An ethical committee approval is needed to work with 1.5 millimetre-long squids in the UK, says the Home Office officer who just came back from a trip to the Mediterranean that included many a meal with 25 cm-long grilled squids.

Oh, you are working with late embryos prior to hatching? Then no ethical permits are required. The honorary primate status, i.e., "sentient beings", is only for hatched, free-living cephalopods.

So prior to hatching, cephalopods aren't sentient beings?

In any case, bear in mind these 1.5-mm squids have ~30,000 neurons, about 1/5th of those in the brain of a fruit fly that the same officer doesn't hesitate to squash with an adroit flick of the hand. And for which no permits are required, whatsoever.

And a honeybee, with 600,000 neurons in its brain, is not a sentient being?

None of this will ever make any sense to me. It is not science. Perhaps not even politics. I don't know what it is.

#academia #cephalopods #UK #neuroscience

An ethical committee approval is needed to work with 1.5 millimetre-long squids in the UK, says the Home Office officer who just came back from a trip to the Mediterranean that included many a meal with 25 cm-long grilled squids.

Oh, you are working with late embryos prior to hatching? Then no ethical permits are required. The honorary primate status, i.e., "sentient beings", is only for hatched, free-living cephalopods.

So prior to hatching, cephalopods aren't sentient beings?

In any case, bear in mind these 1.5-mm squids have ~30,000 neurons, about 1/5th of those in the brain of a fruit fly that the same officer doesn't hesitate to squash with an adroit flick of the hand. And for which no permits are required, whatsoever.

And a honeybee, with 600,000 neurons in its brain, is not a sentient being?

None of this will ever make any sense to me. It is not science. Perhaps not even politics. I don't know what it is.

#academia #cephalopods #UK #neuroscience

Some People Can't See Mental Images. The Consequences Are Profound

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/11/03/some-people-cant-see-mental-images-the-consequences-are-profound

#HackerNews #mentalimagery #cognitivepsychology #aphantasia #neuroscience #awareness

@tomstafford

Given that a single human cortical pyramidal neuron requires a whole multi-layer perceptron to model it, have you applied any correction factor?
https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(21)00501-8?

Same could be said of neurons in the worm, fly, and honeybee, although without active dendrites they are somewhat less complex than neocortical pyramidal cells.

#neuroscience

Comparing real and artificial brains by size

References

C. elegans https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.1986.0056

Drosophila https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07558-y

Honeybee https://doi.org/10.1016/s1364-6613(00)01601-6

GPT-4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPT-4

Human https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1201895109

#Brains #Neuroscience

"Covariant spatio-temporal receptive fields for spiking neural networks" by Pedersen, Conradt & Lindeberg 2025
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-63493-0

With the author's own words:
"We built spiking neural networks that outperform ANNs on event-based vision by initialising them with spatio-temporal receptive fields. And our theory-guided design beats naive approaches by 42%!"

A video explanation of the paper:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtHkrx4tYfI

#neuroscience #NeuromorphicComputing

"Covariant spatio-temporal receptive fields for spiking neural networks" by Pedersen, Conradt & Lindeberg 2025
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-63493-0

With the author's own words:
"We built spiking neural networks that outperform ANNs on event-based vision by initialising them with spatio-temporal receptive fields. And our theory-guided design beats naive approaches by 42%!"

A video explanation of the paper:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtHkrx4tYfI

#neuroscience #NeuromorphicComputing

How the brain's activity, energy use and blood flow change as people fall asleep

https://www.massgeneralbrigham.org/en/about/newsroom/press-releases/research-shows-coordinated-shift-in-brain-activity-while-asleep

#HackerNews #brainactivity #energyuse #bloodflow #sleepresearch #neuroscience

🧠 New preprint by Kim et al. (2025) from David Anderson’s lab: A line #attractor maintains aggressiveness during feeding in “hangry” mice 🍔🐁. Using in vivo #CalciumImaging and #rSLDS modeling, they show how moderate fasting stabilizes an aggression-related attractor in #VMHvl, while prolonged fasting collapses it, linking hunger, motivation, and aggression through #PopulationDynamics:

🌍 https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.10.16.682711

#Neuroscience #CompNeuro #Behavior #AttractorDynamics #Hypothalamus #2p #imaging

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PymMVna6T8A

Anne Churchland (CSHL) 1: How do brains decide?

#neurology #brain #connectome #neuroscience #decision

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFpGbmqXWOI

Anne Churchland (CSHL) 2: Connecting movement & ...

#neurology #neuroscience #brain #connectome

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PymMVna6T8A

Anne Churchland (CSHL) 1: How do brains decide?

#neurology #brain #connectome #neuroscience #decision

Spiking NN fans - the #SNUFA workshop (Nov 5-6) agenda is finalised and online now. Make sure to register (free) soon. (Note you can register for either day and come to both.)

Agenda: https://snufa.net/2025/
Registration: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/snufa-2025-tickets-1549418545579

Thanks to all who voted on abstracts!

#Neuroscience #ComputationalNeuroscience #SpikingNeuralNetworks

Spiking NN fans - the #SNUFA workshop (Nov 5-6) agenda is finalised and online now. Make sure to register (free) soon. (Note you can register for either day and come to both.)

Agenda: https://snufa.net/2025/
Registration: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/snufa-2025-tickets-1549418545579

Thanks to all who voted on abstracts!

#Neuroscience #ComputationalNeuroscience #SpikingNeuralNetworks

3 tenure-track faculty positions in a super cool department (USA):

#NeuroJob #Neuroscience

https://neuromatch.social/@adredish/115390293849171297

3 tenure-track faculty positions in a super cool department (USA):

#NeuroJob #Neuroscience

https://neuromatch.social/@adredish/115390293849171297

@brembs

For the worm there's the additional problem that the field has been working with point neurons for decades, ignoring the fact that most neurons in C. elegans have a very clear axon separate from its dendrite. I'd like to see a cleaned up connectome where there are 4 synaptic connectivity matrices and not one (axo-dendritic, axon-axonic, etc.), and I fear I may have to do so myself.

Modeling a connectome while mixing axo-dendritic with axo-axonic synapses with a point-neuron model is only asking for trouble and confusion.

#Celegans #neuroscience #connectomics

A challenging #neuroscience problem:

"The synaptic connectome of most animals bears little resemblance to functional brain maps,"

https://www.thetransmitter.org/connectome/worms-help-untangle-longstanding-brain-structure-function-mystery/

Worms, mice flies: the more we learn about thew structural connectivity between neurons, the more apparent it becomes just how dynamic nervous systems really are. Connectomes aren't really like maps at all - maybe more like guideposts?

That lack of correspondence [between anatomical and physiological neuronal connectivity] adds to mounting evidence that researchers cannot infer information flow using the synaptic connectome alone.

https://www.thetransmitter.org/connectome/worms-help-untangle-longstanding-brain-structure-function-mystery/

#neuroscience