prokraustinator.bsky.social
Brains, Machines
122 posts
1,170 followers
1,472 following
Active Commenter
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It’s less sinister than it sounds!
Because of how it develops, the retina is technically considered part of the brain.
They have a fancy display system that can map out individual cones and stimulate them with pulses of light. You can see crazy colors won’t become the Manchurian Candidate!
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I think it’s probably hard to make the impact immediately visible, other than as photos of a protest.
When sanitation workers go on strike, there’s an immediate need not being met—with stinky reminders.
If no one does research for a week…the impact is subtle and years down the line.
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At the very bottom reputationally, I can believe that specific skills matter, but above that....
My childhood friends with less-famous non-STEM degrees largely seem to have landed okay: some high-flyers, but some also look happy teaching middle school, doing local marketing, or working at an NGO.
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Surely a lot of this just gets pushed onto the institution instead?
I can't imagine that there are armies of (involuntarily) unemployed people with English degrees from Harvard or most other nationally-known universities.
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That's the point of having undergrad RAs and honours thesis programs!
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Clever! Is that a repurposed ECoG array?
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You can just wrap everything in foil, right?
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No, I'm Spartacus!
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Congrats! Was there blue soup at the reception? :-)
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Beautiful photos!
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Our lab has a bunch and I don’t think anyone has had problems besides losing the small USB-C to A adapter (guilty).
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That sounds so cool! Any chance you’ve got a link to the syllabus laying about?
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Aww I’m so flattered that I count as “young.”
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I’m curious why people (not just you!) seem to think ephaptic effects are only interesting if they’re huge.
Wouldn’t it still be relevant if it were 50%—or even 5%—of the total drive to a neuron? (And a qualitatively different sort of input that’s weak but fast and widely distributed)
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There’s a decent chance it’s the same one!
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Heck, I refer back to one of the ones I helped write!
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I choose to believe he was just writing with Matlab's syntax.
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Yay! Congratulations—awesome to see your very cool work appreciated!
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They're not always coordinated though, are they?
Sensory information arrives, at least at the periphery, more or less randomly.
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Maybe “changed environment” would work better?
My sense is that adaptation is often less conscious or deliberate, but of course there’s implicit learning too. On the gripping hand, people generally qualify those sorts of learning, so…🤔
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It just got accepted so the fancy version should be out early next year!
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Read it? We cited it in the “Are oscillations epiphenomena” paper!
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Aww thanks! Always happy to chat!
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We're split between really simple coupled-oscillator models as an "idea pump" for designing experiments and biophysical ones for actually doing them.
We wrote a fun little piece about this for PLOS Biology's magazine: journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...
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I think it's not the whole city so much as the venue. A single hotel or university can handle a few hundred attendees; big convention centers can easily host 5,000 or more (e.g., SFN is ~30k people) but 2000 is in the murky middle.
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Steven Prescott (also in Toronto) has some cool stuff with kHz stimulation of the spine.
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A lot of comp neuro folks think about the effects of perturbations, even if they don't do them directly.
Check out @clopathlab.bsky.social's 2020 PNAS paper, for example, or @danisbassett.bsky.social's 2016 PLos Comp Bio paper, for example.
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Me, I suppose (though I am more of a computationally-savvy experimentalist--I like being able to collect my own data).
@virati.bsky.social is worth a follow; check out his blog too.
@markhisted.org's work might be of interest too.
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Lots of cool stuff in this area! The space of possible stimulation protocols is so enormous that I can't see how we'll get anywhere without models.
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It's...varied because "academia" is a lot of people with very different backgrounds, areas of expertise, and smarts?
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I've cited it a few times, but I never believed it to be a "grandmother"-type cell: other cells must contribute to the representation of Jennifer Aniston and I bet the example neuron probably responds like crazy to something else out of the stim set too.
It's just surprisingly sparse and invariant!
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🤯
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I’d like in, if there’s room!
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Common ones too. History, statistics, microbiology, and entomology are going to be really confusing.
"During the Siege of Tobruk, the Axis forces besieged the...uhh...other guys."
"OLS is the Best Linear <redacted> Estimator (BL*E) of a parameter."
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Bummer! It's a great party trick when it works.
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That's even better! Look at both parents and say "So which one of you did this as a kid?"
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May I nominate myself?
🐒👁️⚡
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Do you know if you did this too? I think there’s decent evidence for it being fairly heritable!
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Chomp, chomp.
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And a pony!
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I chuckled at this clarification but..."misinformation", in the form of optical illusions, added noise, and other experimental trickery, has been a really powerful tool for studying vision!
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Le cerveau est très compliqué. Informatique aussi, mais ensemble...on sera rendu fou.
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(Lots more in this line too).
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Single-unit recordings from monkeys receiving TMS.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
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Please thank the committee for not putting K99/R00 nonsense in this one!
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Thanks!
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Hey, at least you heard back!