I will examine the concept of chirality (the difference between a right hand and a left hand, generalized) and its relevance to philosophy of mind. Philosophy of mind often deals with colors: color… Read more ›
From feature-level attractor geometry to dynamical systems state-space. Read more ›
UC Irvine neuroscientist Oswald Steward received the 2026 Kavli Prize in Neuroscience for discoveries that helped explain how the brain forms and stores memories. Read more ›
The prize-collecting stroll is the path version of the prize-collecting TSP. Given a complete metric graph, two prescribed terminal vertices $s,t$, and nonnegative penalties on vertices, the prize-collecting stroll asks for an $s$-$t$ tour minimizing the length of the tour plus the total penalty of vertices that are not visited by the $s,t$ tour. We study a common generalization of the prize-collecting stroll and several related prize-collecting... Read more ›
A personality trait usually seen as a weakness may have an unexpected advantage hidden beneath the surface. Read more ›
A dopamine menu can help provide small, regular boosts of motivation and pleasure throughout the day Read more ›
Womb of Being Here I am, in it, curled as you are, as all are who breathe. I found myself here, not by my choice but by that of something other. So, I’m here wondering how you interpret the mystery of it —not its biology, but the phenomenology of it, the cloud of meanings of its textures… Read more ›
This work proposes a hybrid ANN-SNN pipeline that effectively leverages the rich embeddings of pretrained artificial neural networks (ANNs) to enable high-performance spiking neural networks (SNNs). The architecture couples a pretrained EfficientNet encoder with a CoLaNET spiking classifier. We convert the encoder's activations into spike trains via rate-coding and train the subsequent SNN classifier using local, biologically inspired learning... Read more ›
The clinical and molecular heterogeneity observed in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) presents a challenge for diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment. RNA sequencing of post-mortem brain samples from ALS patients has identified several subtypes with distinct molecular signatures. We sought to evaluate these subtypes across diverse tissues and datasets and assess the feasibility of supervised machine learning models for sample classification. Unsupervised clustering and pathway analysis were p... Read more ›
From Turing and Dartmouth to Searle, Nagel, Chalmers, and Aisentica, the question of artificial consciousness changed from machine… Read more ›
MIT EEG study found AI users performed worse without AI than those who never used it. The cognitive debt argument: what AI takes from… Read more ›
The mismatch between continuous acoustic signals and discrete event-driven processing remains a fundamental bottleneck for neuromorphic speech processing. Current systems typically rely on fixed spike encoders, forcing downstream Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) to compensate for non-adaptive input representations. To address this, we present a learnable residual speech-to-spike encoder jointly trained end-to-end with a Recurrent Leaky Integrate-a... Read more ›
Prof. Abhyudai Singh earned his bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur, India. He received master’s degrees in both mechanical and electrical & computer […] Read more ›
The Strange Architecture of U of AlbanyThe University of Albany was built to resemble a decommissioned nuclear power plant, apparently. The central courtyard is surrounded by a sea of tall white columns and glass domes that evoke the science-fiction espionage of Andor more than responsible learning. Read more ›
Climate change reshapes forest biophysical effects, yet the impact direction and strength remain uncertain. Here we quantify the growing-season land surface temperature between forests and adjacent open land (∆LSTgs) and show contrasting temporal trends in ∆LSTgs across the globe during 2001–2023. Rising vapour pressure deficit (VPD) has emerged as the primary driver of these contrasting trends, surpassing other common climatic factors. By contrast, plant anisohydricity—an indicator of stomat... Read more ›
The study reveals that these vortex-like waves are driven by a unique, circular "merry-go-round" architectural layout of neurons in the sensory cortex. Read more ›
The option of professional golfers playing a different ball from the casual golfer (bifurcation is the technical term) is back on the table. Read more ›
I hadn't scrolled Instagram for quite a while (>4-5 hours). I'd grayscaled my phone for over three hours. It seemed great. And now right before I f... Read more ›
For centuries, the dominant paradigm in cognitive science and philosophy viewed the mind as a fundamentally linguistic or symbolic engine… Read more ›
In the book Metazoa, I connect the evolution of subjective experience (consciousness, in a very broad sense) to some ideas about nervous system activity. The main idea I look at is the possible importance of large-scale rhythmic patterns, some of … → Read more ›