However, I reckon the fact that Kariko's work proved useful will be used as an argument for "focusing on translation and societal impact", not as an argument for the inherent unpredictability and eventual utility of true research.

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Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

2 years

Dear fellow researchers: if you are a grant reviewer or on hiring/selection committee and you discount or question work on the basis of multiple authorship then you are damaging science, not protecting it. Instead you should be questioning CVs with >>10 pubs per year.

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Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

5 years

Neuroscience is about 100 years behind Economics:

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Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

10 months

What pseudoscience needs right now is a pseudorebuttal.

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Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

4 months

Before deciding how long a PhD should take, how many papers you need to, etc, we need to agree on the purpose of a PhD. Much of the strife comes from a confusion about whether it is a qualification for a particular career, or a continuation of one's learning.

Cian O'Donnell

@cian_neuro

4 months

imo N American PhDs take too long. 3-4 years is plenty long enough time to ask early 20-somethings to sign away their life for

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Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

1 year

Anyway, one editor's quickly assembled triage letter won't take away my student's achievement, so here's the latest preprint. Editors feel fee to DM me if you do want to review it :)

How Cerebellar Architecture and Dense Activation Patterns Facilitate Online Learning in Dynamic...

The cerebellum has a distinctive architecture in which inputs undergo a massive size expansion in dimensionality in early layers. Marr and Albus’s classic codon theory and more recent extensions[1]...

www.biorxiv.org

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Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

4 years

Understanding how model parameters determine behaviour is a tough problem with no general solution. This paper throws deep learning at it, with some neat results. Training deep neural density estimators to identify mechanistic models of neural dynamics

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Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

4 years

This keeps popping up in discussions/peer review. Do we think 'the brain' is chaotic? Specifically, do we think that chaotic dynamics describe a substantial part of dynamics that govern cortical computations? Chaos might be *possible*, but is it largely relevant?

Chaos dominates

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Chaos important

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Chaos not important

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Chaos is pathological

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Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

2 years

do you find parts of the neuroscience community simultaneously stiff and sloppy? ✅ultra pedantic about whether some arcane "control" experiment is even necessary ✅superstitious about statistics and happy to make massive leaps of logic in interpreting data

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Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

1 year

the difference between statistical significance and meaningful effect, in one plot

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Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

4 years

My mentor, Eve Marder, spent much of her career using models to show just how little we learn by manipulating single parameters, as many experiments aim to. Even in 'simple' models this is almost impossible. Yet many see this as a limitation of modelling!!! It blows my mind.

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Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

2 years

@drmichaellevin @adeelrazi @TrackingActions @NeuroCellPress Ok, hand on heart, if you read an article stating "shopping mall door is sentient" and it turned out that the door in question was just a standard IR triggered door would you feel this was misleading?

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Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

3 years

After nearly 2 years the lab gets together. I'm very lucky to be able to work with such brilliant people (and cook pizza for them:)

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Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

6 months

what a beautiful study: an oscillatory search strategy in visual navigation

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Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

2 years

@ItaiYanai I think that the wrong interpretation. The paper finds evidence for a change in citation patterns, with it becoming less common to regard single studies as watersheds. This points to a change in scholarly practice, with more even credit given to prior work as much as anything.

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Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

2 years

The Marr-Albus theory of cerebellar function has stood the test of time. A key element is “codon theory”: sparse granule cell activation facilitates pattern separation. However, recent experimental work challenged this by finding *dense* activation during motor learning… 🧵

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Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

4 years

Sometimes it seems like anything can happen in in the brain. Amidst all the chaos, it's reassuring to remember that at least primary sensory neurons maintain stable responses to tangible things in the external world... ...except they don't:

Representational drift in primary olfactory cortex

Representations of the external world in sensory cortices may define the identity of a stimulus and should therefore vary little over the life of the organism. In the olfactory system the primary...

www.biorxiv.org

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Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

4 years

I think #neuralink is cool. I rolled my eyes at the hype (there has to be some hype) and I shrugged at the hating from the neuro community. I was a little embarassed by the ensuing finger wagging and chest puffing. And now I'm embarassed as an engineer.

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Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

3 years

👇THIS is why the concept of sloppiness is important in biology. When we move from one scale to the next, sensitivities spread across many components. So papers with titles like "The role of molecule X in high level process Y" might not be that informative unfortunately :(

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Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

4 years

My brilliant postdoc, Dhuva Raman, has created a new toolbox in #JuliaLang for efficiently computing minimally disruptive curves in complex models: MinimallyDisruptiveCurves.jl: What's a minimally disruptive curve? How can it give insight into a model?

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Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

1 year

I'm not afraid of the emergence of a superintelligence. I'm afraid of the emergence of a superdumbass.

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Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

5 years

@PNASNews PNAS author guidelines: "PNAS is a general science journal and all papers should be intelligible to a broad scientific audience."

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Timothy O'Leary

@Timothy0Leary

1 year

I offered a masters project on BMI recently. After I outlined it to a few eager students, they asked about the decoding algorithm and were visibly bewildered and/or horrified that it didn't involve "AI" or neural networks.

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