Shahab Bakhtiari
|| assistant prof at University of Montreal || leading the systems neuroscience and AI lab (SNAIL: snailab.ca/) 🐌 || associate academic member of Mila (Quebec AI Institute) || #NeuroAI || vision and learning in brains and machines
- Reposted by Shahab BakhtiariHow do you know how visual stimuli are represented internally for decision making? This is perhaps the central question in perceptual decision making. In a new paper, we show that one can use artificial neural networks to crack this problem. #NeuroAi #VisionScience direct.mit.edu/opmi/article...
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- Reposted by Shahab BakhtiariNew @pnas.org paper out 🎉 “Representational drift reflects ongoing balancing of stochastic changes by Hebbian learning” 👉 doi.org/10.1073/pnas... What drives representational drift in neural populations? Here’s the short version. 👇 🧪🧠 1/5
- Reposted by Shahab BakhtiariWhy don’t neural networks learn all at once, but instead progress from simple to complex solutions? And what does “simple” even mean across different neural network architectures? Sharing our new paper @iclr_conf led by Yedi Zhang with Peter Latham arxiv.org/abs/2512.20607
- Reposted by Shahab BakhtiariThis paper was an awesome collaborative effort of a @fitngin.bsky.social working group. It provides a detailed review of how DNNs can be used to support dev neuro research @lauriebayet.bsky.social and I wrote the network modeling section about how DNNs can be used to test developmental theories 🧵
- Reposted by Shahab BakhtiariFascinating neuropsych article from 1919 of a patient with spatial disorientation, with a loss of mental imagery for routes: watermark02.silverchair.com/archneurpsyc...
- Reposted by Shahab BakhtiariThe hippocampal map has its own attentional control signal! Our new study reveals that theta #sweeps can be instantly biased towards behaviourally relevant locations. See 📹 in post 4/6 and preprint here 👉 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 🧵(1/6)
- Reposted by Shahab BakhtiariLove this. “Spontaneous” has always really meant “we don’t know why X is happening”, a perspective tied to the dominance of structured task paradigms for studying cognition, behavior, and brain activity.
- I know this isn't the content you followed me for, but I watched a father desperately searching through piles of bodies, crying out, "Sepehr, Baba, where are you?" A 12-fu…-minute video searching through the bodies. It is a level of pain I can’t put into words. …
- Reposted by Shahab BakhtiariNew in Nature Neuroscience: We developed a flexible model that reveals how animals learn tasks—uncovering stages, sudden insights, and gradual improvements unique to each animal. Learning isn't monotonic, and our model captures that complexity 🐭📊 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- Reposted by Shahab BakhtiariExcited to share our NEWEST PREPRINT led by @rochellekaper.bsky.social!! osf.io/preprints/ps... We ask: How do people learn multiple layers of environmental structure – w/o feedback – & how well do they *know* they’ve learned? Turns out, stimulus familiarity matters more than we thought! 🧵👇
- Reposted by Shahab BakhtiariOur paper on the "Oneirogen hypothesis" is now up in its revised form on eLife! This is the hypothesis that psychedelics induce a dream-like state, which we show via modelling could explain a variety of perceptual and learning effects from such drugs. elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre... 🧠📈 🧪
- Reposted by Shahab BakhtiariThank you to @aaas.org for the opportunity to lead a new editorial pod at Science Advances on Systems, Computational, Neuro-AI & Neurotechnology (SCANN). Top opportunity to highlight outstanding work at the intersection of neuroscience, computation, and emerging technologies. Send your papers now!
- Reposted by Shahab BakhtiariWe're already in the phase that each of us (Iranians) by now know someone killed/injured in our circle of friends/family. And this is despite the continued internet blackout, when millions haven't still managed to hear from their family/friends since Thursday, January 8th. This tells a lot ... 😥😥
- Reposted by Shahab BakhtiariI’m very happy to share the latest from my lab published in @Nature Hippocampal neurons that initially encode reward shift their tuning over the course of days to precede or predict reward. Full text here: rdcu.be/eY5nh
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- Reposted by Shahab BakhtiariWhen and why do modular representations emerge in neural networks? @stefanofusi.bsky.social and I posted a preprint answering this question last year, and now it has been extensively revised, refocused, and generalized. Read more here: doi.org/10.1101/2024... (1/7)
- Reposted by Shahab BakhtiariWith some trepidation, I'm putting this out into the world: gershmanlab.com/textbook.html It's a textbook called Computational Foundations of Cognitive Neuroscience, which I wrote for my class. My hope is that this will be a living document, continuously improved as I get feedback.
- Really interesting work, introducing Epiplexity (an observer-dependent measure of information under computational constraints) Feels like something theoretical neuroscience could use right away. 🧠📈
- We introduce epiplexity, a new measure of information that provides a foundation for how to select, generate, or transform data for learning systems. We have been working on this for almost 2 years, and I cannot contain my excitement! arxiv.org/abs/2601.03220 1/7
- Reposted by Shahab Bakhtiari🚨📜+🧵🚨 Very excited about this work showing that people with no hand function following a spinal cord injury can control the activity of motor units from those muscles to perform 1D, 2D and 3D tasks, play video games, or navigate a virtual wheelchair By a wonderful team co-mentored w Dario Farina
- New preprint! We show that people with tetraplegic spinal cord injury can use their residual motor unit activity to achieve up to three dimensional control using non-invasive high-density surface EMG With my co-first authors Xingchen Yang and Ciara Gibbs www.medrxiv.org/content/10.6... 1/13
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As this ramps up and we are asked to cheerlead for it, I remain genuinely shocked that Canada, once again, under the banner of a **nation-building**, has created a funding program that excludes Canadian students and researchers based on presence in Canada. /1 universityaffairs.ca/news/feds-la... - Wondering if the "slow death of scaling" is the hidden force behind this trend. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.... Very nice write up by @sarahooker.bsky.social Rethinking architectures and training curricula can definitely open up a new space for #NeuroAI
- Reposted by Shahab BakhtiariReminder that this job is open! If you have any questions, feel free to get in touch. Deadline is February 20th.
- Great news! We are looking for an NHP neuroscientist as the assistant professor level. We have no preconceived ideas -- looking for the most exciting research going. If you have any questions, please reach out. universityaffairs.ca/search-jobs/...
- Is it just my timeline, or are we seeing a spike in loose neuro-based AI ideation again? I’m seeing way more references to specific mechanisms by AI folks (hippocampus, oscillations, etc.). It's often handwavy, but interesting to see the pendulum swing back after years of fading interest. 🧠🤖
- Reposted by Shahab BakhtiariWhat can cognitive science learn from AI? In infinitefaculty.substack.com/p/what-cogni... I outline how AI has found that scale and richness of learning experiences fundamentally change learning & generalization — and how I believe we should rethink cognitive experiments & theories in response.
- Reposted by Shahab BakhtiariThis paper had a pretty shocking headline result (40% of voxels!), so I dug into it, and I think it is wrong. Essentially: they compare two noisy measures and find that about 40% of voxels have different sign between the two. I think this is just noise!
- Would love to hear expert views on this paper. It appears to show that the operationalization of brain activity the field has relied on for 3 decades—the BOLD response—is not actually a sensible measure of brain activity. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- Reposted by Shahab BakhtiariNew preprint. We show that in addition to reward prediction errors (RPEs), dorsal striatal dopamine signals encode sensory prediction errors (SPEs), the difference between sensory prior & observed stimulus. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
- Reposted by Shahab BakhtiariThe last year was very hard as my father was dying. It became that much harder when I discovered that AI played a role in amplifying his physical pain, and perhaps hastening the end of his life. It wasn’t easy to write about what happened, but I’ve tried. open.substack.com/pub/buildcog...
- Reposted by Shahab BakhtiariIf this result generalises, then the field's great dendritic computation dream is over
- Apple’s real 'edge' might be Edge AI. On-device continual learning is still a tough nut to crack (catastrophic forgetting, energy consumption, etc.), but Apple may have the right pieces in place to get there first.
- Great piece as always by @markdhumphries.bsky.social. I’d bet a lot of the pushback foundation models in neuroscience receive is simply because of the name. Call them anything else and they’d be perfectly fine :)
- Just published my review of neuroscience in 2025, on The Spike. The 10th of these, would you believe? This year we have foundation models, breakthroughs in using light to understand the brain, a gene therapy, and more Enjoy! medium.com/the-spike/20...
- Reposted by Shahab BakhtiariJust published my review of neuroscience in 2025, on The Spike. The 10th of these, would you believe? This year we have foundation models, breakthroughs in using light to understand the brain, a gene therapy, and more Enjoy! medium.com/the-spike/20...
- Most likely captured on a phone, this image perfectly captures the reality of Iran today.
- James makes a crucial point in this thread about AI in data analysis. It reminded me of this recent paper: osf.io/preprints/ps.... While I don’t agree with every argument made, I found the particular segment below especially useful.
- Andrew’s latest blog series has the potential to be a full curriculum. It’s made me think more about the value of non-interdisciplinary foundations. There’s a strong case for ensuring students are expert cognitive (neuro)scientists before they transition into interdisciplinary spaces eg neuroAI 1/3
- New post! Last week I shared why I thought cognitive (neuro)science hasn’t contributed as much as one might hope to the design of AI systems; this week I'm sharing my thoughts on how methods and principles from these fields *have* been useful in my work. infinitefaculty.substack.com/p/how-cognit...
- Reposted by Shahab BakhtiariIf you're (1) into nhp neurophysiology and/or biological motor control, (2) a foreign big shot and (3) interested in moving here, please reach out -- this new program looks extremely attractive (min. $8M over 8y)! www.uwo.ca/research/can...
- Reposted by Shahab BakhtiariOur paper on data constrained RNN that generalize to optogenetic perturbations now citable on eLife: doi.org/10.7554/eLif...
- Reposted by Shahab BakhtiariGenerative AI systems are being built primarily for entertainment, design and communication, but their potential for neuroscience is vast. @shahabbakht.bsky.social explores how this technology could help capture an animal’s ecological experience. #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/artificial-i...
- Reposted by Shahab BakhtiariExcited to announce a new book telling the story of mathematical approaches to studying the mind, from the origins of cognitive science to modern AI! The Laws of Thought will be published in February and is available for pre-order now.
- On why AlphaFold may not revolutionize drug discovery. Great piece by @philipcball.bsky.social
- Reposted by Shahab BakhtiariWhy isn’t modern AI built around principles from cognitive science or neuroscience? Starting a substack (infinitefaculty.substack.com/p/why-isnt-m...) by writing down my thoughts on that question: as part of a first series of posts giving my current thoughts on the relation between these fields. 1/3
- Reposted by Shahab Bakhtiari“Why AGI Will Not Happen” by Tim Dettmers. timdettmers.com/2025/12/10/w... This essay is worth reading. Discusses diminishing returns (and risks) of scaling. The contrast between West and East: “Winner takes all” approach of building the biggest thing vs a long-term focus on practicality.
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- Reposted by Shahab BakhtiariYup I realized that when one of his New Yorker articles discussed his great idea that the brain might have a special region for face recognition, all presented as his idea long after this had been widely published.
- Incredible piece on Oliver Sacks. If you were ever awed at his supposedly true stories (I remember being stunned by the account of the autistic twins who rattled off large prime numbers), read this. He told wonderful stories, but they were in large part fiction. www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...
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- Reposted by Shahab BakhtiariThe last chapter of my PhD (expanded) is finally out as a preprint! “Semantic reasoning takes place largely outside the language network” 🧠🧐 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... What is semantic reasoning? Read on! 🧵👇
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- Reposted by Shahab BakhtiariI'm more and more convinced that low-dimensional manifolds in the brain are just an artifact of the experimental designs and analyses we use... 🧠📈 🧪
- Dimensionality reduction may be the wrong approach to understanding neural representations. Our new paper shows that across human visual cortex, dimensionality is unbounded and scales with dataset size—we show this across nearly four orders of magnitude. journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...
- Reposted by Shahab BakhtiariThis is HUGE! (Read it!!). I'll be cheering Doris and Astera Neuro on the entire way. Doris is a genius, both in the scope of her vision and in making things happen (that combination is rare). SO EXCITING! I can't wait to see what Astera Neuro discovers. astera.org/neuroscienti...
- The "AI Scientist will be a killjoy" argument is pretty funny. I, for one, would be happy to find joy in something less crucial if it means accelerating science harmlessly.
- Reposted by Shahab BakhtiariWhen we see something that's moving, our memories about it end up projected forward in time: We remember it further along than it was. In a new paper in 𝘗𝘴𝘺𝘤𝘩𝘰𝘭𝘰𝘨𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘭 𝘚𝘤𝘪𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘦, out today and led by @dillonplunkett.bsky.social, we demonstrate that this happens even when there is 𝙣𝙤 𝙢𝙤𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣 𝙬𝙝𝙖𝙩𝙨𝙤𝙚𝙫𝙚𝙧.🧵
- Reposted by Shahab Bakhtiari📣We have 2 open faculty positions for senior researchers in Neuroscience at Queen's University! healthsci.queensu.ca/administrati... 1. a new Director for our Centre for Neuroscience Studies 2. a non-human primate NeuroAI researcher Please share widely and reach out for questions!
- Reposted by Shahab BakhtiariSpread the word: I'm looking to hire a postdoc to explore the concept of attention (as studied in psych/neuro, not the transformer mechanism) in large Vision-Language Models. More details here: lindsay-lab.github.io/2025/12/08/p... #MLSky #neurojobs #compneuro
- In this piece for @thetransmitter.bsky.social, I argue that ecological neuroscience should leverage generative video and interactive models to simulate the world from animals' perspectives. The technological building blocks are almost here - we just need to align them for this application. 🧠🤖
- Generative AI will offer a new way to see, simulate and hypothesize about how animals experience their worlds. In doing so, it could help bridge the long-standing gap between neural function and behavior, writes @shahabbakht.bsky.social. #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/artificial-i...
- Reposted by Shahab BakhtiariThrilled to start 2026 as faculty in Psych & CS @ualberta.bsky.social + Amii.ca Fellow! 🥳 Recruiting students to develop theories of cognition in natural & artificial systems 🤖💭🧠. Find me at #NeurIPS2025 workshops (speaking coginterp.github.io/neurips2025 & organising @dataonbrainmind.bsky.social)
