Jonathan A. Michaels
How do we move? I study brains and machines at York University (Assistant Professor). Full-time human.
Neural Control & Computation Lab
www.ncclab.ca
- After four months, the journal has not found a single reviewer for my PhD student's manuscript. The academic peer review system is broken. I think we all should: 1. Review three papers for every one that we submit. 2. Promptly declined to review a paper when the request arrives. #AcademicChatter
- No joke: I got angry hate mail today for writing an obituary of a Black woman scientist—because the person felt she did didn’t deserve the recognition. Which just makes me want to share it again: www.nature.com/articles/d41...
- Discover @thetransmitter.bsky.social's Mentorship Directory, connecting mentors and mentees at all stages of their careers. #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/mentorship-d...
- People calling themselves the “father” or “godfather” of AI is so blasé and derivative. I’m claiming the title of the “drunk, argumentative uncle who ruins Thanksgiving” of AI.
- While preparing your #NCMKobe26 abstract, read through the highlights from #NCMPan25! The meeting highlight article is now available for review. Thank you to some of the scholarship winners from 2025 for putting the article together. journals.physiology....
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- This is who runs this account
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- Final paper of my PhD 🤗 www.nature.com/articles/s44... There is growing interest in how cognitive control may improve value-based decision making. However, we find that a recent paper overestimated the role of control in their task, leading to erroneous interpretations of dACC recordings.
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- A new and improved version of TheoryCoder, which learns to play video games in a human-like way by synthesizing both high-level abstractions and a low-level model of game mechanics: arxiv.org/abs/2602.00929
- #OTD in 1995, astronaut Eileen Collins became the first female pilot of a NASA space shuttle. She piloted the Space Shuttle Discovery during mission STS-63, a mission that included the first-ever rendezvous between a US space shuttle & the Russian space station Mir. #WomenInSTEM #AstronautEnvy 🚀
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- Was a pleasure to discuss the cognitive basis of reasoning at an @ivado.bsky.social workshop with legends like @alisongopnik.bsky.social @lauraruis.bsky.social @taylorwwebb.bsky.social and Andrew Granville!
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- We think cortex might function like a JEPA. It looks like prediction errors in layer 2/3 are not computed against input (as is the idea in predictive processing), but against a representation in latent space (i.e. like in a JEPA arxiv.org/abs/2301.08243 or RPL doi.org/10.1101/2025...).
- Our work with @georgkeller.bsky.social on testing predictive processing (PP) models in cortex is out on biorvix now! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... A short thread on our findings and thoughts on where we should move on from PP below.
- JEPAs all the way down 🐢🐢🐢
- We think cortex might function like a JEPA. It looks like prediction errors in layer 2/3 are not computed against input (as is the idea in predictive processing), but against a representation in latent space (i.e. like in a JEPA arxiv.org/abs/2301.08243 or RPL doi.org/10.1101/2025...).
- “We found that using AI assistance led to a statistically significant decrease in mastery.” Props to Anthropic for studying the effects of their creation and reporting results that are not probably what they wished for www.anthropic.com/research/AI-...
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- Hannah Arendt did not mince words, did she? 'Totalitarianism replaces all first-rate talents with crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.' From "The Origins of Totalitarianism" (1951)
- Ilhan Omar is an American hero. www.nytimes.com/live/2026/01...
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- The 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)
- More than you would expect from studying AI and less than you would expect from studying neurobiology.
- "How much of the brain's learned algorithms depend on the fact it is a brain?" arxiv.org/abs/2601.02063 The brain is a neural network, but also a biological organ (unlike artificial neural networks). How much does this matter to cognition?
- rightwingers see people caring about others in their community and instead of finding that inspiring they think it’s some sort of grand conspiracy because they don’t understand what it means to care for others you don’t personally know
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- a chilly pine warbler trying to stay warm in the freezing rain #birds
- Mirror-imaging. They could never imagine putting themselves on the line for another person or their community (remember JD Vance's theory of love, that it extends only to your family and no one else?) and they know any "resistance" on their end would be purely transactional - so they assume the same
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- Provocative! Not all scientists will want to hear this. I agree with many points. In parallel to emphasis on better communication, I hope we’ll begin conversations about maintaining integrity. asteriskmag.com/issues/13/th...
- On the idea of leaving academic research: one of the hardest ideas for me to grapple with is stepping away from the science that I love. I’ve spent years focusing on a carefully chosen topic. The (potentially false) idea is that I can’t find a TT job, I have to give up that study & that hurts…
- Random reminder that the clove of garlic I put in my dinner last night is larger than a mouse brain.
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- I just created a series of seven deep-dive videos about AI, which I've posted to youtube and now here. 😊 Targeted to laypeople, they explore how LLMs work, what they can do, and what impacts they have on learning, well-being, disinformation, the workplace, the economy, and the environment.
- Where does learning through imitation happen in the brain? In juvenile zebra finches, we pinpoint a synaptic locus of song learning in a cortico-basal ganglia circuit and leverage this localization to measure the timescale of consolidation and make birds learn faster! #neuroskyence (1/14)
- Hard to overstate how much fun it has been to work with @schreinerdrew.bsky.social on this, a heroic study pinning down the mechanisms underlying birdsong learning at a synaptic level. It’s a lucky department that hires him. #animalprattle
- Where does learning through imitation happen in the brain? In juvenile zebra finches, we pinpoint a synaptic locus of song learning in a cortico-basal ganglia circuit and leverage this localization to measure the timescale of consolidation and make birds learn faster! #neuroskyence (1/14)
- 🚨🧵 Happy to share my new preprint “Sensory expectations and prediction error during feedback control in the human brain” with @gribblelab.org , @andpru.bsky.social , @jonathanamichaels.bsky.social and @diedrichsenjorn.bsky.social. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
- Remembering Krishna Shenoy, who died 3 years ago today. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- Great pic. Will miss him forever.
