Now available on Addgene as virus, can be ordered now: 💉🧠 Our bicistronic construct that expresses GCaMP8s and stChrimsonR, designed for two-photon optogenetics. 1/3

Happy to share our recent paper, showing cortical pattern amplification with learning, w/ Kanaka Rajan lab, just pub'd in Curr Biology. 🧠📄 Below in thread: Huge percept. improvement. No vis resp changes. Simple recurrent model. Relationship to recent Simon Peron. +more. 1/14

Single cell optogenetics reveals attenuation-by-suppression in visual cortical neurons biorxiv.org/cgi/content/sh… #biorxiv_neursci

We have two posters at this meeting - From Paul LaFosse who has characterized neural activation functions (#neuroai #AI) in real neurons in awake animals. And from Ciana Deveau, Zhishang Zhou who have a new theory for recurrent connections in sensory ctx: sequence amplification.

Sharing new preprint from our lab: bioRxiv Neuroscience. Led by Paul LaFosse, we show neurons in the awake🧠can filter out inputs: attenuation-by-suppression. Also: real neurons’ activation function share features w/ #ai systems (eg ChatGPT). #neuroscience Comments welcome! 1/15

I'll be at the Bernstein conference this week and happy to chat w/ you about this work, or other science. At Bernstein @lafosse.bsky.social will be presenting the below on Wed in poster sess II, and @cianadeveau.bsky.social has a talk Thu on recurrent cortical processing. 🧠

🧠🚨: Our latest paper is out today in Neuron! Led by Jonathan O'Rawe, we show salt-and-pepper excitation& suppression in mouse V1 arises from purely exc opto input. That means the excit-excit recurrent connections in cortex change how neurons respond to input. 1/3

Tough times in the world right now, but will share this: If you're attending SFN in DC this wknd, we have 2 posters on Sat I'm excited about. Paul LaFosse is presenting work on activation functions in cortical neurons,& Ciana Deveau on cortical recurrent nets 'doing sequences.'1/2

On Ciana and Zhishang's work on sequence processing in the cortex, here is a teaser of a graphical abstract for the poster, which is on Saturday at #SfN23. We find the visual cortical network in L2/3 selectively _filters_ sequences of inputs to populations of neurons.

If you'll be at Cosyne 2024 this week, please come by our posters: We have 3 presentations, by Paul LaFosse, Remy Yovanno&Bradley Akitake, and Ciana Deveau. All about what the recurrent network of sensory ctx does. Looking forward to seeing others' science at the meeting too!

This is a new preprint we are excited about. Ciana Deveau will be talking about this work w/ Zhishang Zhou at Cosyne - please stop by. We'll post a tweet thread next week after Cosyne. #Cosyne2024 #cosyne24 #neuroscience #neuroai

Active filtering of sequences of neural activity by recurrent circuits of sensory cortex biorxiv.org/content/10.110… (repost with working link)

New preprint, on 'sequence filtering'. Led by Ciana Deveau, Z Zhou. We see this as a key step forw on how cortex works. All cortical areas have dense exc-exc recurrent connectivity. What do these connections do, esp in sensory ctx? Our data say: they do dynamics/time. 1/4

What does #neuroscience tell us about AI, and vice versa? In this new PNAS paper, we find that real neurons' activation functions (f-I curves) share features with freq-used AI activation functions. We measure many neurons w/ 2p holographic stim. Work led by Paul LaFosse... 1/3

"Starting in the 80s, that investment in basic science began to pay off, driving a revolution in the molecular biology of cancer... US gov't funding for science strengthens the economy in ways beyond cures." I wrote today abt the case for science investment:

Recurrent connections within brain areas are very prominent in biological brains. They can do many different things and #neuroscience is just at the beginning of making sense of brain recurrent network function. 1/

This is amazing science from #NIH. Ana and Soohyun and their collabs use a new molecular tool to label connected neurons in the cortex, then image their responses. The ability to link wiring and function is extremely powerful and will shed light on autism and schizophrenia…1/

Today is amazing grad student Paul LaFosse's last lab meeting. Here's cool data he showed: Paul used 2p holographic optogenetics (laser stim) to select and stimulate this neuron in a working brain. This ability to change neural activity is key to understanding. (hey Chris Olah)

"Evidence suggests the local recurrent network encodes the structure of natural sensory input. & that it does so via active filtering, transforming network inputs to boost those associated w/ nat'l sensation" Amidst <waves hands> all this, I have a new review article that...

Despite some ups and downs at NIH, we do have an open position for a postbac and are considering candidates. Our work is at the intersection of neuroscience and AI, and we aim to understand how the brain's densely connected recurrent networks operate. 🧪