Michael W. Cole

Inspired by Edinburgh’s legacy of big ideas (e.g., Hume), on a train leaving the city, I crafted a book proposal about big ideas in network neuroscience—how brain flows generate representations that compose our minds. The rest is history, and this book: shorturl.at/dSfwB

My latest Neural Flows newsletter post! “Enhancing scientific inference with evidence quality maps” Automated inference as a scalable engine of discovery neuralflows.substack.com/p/enhancing-sc…

My latest Neural Flows post: “Living in a compositional universe is a prerequisite for intelligence” Brain flow dynamics take advantage of our environment’s compositionality to accomplish goals neuralflows.substack.com/p/living-in-a-…

Thanks to first author Alexandros Tzalavras and coauthors! The paper: biorxiv.org/content/10.648… 15/n

Together, these results validate a new method to test complementary roles of distinct flow pathways: direct visual pathways rapidly generate detailed visual information, while hierarchical pathways build up compressed representations (e.g., shapes rather than lines). 14/n

Why do our visual systems have “shortcut” connections (V1-V4)? What do they add beyond the classic hierarchical (V1-V2-V3-V4) pathway? The lab’s latest study takes activity flow modeling to the next level to answer these questions biorxiv.org/content/10.648… 1/n

@PessoaBrain EQI is still being developed, but it’d be fun to get some rough estimates now. I can share an LLM prompt to make it easier, if you’re up for trying it

@TheColeLab How do I check my scores?? 😀

My latest Neural Flows post: “Using evidence quality to restructure incentives in science” Metrics will inevitably bias science, so let’s switch to metrics that reflect what science should be biased by open.substack.com/pub/neuralflow…

@PessoaBrain If your methods are reliable and valid, you’ll get high EQI scores! EQI-contribution (EQI-C) scores tend to be higher for novel areas. Also, evidence that challenges the existing literature carries equally weight (as shown in the interactive figure in the post)

@TheColeLab Interesting. What if one's studies are in a "small area", tend to be novel and to challenge existing literature?