We are thrilled to celebrate the winners of our 2025 postdoctoral awards! 🏅👏 Congratulations to all who were recognized for their outstanding work and impact in the community. 🎉

Im pleased to share our new work, “Spatio-temporal organization of network activity patterns in the hippocampus”, now out in Cell Reports! With Demi Brizee & David Dupret, we track how rhythms and spiking behavior map onto hippocampal layers. doi.org/10.1016/j.celr…

Research led by Thilo Womelsdorf, prof. of psychology and biomedical engineering at the Vanderbilt Brain Institute, could revolutionize how brain-computer interfaces are used to treat disorders of memory and cognition. Vanderbilt College of Arts and Science engineering.vanderbilt.edu/2025/06/10/bre…

Great conversation on Andrew D. Huberman, Ph.D.. I am super excited and encouraged to hear that Jay Bhattacharya, MD, PhD is so committed to supporting early career stage investigators. I'll keep sending in those grant proposals! youtu.be/2Y_PxTxLFVg?si…

Fully revised version out in the open ODIN: Open Data In Neurophysiology: Advancements, Solutions & Challenges arxiv.org/abs/2407.00976

Church lab automates 12 years of research in 2 days Sometimes I have the privilege of receiving emails from people telling me about their breakthroughs. In such cases, it gives me great pleasure to help advance scientific knowledge by giving it a little reach with my modest

🚀Out in PNAS! We find that recurrent networks trained with the predictive plasticity rules explain many features of prediction errors observed in experimental studies pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pn… ClopathLab

Robust & reliable federal funding is crucial for America's scientific leadership and the health of all Americans. SfN calls on federal agencies to halt these destabilizing actions. Read the full statement from SfN president, John H. Morrison, PhD 🔗 vist.ly/3n8cqdi

Not all mammalian brains were created the same. The granular prefrontal cortex, an area appearing the novo in primates is wired for mental representations and precise executive control of the rest of the brain. Very important ground-breaking work 👇 cell.com/cell/abstract/…

Fully agree!

Our department is recruiting! New tenure-track, open rank faculty position in the Department of Psychology at the University of Michigan (emphasis on human cognition and artificial intelligence). apply.interfolio.com/169170

Nice review of predictive coding models Predictive coding: a more cognitive process than we thought? doi.org/10.1016/j.tics… #neuroscience

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is an engine of better health and economic development. Congress knows that, economists know that, and Bay Staters know that. Any attempts to cut the NIH must be stopped cold.

New paper from the Bastos Lab, led by Eli Sennesh! We find ubiquitous predictive processing in the spectral domain (but not rate-coding domain): doi.org/10.1101/2025.0… Gamma oscillations consistently signal prediction errors even in V1!

These results are in contrast to our earlier analysis of this same dataset (Westerberg, Xiong et al.), where we found evidence of predictive processing in spike rates only in very late levels of the hierarchy (e.g., PFC and the highest stages of visual processing).

We suggest that there could be a functional dissociation between rate coding and temporal coding, where rate coding was more evident late in hierarchical processing and temporal coding (via gamma oscillations) was more evident in early areas of the visual hierarchy

The results also speak to the ongoing debate between 'gamma as prediction errors' (predictive routing) vs. 'gamma as predictions' (a la Martin Vinck ). We find evidence for predictive routing, even after accounting for shifts in aperiodic components of the LFP.

The results also speak to the importance of performing multiple analyses on the same dataset (LFP, spiking, temporal, and rate coding). If you stick to only one domain and not the other, you get an incomplete picture of brain function!

New preprint from our lab. Great work by Zach Redding, with Yun Ding. We are rhythmically distractible. Distinct oscillatory mechanisms shape the influence of salient distractors on visual-target processing. Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience RochesterBrainCogSci CVSUoR biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

New theory: Categorization is Baked Into the Brain It is not at the end of sensory processing but a core computation that begins at the earliest stages, occurring throughout the cortex as predictive feedback shapes feedforward processing. doi.org/10.31234/osf.i… #neuroscience