Kording Lab 🦖

I think this is amazing in a few ways! doi.org/10.1038/s41586…

@vineettiruvadi But for clinical I bet simplicity for most questions

@vineettiruvadi I bet against simplicity:)

Vindication is here

These results are based on only 10 completers after 75% attrition, making them not only limited in generalizability but also highly susceptible to survivorship bias. The high attrition rate may be this study's most important finding: dropouts aren't noise; they are part of the treatment-effect profile, and attrition at this level indicates serious challenges for the intervention’s feasibility and scalability, a pattern that appears across ketogenic intervention studies.

New paper! Deep-learning-assisted simulation of a cortical circuit: integrating anatomy, physiology and function biorxiv.org/cgi/content/sh… It comes with a new major model release from @AllenInstitute. Find models and code here: github.com/AllenInstitute… 🧵 1/13

How do neural circuits in the brain implement normalization? 🧠 In our new paper, we show that just normalizing sensory input isn't enough. Crucially, we must also normalize the error signals! 🧵👇 Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2603.17676

6 weeks ago we released a report ecosystem detailing the state of brain emulation. We now added what is arguably the most important piece: A summary of the state of brain emulation anyone can read in less than 5 minutes and get the take-aways of thousands of hours of research. If you want to build intuitions on how close we are to running brains on computers, our at-a-glance summary is the place to start. For convenience I added the text in the thread below; please check out the full PDF for figures Accessibility was a key objective of our project and I think we delivered strongly with this one! Hopefully it pulls you deeper into our full report, the Asimov Press companion article, our public data repository, and an online guesstimator for predicting time and resources needed. Enjoy! brainemulation.mxschons.com

@rudzinskimaciej @shivon 100% I really need to get to that!

@shivon In Tensors, sometimes 3d moving visualizations of vectors pressures @KordingLab ☝️ your topic with examples co ering even larger space of world models/simulators

When you think, what medium do you tend to think in? Would be very curious to hear how you’d describe the base unit(s) of your thoughts and how they feel to you. I assumed what happens in my head was similar to everyone else but have been surprised by how varied thought can be.

@vdcalhoun @TroyASmithPhD Well. How do you read the last sentence of the abstract which literally says "These results can help inform the design of age-friendly street networks that better support brain health."

@KordingLab @TroyASmithPhD That would be a very different paper. ;) I read this more as modest effects + lots of caveats, not ‘street layout explains everything'.

Anyone see the obvious confounds here? nature.com/articles/s4428…

@vdcalhoun @TroyASmithPhD Imagine a paper argued that the outline of a gym was responsible for 80% of weight loss. It’s that kind of thing.

@KordingLab @TroyASmithPhD Like saying ‘the layout of a gym can’t affect fitness’…until you realize it changes how often and how hard people use it. I haven't read in detail, but given how strongly navigation demands are linked to hippocampus, it doesn’t seem that far-fetched.

@PessoaBrain planyourscience.com

@KordingLab Cool, what tool is this??

Built explicit praise into my science writing feedback app. Felt embarrassing. Then I couldn't stop using it myself. Maybe the reason we don't celebrate small wins in science isn't that we don't want to — it's that nobody ever built the button.

@vdcalhoun @TroyASmithPhD No. Its super credible that your diet affects your weight. It is not super credible that the design of your street per se has a huge influence on your brain health.

@KordingLab @TroyASmithPhD Right, like saying diet can’t affect weight because metabolism does a million other things. ;-)

@vdcalhoun @TroyASmithPhD Agreed. But the meta-issue is that the result is obviously not credible, no? Like lets be realistic, which proportion of your thoughts, even spatial thoughts are about your city? And Hippocampus does a million other things.

@KordingLab @TroyASmithPhD I’d frame it less as ‘obvious confounds’ and more as ‘important residual confounds.’ They did include area-level SES and several other adjustments. The tougher issue is selection and behavior, which is harder to nail down.

And the conclusion "These results can help inform the design of age-friendly street networks that better support brain health." seems truly preposterous.

Interesting result, but this looks much more like selection and survivor bias than a causal effect of street design on the hippocampus. The association is between people, within-person change is null, and attrition /compositional change across waves is substantial.

@TroyASmithPhD yeah!

@KordingLab I can only read the abstract, and I'm not super familiar w/ Sydney. Did they control for SES? (Are highly connected neighborhoods more expensive?) Activity level? Or is their point that more walkable neighborhoods lead to more activity, which increases brain health?

🎉I'll be promoted to full professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Social Policy & Practice, effective July 2026! Grateful for of the many people who've helped and challenged me along the way. Now off to work on #AI and its impact on the economy, society, & policy!

Running a research lab is about leading people. I created a free toolkit on the human side of lab leadership—covering hiring, mentoring, conflict navigation, lab culture, and performance management. Open access: doi.org/10.5281/zenodo… #TeamScience #AcademicLeadership