Rafael Malach Lab

I am pleased to share that together with the brilliant team of Ofer Lipman, @Doronfried1179 and @OrYacov from Reichman University and @ShanyGrossman from MPI for Human Development and Hamburg University, our study was just published in Nat Commun 🔗 doi.org/10.1038/s41467…

Correction -- @doronf from @ReichmanUni was part of our brilliant team!

Our results thus support the hypothesis that relational coding plays an important functional role in perception and our shared visual world.

I am pleased to share that together with the brilliant team of Ofer Lipman, @Doronfried1179 and @OrYacov from Reichman University and @ShanyGrossman from MPI for Human Development and Hamburg University, our study was just published in Nat Commun 🔗 doi.org/10.1038/s41467…

We are delighted to share that our paper, a joint work with the brilliant @ShohamAdva , @rotembroday, Galit Yovel and Itay Yaron from @TelAvivUni has now been published in Communication Biology nature.com/articles/s4200…

@CIFAR_News @TempletonWorld @anilkseth @Liad_Mudrik @jbmattingley @meganakpeters @sandyrwaxman @Sahba_Besh @CatherineDuclo6 @introspection @adeelrazi הכ,ע

#CIFARWinterSchool applications are now open! Learn from top researchers studying the neuroscience of consciousness in a fully-funded, 3-day event for senior PhD and post-doctoral fellows, hosted by CIFAR and @TempletonWorld. Apply by June 23! cifar.ca/next-generatio…

Nachum's new book Natural Neuroscience is out! A fresh take on how brains work in the real world—well worth a read.

@davidpoeppel 2aqSw×

Wow this is cool!

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Too much time spent in Shadow can result in deficiency of Light, and it can be depressive if our physical world existence is already bleak in faith or positivity. Too much time spent in Light brings a risk for physical world collapse when Shadow hits reality—we can find ourselves completely unprepared for real tragedy and heartbreak, and suffer accordingly. We’re not meant to dilly-dally in darkness, but we can’t expect to stay forever under a sunny sky. The goal is adaptability to either state-of-being and tempering of our expectations—aligned living at its best.

Are high-order visual cortex representations organized according to purely visual, or also linguistic, principles? Check out the new preprint from our great collaboration with @yovelgalit @ShohamAdva - always a pleasure working with you!

As can be seen, the receptive field structure of entorhinal neurons resembles the basis functions of JPEG, suggesting a form of lossy representation of space in the entorhinal cortex. (4/4)

We illustrate this point, among other examples, by noting a surprising similarity between entorhinal grid cells and the widely used information compression algorithm JPEG (Figure 3, see next). (3/4)

Artificial systems are so different from the brain — can they be informative about brain function? In our perspective with @SimonyErez and @ShanyGrossman, now in PNAS (pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pn…), we borrow the concept of convergent evolution and argue that, paradoxically, (1/4)

and here is a proper link to the preprint : arxiv.org/abs/2407.08714 check it out!

These results help explain the substantial similarity in perceptual judgments that are observed across individuals. They further point to relational coding as a fundamental representational principle in high order human visual areas.

Our results show that what remains invariant across brains is not the activation patterns (population vectors), commonly considered the “work horse” of visual representations, but rather the similarity structure (relational coding) which emerges between these patterns (see fig)

Together with the superb Reichman University group: Ofer Lipman, @Doronfried1779 and Yacov Hel-Or and our group’s brilliant alumni @ShanyGrossman, we explored this question by studying intracranial recordings from the visual cortex of patients undergoing clinical diagnosis.

Why do we all perceive the world in a (largely) similar manner? This question is not only interesting from a social-neuroscience point of view, but addresses the fundamental issue of neuronal representations of perceptual content in the human brain. New preprint arXiv:2407.08714