i just finished reading a study published in Nature in January by researchers from McGill & Harvard and it broke my brain a little they tracked neurons in the hippocampus over several weeks while mice were learning a complex task and what they found is wild the hippocampus does way more than store memories like a hard drive, it actively reorganizes them to predict what’s going to happen next, the neurons literally rewire their firing timing to start shooting BEFORE a reward shows up instead of after your brain is basically running a real time simulation of the future built entirely from past experience and this is where it gets crazy when you think about AI every foundation model we have right now learns through backpropagation which is a math trick from the 1980s that has absolutely nothing to do with how actual neurons learn, it works absurdly well but it’s also why training GPT-5 burns hundreds of millions of dollars & eats the energy of a small city your brain does something arguably more impressive on 20 watts which is literally a light bulb how? because the brain runs on predictive coding, it predicts what’s about to happen at every single moment and only bothers transmitting the stuff it got wrong, everything it predicted correctly gets suppressed evolution basically invented the most insane compression algorithm imaginable and we’ve been pretending it doesn’t exist for decades the most fascinating part is that tomorrow’s AI will look absolutely nothing like what we know today: sparse event driven predictive architectures running on a fraction of current energy & the thing is the solution has been sitting inside your skull for 600 million years, evolution already did the work except nobody in this industry wants to face it because it’s easier to throw billions at compute than to sit down and study how a mouse brain outperforms everything with a light bulb we’re spending billions reinventing the wheel when a mouse brain already outperforms our best models on the energy of a nightlight, the day this industry sits down & seriously studies what’s happening between our ears everything changes

Extremely happy to share our manuscript jointly authored by me and the amazing @LindsayOsso ! An awesome collaboration between the @EthanHughesLab , @denmanlab and Autobahn Therapeutics nature.com/articles/s41467-0… 🧵

Excited to share our work published this week! Led by myself and world class co-first @gdfnunes working in the @EthanHughesLab in collaboration with Dan Denman: nature.com/articles/s41467-0…. A short 🧵

Extremely excited to share our review on mature myelin dynamics out today! @EthanHughesLab and I discuss myelin remodeling and turnover, mechanisms and functional implications. I hope folks will enjoy diving into this fascinating emerging field with us! nature.com/articles/s41593-0…

Folks at the @CAN_ACN meeting, come check out my poster today on in vivo imaging of endogenous and therapeutic-induced remyelination and its impacts on visual neuronal function!

Dreams became reality through @michael_CUAnsch tremendous PhD work! Thrilled this phenomenal collaboration with @CUNeurophotons @LabRestrepo is out in the wild. Looking forward to helping others leverage the powers of long-term three-photon microscopy 💪🏼🤓🔬

Check out our new preprint, where we found some cool insights about remyelination. It was awesome to collaborate with @LindsayOsso, @denmanlab and Autobahn Therapeutics in this project!

@michael_CUAnsch turned dreams into reality in his PhD work that is now up on BioRxiv! Stay tuned for more details 🔬🐭🧠 biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/…

Huge congratulations to @michael_CUAnsch for successfully defending his PhD thesis!!! Stay tuned for more of his amazing work coming soon 😎

Happy to announce that my fantastic student Dylan Calame's thesis work is out. Purkinje cells, learning, basis sets and more! For details, read paper here: nature.com/articles/s41593-0…

Here is my graduate work exploring what determines oligodendrocyte sheath number! 🙂 Early myelination involves the dynamic and repetitive ensheathment of axons which resolves through a low and consistent stabilization rate doi.org/10.7554/eLife.82111

"State of the Lab" address returned today! It was great to revisit and celebrate the accomplishments of our talented group members 🎉 and pull back the curtain on the inner workings of the lab 👀 Onward and Upward!

I am thrilled to announce that I have been recruited to the University of Colorado Medical school (@CUAnshutz) as the new Chair of the Department of Physiology and Biophysics! And we are hiring! If you want to join our vibrant faculty, apply by Feb 15: cu.taleo.net/careersection/2….

The re-reconquista continues. Crucially, if France win this sets up a rematch of the critical Battle of Tours in 732.

“We’re trying to make transformational changes to our working conditions that will in turn impact the quality of research and education,” said Sweeney, the union leader. “The issues we face are similar to other workers in this country.” #FairUCNow washingtonpost.com/business/…

I am so happy to finally share the main work from my PhD on Polycomb-mediated genome folding: biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/…

If you haven’t checked out my paper yet, now is the time ☺️

The indefatigable @ClaraBacmeister has done it again. Thrilled to share our latest work out online today @NatureNeuro! Stay tuned for the thread "Motor learning drives dynamic patterns of intermittent myelination on learning-activated axons" rdcu.be/cWFPH

Yahoooo! We did it! Mil gracias to all involved: @RongchenH & her epic surgeries; @LindsayOsso's indispensable input during reviews; @michael_CUAnsch, Lauren Conant, and Anthony Chavez for their support throughout; and Alon and @EthanHughesLab for stellar mentorship. Proud of us!

My latest research is on bioRxiv now! Proud to present the amazing OPC Ca2 dynamics in the cortex that’s not known to us till now. NE plays a surprising role in driving those beauties! Thanks @EricT_Hsu I’m also on the market now. Plz rt! #glia