Ari Benjamin
Computational neuroscientist in the connectionist tradition.
https://ari-benjamin.com
- This tool is extremely helpful and I think all scientists could benefit from it. Good at all stages of the research process, especially the very beginning. It's also a great of example of how we *should* be building AI tools for science. Not to replace scientific thinking, but to hone it.
- First week where planyourscience.com had more than 1000 organic users. I know this is nothing by software standards but it is quite something by academic standards. And to everyone using it - tell me what could/should be better. And use it to export a first draft ;)
- Especially relevant as a counterexample to OpenAI’s Prism tool, which will only worsen the science slop problem. The point isn’t to be anti-AI. It’s to demand a better philosophy behind the tools we build
- Interesting – this is what you need for synaptic plasticity to solve "within-neuron" credit assignment. Backpropagating APs, elevating Ca2+ above the plasticity threshold, should preferentially enter dendrites which recently activated. Is this the first evidence of this?
- More of this type of content please!
- It is possible to work on neural networks as a neuroscientist and actively oppose how AI is developing and how it will affect society.
- Reposted by Ari BenjaminConsciousness science as a marketplace of rationalizations my commentary on @smfleming.bsky.social and @matthiasmichel.bsky.social's thought-provoking BBS paper, and more generally about the field. osf.io/preprints/ps...
- Truly crazy - Texas groups are demanding absolute ideological alignment. There are multiple TT job calls at Texas public universities right now. I will not be applying.
- Do you plot transcriptomic data, coloring each cell by its cell type? ~ Don't use a default colormap! ~ Instead, use colormaps that capture biological meaning. If two cell types are very similar, their colors should be similar too. Read on 🧵 🧬💻
- Good scientific plotting uses color to convey meaning. We don't want to distract readers. Yet with default categorical maps, (-) some cell types jump out for no reason (-) perceptual similarity between colors is meaningless (-) fewer colors than types, leading to repeats
- This is real – Anthropic just agreed to a $1.5B class action settlement for authors of copyrighted works it stole. File your claim here: www.anthropiccopyrightsettlement.com Unclear if this is just 'books' or journal articles too, but I'm putting mine in anyway www.reuters.com/sustainabili...
- what’s crazy is how they figured this out. makes for good science reading! “Replication of an alien genome within one’s own cytoplasm echoes the endosymbiotic domestication of organelles [mitochondria]. Clonal males may thus be regarded as organelles at the superorganism level” 🤯
- This interview of Monica López-Hidalgo by @analog-ashley.bsky.social is inspiring. All scientists’ job description should include this, great model
- Neurociencias Para Todos brings neuroscience education to remote communities in Mexico. @analog-ashley.bsky.social talked with founder Monica López-Hidalgo about the program’s efforts and the importance of making neuroscience accessible to all. www.thetransmitter.org/community/br...
- who is liable when an error is made by a BCI-using human with AI intervening in the output? The human? The BCI manufacturer? No one?
- A brain-computer interface co-piloted by AI improved how a person with paralysis complete tasks, such as moving a computer cursor or operating a robotic arm, by up to four times, according to research in @natmachintell.nature.com: spklr.io/63322BHjsK #Neuroscience #Neuroskyence #AI
- Get on my wavelength, man
- Oh no how is it that "neuromodulation" means such different things across communities? Who let this happen? For the record, the right answer is serotonin, etc. The wrong answer is brain stimulation in a medical context, DBS, TMS etc. I will endlessly defend this turf.
- me: Dang I wish there weren’t such incentives for self-promotion all the damn time also me: *logs on to see what papers folks are promoting today*
- “scientific progress can’t be cleanly separated from questions about our values. By aiming for a value-free science, we risk missing the political and moral values already implicitly embedded in the technologies we create.”
- Reposted by Ari BenjaminI think it's now possible to make a poli-sci course that equips one for modern political analysis better than most classic theory and has a syllabus sourced entirely from random internet posts. Text 1. Wilhoit's Law, born as part of a 2018 blog comment crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/l...
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- TIL that Earth and the inner planets don't have stable orbits. Their eccentricities evolve chaotically, and by a lot. In about 1% of simulations, inner planets collide with each other in the next few billion years www.scholarpedia.org/article/Stab...
- Reposted by Ari BenjaminNew work from the lab highlighting the differential effect of arousal on distinct excitatory projections!
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- Proud of Williams College for choosing to decline all new federal grants because of anti-DEI requirements www.science.org/content/arti...
- Interesting preprint: functional connectivity between pairs of neurons in V1 isn't about tuning properties nearly as much as it is about which neurons engage with pupil diameter. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC... IMO we should be looking more often to neuromodulator receptor profiles in cortex
- A study recently made the rounds here claiming that ‘interdisciplinarity reduces impact’. But, citations are inflated by bubbles. Which bubbles would pop given higher rates of interdisciplinary migration?
- I’d love to see this method applied to embeddings of genes in models of single cell ‘omics data. Would be a fast way to match orthologous genes across species
