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neural-reckoning.org
Dan Goodman
@neural-reckoning.org
3.5K followers 360 following 2.1K posts
Computational neuroscientist at Imperial College. I like spikes and making science better (Neuromatch, Brian spiking neural network simulator, SNUFA annual workshop on spiking neurons).
🧪 https://neural-reckoning.org/
📷 https://adobe.ly/3On5B29
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neural-reckoning.org
Dan Goodman @neural-reckoning.org · Nov 12
I made a starter pack of researchers working on spiking neural networks, neuromorphic hardware and all that jazz. At the moment, this community doesn't seem to be very present on Bluesky (more on Mastodon), but let me know if I've missed anyone! 🧠🧪

go.bsky.app/46Eu9GG
Reposted by Dan Goodman
anne-urai.bsky.social
Thanks @thetransmitter.bsky.social for this Rising Stars of Neuroscience award!

I'm not at #SfN so I did my best to take a photo of the trophy I received (fun to snap a picture of the text' shadows).

www.thetransmitter.org/early-career...
November 17, 2025 at 10:11 AM
neural-reckoning.org
Feeling these third tier CEO vibes right now as I'm involved in industrial action for the fourth time in 11 years. Why can't pay rise with inflation? Because, our president told us last year, inflation might go down but pay rises are forever. 🤦‍♂️

@ucuimperial.bsky.social
nabalkattu.bsky.social Nabalkattu @nabalkattu.bsky.social · 1d
Universities across the world from the US to the UK to Australia and Canada, are now "led" by an interchangeable Global Admin class who swap places every couple of years. Their blandness, lack of local roots and commitments, and general third-tier-CEO vibes are their main feature, not a bug. 2/4
November 16, 2025 at 3:54 PM
Reposted by Dan Goodman
zackpolanski.bsky.social
The Labour Government reeling off the same far-right talking points on immigration. And look who is celebrating. The far-right.

There is a political alternative that won’t ever scapegoat those fleeing war, persecution and torture

join.greenparty.org.uk
Mahmood furious over asylum seeker taxi bills. Overton window has been obliterated
November 16, 2025 at 10:28 AM
Reposted by Dan Goodman
simonschultz.bsky.social
Synergy mediates long-range correlations in the visual cortex near criticality. Hardik Rajpal et al, a collaboration with @spencerlaveresmith.bsky.social (and one of the outputs of the EPSRC/Wellcome Statistical Physics of Cognition project)
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Synergy mediates Long-Range Correlations in the Visual Cortex Near Criticality
Long-range correlations are a key signature of systems operating near criticality, indicating spatially-extended interactions across large distances. These extended dependencies underlie other emergen...
www.biorxiv.org
November 16, 2025 at 11:18 AM
neural-reckoning.org
This is an absolutely delightful read that i strongly recommend for everyone in science.
November 15, 2025 at 3:13 PM
Reposted by Dan Goodman
richardsever.bsky.social
Always liked this humorous piece on how papers are 'lies' constructed to destroy myth and wonder journals.biologists.com/jcs/article/...
Destroying myth and wonder
I've just had the most wonderful day. I spent the entire time notwriting papers. (The only thing I like more than not writing papers is not writing grants and not going to staff meetings.) I cleaned m...
journals.biologists.com
November 15, 2025 at 3:00 PM
Reposted by Dan Goodman
kenneth-harris.bsky.social
1. New preprint resolving a conundrum in systems neuroscience with an AI scientist, and humans Reilly Tilbury, Dabin Kwon, @haydari.bsky.social, @jacobmratliff.bsky.social, @bio-emergent.bsky.social, @carandinilab.net, @kevinjmiller.bsky.social, @neurokim.bsky.social
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Characterizing neuronal population geometry with AI equation discovery
The visual cortex contains millions of neurons, whose combined activity forms a population code representing visual stimuli. There is, however, a discrepancy between our understanding of this code at ...
www.biorxiv.org
November 14, 2025 at 6:07 PM
Reposted by Dan Goodman
neural-reckoning.org
Psst - neuromorphic folks. Did you know that you can solve the SHD dataset with 90% accuracy using only 22 kb of parameter memory by quantising weights and delays? Check out our preprint with @pengfei-sun.bsky.social and @danakarca.bsky.social, or read the TLDR below. 👇🤖🧠🧪 arxiv.org/abs/2510.27434
Exploiting heterogeneous delays for efficient computation in low-bit neural networks
Neural networks rely on learning synaptic weights. However, this overlooks other neural parameters that can also be learned and may be utilized by the brain. One such parameter is the delay: the brain...
arxiv.org
November 13, 2025 at 5:40 PM
Reposted by Dan Goodman
With my great advisors and colleagues, @achterbrain.bsky.social @zhe @danakarca.bsky.social @neural-reckoning.org, we show that if heterogeneous axonal delays (imprecise) can capture the essential temporal structure of a task, spiking networks do not need precise synaptic weights to perform well.
November 13, 2025 at 8:51 PM
Reposted by Dan Goodman
richardsever.bsky.social
The recent openRxiv meeting was a chance to present a vision for the future: a network of organizations working together to improve science communication and an ‘article of the future’ that is a constellation of linked web objects.
openrxiv.org/openrxiv-day/
November 13, 2025 at 7:14 PM
neural-reckoning.org
Psst - neuromorphic folks. Did you know that you can solve the SHD dataset with 90% accuracy using only 22 kb of parameter memory by quantising weights and delays? Check out our preprint with @pengfei-sun.bsky.social and @danakarca.bsky.social, or read the TLDR below. 👇🤖🧠🧪 arxiv.org/abs/2510.27434
Exploiting heterogeneous delays for efficient computation in low-bit neural networks
Neural networks rely on learning synaptic weights. However, this overlooks other neural parameters that can also be learned and may be utilized by the brain. One such parameter is the delay: the brain...
arxiv.org
November 13, 2025 at 5:40 PM
Reposted by Dan Goodman
markdhumphries.bsky.social
🧪Preprint!
How foragers depart from optimal models can tell us a lot about how they compute their decisions.

A strong but underexplored departure is that foragers widely vary when they leave identical patches.

A 🧵
doi.org/10.1101/2025...

With
@emmavscholey.bsky.social @brainapps.bsky.social
November 12, 2025 at 4:32 PM
neural-reckoning.org
It's gonna happen, I'm sure of it. They're going to replace Starmer with the only person in the Labour party that will do an even worse job than him.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
Streeting denies plotting against PM after leadership claims
Wes Streeting has urged Sir Keir Starmer to sack whoever is briefing the media about challenges to the PM's leadership.
www.bbc.co.uk
November 12, 2025 at 9:52 AM
Reposted by Dan Goodman
jbarbosa.org
Tbc: NHP are definitely special and we should absolutely not stop its research.

But IMO we're are actually not taping into these capacities: the tasks mentioned here can be done with a neural net w/ a handful of relu 'neurons'

(Jean has raised very important points in this thread, though)
November 12, 2025 at 9:28 AM
Reposted by Dan Goodman
venpopov.bsky.social
The academic publishing system is so rotten, it must be completely dismantled. Not partially, and not improved. Dismantled and rebuilt from the ground up.

When I tell non-academic friends how it all works they stare at me in disbelief. Not only that it exists, but that we still allow it to.
hansonmark.bsky.social Mark A. Hanson @hansonmark.bsky.social · 6d
We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing:

a 🧵 1/n

Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820
Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
A table showing profit margins of major publishers. A snippet of text related to this table is below. 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year. A figure detailing the drain on researcher time. 1. The four-fold drain 1.2 Time The number of papers published each year is growing faster than the scientific workforce, with the number of papers per researcher almost doubling between 1996 and 2022 (Figure 1A). This reflects the fact that publishers’ commercial desire to publish (sell) more material has aligned well with the competitive prestige culture in which publications help secure jobs, grants, promotions, and awards. To the extent that this growth is driven by a pressure for profit, rather than scholarly imperatives, it distorts the way researchers spend their time. The publishing system depends on unpaid reviewer labour, estimated to be over 130 million unpaid hours annually in 2020 alone (9). Researchers have complained about the demands of peer-review for decades, but the scale of the problem is now worse, with editors reporting widespread difficulties recruiting reviewers. The growth in publications involves not only the authors’ time, but that of academic editors and reviewers who are dealing with so many review demands. Even more seriously, the imperative to produce ever more articles reshapes the nature of scientific inquiry. Evidence across multiple fields shows that more papers result in ‘ossification’, not new ideas (10). It may seem paradoxical that more papers can slow progress until one considers how it affects researchers’ time. While rewards remain tied to volume, prestige, and impact of publications, researchers will be nudged away from riskier, local, interdisciplinary, and long-term work. The result is a treadmill of constant activity with limited progress whereas core scholarly practices – such as reading, reflecting and engaging with others’ contributions – is de-prioritized. What looks like productivity often masks intellectual exhaustion built on a demoralizing, narrowing scientific vision. A table of profit margins across industries. The section of text related to this table is below: 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year. The costs of inaction are plain: wasted public funds, lost researcher time, compromised scientific integrity and eroded public trust. Today, the system rewards commercial publishers first, and science second. Without bold action from the funders we risk continuing to pour resources into a system that prioritizes profit over the advancement of scientific knowledge.
November 12, 2025 at 9:24 AM
neural-reckoning.org
This is a very interesting case study where LLMs can answer questions well at the start of a session and get worse over time. Is this well known? My read would be that at the start they are being given extra information in the sense of having irrelevant info eliminated. This matches other results...
carlbergstrom.com Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · 18d
I have a number of colleagues who think that LLMs will be very useful as individualized tutors.

One of their arguments is that unlike previous generations of AI tutors, LLMs have the full context window of the conversation and that’s better understand what a student knows and doesn’t know.
November 12, 2025 at 12:15 AM
neural-reckoning.org
Dear @plos.org Computational Biology, I'm so sorry for ignoring your article proof emails all this time. They look 100% like a phishing scam with their link to some random company website with a 16 digit hex code in the URL! Anyway, we're on it now.
November 11, 2025 at 6:41 PM
Reposted by Dan Goodman
hansonmark.bsky.social
We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing:

a 🧵 1/n

Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820
Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
A table showing profit margins of major publishers. A snippet of text related to this table is below. 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year. A figure detailing the drain on researcher time. 1. The four-fold drain 1.2 Time The number of papers published each year is growing faster than the scientific workforce, with the number of papers per researcher almost doubling between 1996 and 2022 (Figure 1A). This reflects the fact that publishers’ commercial desire to publish (sell) more material has aligned well with the competitive prestige culture in which publications help secure jobs, grants, promotions, and awards. To the extent that this growth is driven by a pressure for profit, rather than scholarly imperatives, it distorts the way researchers spend their time. The publishing system depends on unpaid reviewer labour, estimated to be over 130 million unpaid hours annually in 2020 alone (9). Researchers have complained about the demands of peer-review for decades, but the scale of the problem is now worse, with editors reporting widespread difficulties recruiting reviewers. The growth in publications involves not only the authors’ time, but that of academic editors and reviewers who are dealing with so many review demands. Even more seriously, the imperative to produce ever more articles reshapes the nature of scientific inquiry. Evidence across multiple fields shows that more papers result in ‘ossification’, not new ideas (10). It may seem paradoxical that more papers can slow progress until one considers how it affects researchers’ time. While rewards remain tied to volume, prestige, and impact of publications, researchers will be nudged away from riskier, local, interdisciplinary, and long-term work. The result is a treadmill of constant activity with limited progress whereas core scholarly practices – such as reading, reflecting and engaging with others’ contributions – is de-prioritized. What looks like productivity often masks intellectual exhaustion built on a demoralizing, narrowing scientific vision. A table of profit margins across industries. The section of text related to this table is below: 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year. The costs of inaction are plain: wasted public funds, lost researcher time, compromised scientific integrity and eroded public trust. Today, the system rewards commercial publishers first, and science second. Without bold action from the funders we risk continuing to pour resources into a system that prioritizes profit over the advancement of scientific knowledge.
November 11, 2025 at 11:52 AM
neural-reckoning.org
Apparently this Lovelace disruption labs idea is in the air again. I like the idea of labs with junior researchers given more independence and resources for longer time periods, but I don't think it'll be as disruptive as hoped for if they do this. 👇

jameswphillips.substack.com/p/lovelace-v...
Lovelace vision document: ARIA's proposed twin - a network of new research laboratories using different organisational principles
‘You will not concede me Philosophical poetry. Invert the order! Will you give me poetical philosophy, poetical science?’ Ada Lovelace
jameswphillips.substack.com
November 11, 2025 at 9:57 AM
neural-reckoning.org
Gonna be feeling this when Keir Starmer appoints an even more right wing director of the BBC.
jules.su Jules Suzdaltsev @jules.su · 7d
this is literally never not accurate
November 11, 2025 at 9:13 AM
Reposted by Dan Goodman
okaydaniellle.bsky.social
very nice talk by Joe McCaffrey on functional localization— it’s an easy listen with tons of great information about the debate.

m.youtube.com/watch?v=eRmD...
Lunchtime Talk - Joe McCaffrey 11/7/25
YouTube video by Center for Philosophy of Science
m.youtube.com
November 9, 2025 at 9:54 PM
neural-reckoning.org
Interesting paper on weak standards of evidence in LLM papers. Only 16% use statistics! Half don't define their terms.

www.oii.ox.ac.uk/news-events/...
OII | Study identifies weaknesses in how AI systems are evaluated
Largest systematic review of AI benchmarks highlights need for clearer definitions and stronger scientific standards.
www.oii.ox.ac.uk
November 9, 2025 at 9:29 PM
neural-reckoning.org
Talks from #SNUFA 2025 are now available on YouTube:
youtube.com/playlist?lis...
🤖🧠🧪
SNUFA 2025 Workshop - YouTube
Spiking neural networks as universal function approximators (SNUFA) online workshop 2025. For more see http://snufa.net/2025/
youtube.com
November 7, 2025 at 4:59 PM
Reposted by Dan Goodman
ucuimperial.bsky.social
A significant new development in the Imperial College pay dispute.

The Joint Trade Unions have uncovered that key 2018 pay benchmarking recommendations—based on extensive staff consultation—were quietly set aside by College management.

Read the full update here: ucu.imperial.ac.uk/archives/1143
Joint Trade Unions demand transparency over Imperial’s pay benchmarking
In brief (if you don’t have much time) The Imperial Joint Trade Unions (JTU) have written to the University Negotiating Team (UNT) to raise serious concerns about the College’s handling of the 2018 Pa...
ucu.imperial.ac.uk
November 7, 2025 at 11:24 AM
Reposted by Dan Goodman
neural-reckoning.org
My prediction is that LLM peer review will slow down science. It will do this for precisely the same reasons that contemporary peer review does and some extra ones. Start by reading @hansonmark.bsky.social thread below, then read on. 🧵
hansonmark.bsky.social Mark A. Hanson @hansonmark.bsky.social · 16d
Just tried q.e.d. by @odedrechavi.bsky.social et al. with a few papers including by myself & others where I knew a claim within was flawed based on a misunderstanding of the signal.

1) it was impressive. I see what the hype is about.
2) it hallucinated.

www.qedscience.com

Overly long #SciPub🧵 1/n
q.e.d Science
Critical Thinking AI for constructive criticism and science evaluation
www.qedscience.com
November 6, 2025 at 9:30 PM