Matt Perich
Neuroscience, engineering, AI, music. Asst. Professor / PI at University of Montréal and Mila.
- So, I agreed to teach a group of 4-6 year olds something cool about the brain... in 10 minutes. Any suggestions for a fail-proof activity? I love these ellenjmchenry.com/brain-hemisp... but the cutting/pasting will be too hard for kindergarten I think.
- This year's Lab X-mas Family Photos are very zeitgeisty for those living in #Montreal: #Xmas #Transit
- I'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...
- For this paper, it’s worth considering that structure in brain activity need not be linear…
- Sure, that's fair. But, do you think it's really just a low-D manifold curled up many times? Why would you actually want a low-D manifold for most real-world tasks?
- Low-d dynamics are useful - they are noise robust and easier to control. BUT you also get a major benefit from curling up a low-D state manifold in a high-D embedding space: you can then linearly read out arbitrary functions of state!
- Interesting, but I'm not sure I'm convinced... My intuition is that low-D dynamics, even when curled up, are probably not useful for representing information for arbitrary high-D tasks, no? Like, if you're not letting yourself assume 1 task, can I get arbitrary states for any task this way?
- One of the reasons we wrote our recent perspective (www.nature.com/articles/s41...) was to try and argue that the talk around manifolds should be more about what it buys us conceptually as a framework, not about "is it low-D".
- Well, do please note: my comment above is not intended as a slight against manifold-based approaches. The point is merely that the idea that those manifolds are super low-D is not justified by the theory or data, at this point, I'd say...
- Because of brain constraints and all the bottlenecks on the behaviour? And I'd say it emerges naturally it's not a result of optimization And to echo Matt, trying to estimate intrinsic vs embedding (linear) dimensionality can reveal striking differences even during very simple tasks...
- Go work with Juan! I can vouch that this will be a very cool project.
- Super happy for having been awarded an @erc.europa.eu Consolidator Grant to continue our basic neuroscience work on the neural basis for motor control and motor learning. What a great way to set things up here at Champalimaud! 🎉 🚨 Job Alert for postdocs research technicians, and PhD students in 🧵
- in a very unbiased way of course!
- Super happy for having been awarded an @erc.europa.eu Consolidator Grant to continue our basic neuroscience work on the neural basis for motor control and motor learning. What a great way to set things up here at Champalimaud! 🎉 🚨 Job Alert for postdocs research technicians, and PhD students in 🧵
- 👏 Congratulations Juan Álvaro Gallego on his project “SELECT” being selected in the ERC Consolidator 2025 Call! 🧠 SELECT will investigate the neural mechanisms underlying the learning, execution and adaptation of skilled movements at multiple brain areas 👉 www.fchampalimaud.org/news/two-lif...
- Come to Canada
- It's happening! Canada launched two programs to recruit international researchers. Canada Impact+ Research Chairs (1 million/yr for 8 yrs +) Canada Impact+ Emerging Leaders. I will do my best to facilitate the process for those interested. Hit me up. www.canada.ca/en/impact-pl...
- [Not loaded yet]
- [Not loaded yet]
- There was never any point to having reference letters. That's why we've all started using AI to do this nonesense task. References should only be used for short-listed candidates for important positions/awards, and ideally, be done via a call to get the most honest opinion possible.
- Happy to announce that as of this summer, I've joined the CTRL-Labs group at Meta Reality Labs as a Research Scientist! I've also relocated to the bustling city of New York, where I hope I can do my best work (and enjoy running in Central Park).
- Delighted to see this finally out: rdcu.be/eO9oW We tested whether brief striatal dopamine release events influence the vigor of skilled movements. Despite popular belief, we did not find any evidence linking rapid dopamine dynamics to motor vigor on a moment-by-moment basis.
- [Not loaded yet]
- [Not loaded yet]
- 🚨Job alert🚨 The lab has up to *3 postdoc openings* for comp systems neuroscientists interested in describing and manipulating neural population dynamics mediating behaviour This is part of a collaborative ARIA grant "4D precision control of cortical dynamics" euraxess.ec.europa.eu/jobs/383909
- A tad late (announcements coming) but very happy to share the latest developments in my previous preprint! Previously, we show that neural representations for control of movement are largely distinct following supervised or reinforcement learning. The latter most closely matches NHP recordings.
- Here’s our latest work at @glajoie.bsky.social and @mattperich.bsky.social ‘s labs! Excited to see this out. We used a combination of neural recordings & modelling to show that RL yields neural dynamics closer to biology, with useful continual learning properties. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
-
View full threadWe’re pleased to see RL's role in neural plasticity is increasingly under focus in the motor control community (check out @adrianhaith.bsky.social's latest piece!) I strongly believe motor learning is sitting at the interface of many plasticity mechanisms and RL is an important piece of this puzzle.
- New Pre-Print: www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/... We’re all familiar with having to practice a new skill to get better at it, but what really happens during practice? The answer, I propose, is reinforcement learning - specifically policy-gradient reinforcement learning. Overview 🧵 below...
- As always a huge thank you to my colleagues and supervisors @glajoie.bsky.social @mattperich.bsky.social and @nandahkrishna.bsky.social for helping make this work what it is—and making the journey so fun and interesting
- Congrats to Ann Huang for an excellent presentation at last week's @kempnerinstitute.bsky.social all-hands! 👏 Ann shared exciting updates about our InputDSA tool - more to come soon. Thrilled she had the chance to present to our engaged and supportive community.
- 📣 BIG NEWS EVERYONE. I am so excited to announce… 🎉 I’m moving to University College London @ucl.ac.uk to join the Experimental Psychology department in @uclpals.bsky.social! 🎉 The big move happens in spring/summer. So I’m already exploring recruiting staff & students at UCL for fall 2026!
- [Not loaded yet]
- 🚨Big news!🚨 The lab is relocating to Lisbon, joining a great team of experimental and theoretical neuroscientists, and the Neurotechnology Warehouse, a new initiative to bridge basic and translational research. I'll be sharing postdoc openings soon. Come join us in this new incarnation of the lab!
- 🧠🎼 What does it take to restore movement? Neuroscientist and engineer, @juangallego.bsky.social, joins the new Centre for Restorative Neurotechnology at the Champalimaud Foundation. 🔗 Find out more in this interview: www.fchampalimaud.org/news/juan-al...
- Love how this project came together with the amazing @endoeartha.bsky.social ! Have you wondered about the role that testosterone plays in the ability to re-pattern social behavior when you are at home in your "territory" vs away? We have answers for you...
- Very excited and proud to share my postdoctoral research with @neurrriot.bsky.social looking at the context-specific encoding of social behavior 💃🕺 in hormone-sensitive, large-scale brain networks in mice! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... #neuroskyence #compneurosky 🧪 1/12
- Very excited and proud to share my postdoctoral research with @neurrriot.bsky.social looking at the context-specific encoding of social behavior 💃🕺 in hormone-sensitive, large-scale brain networks in mice! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... #neuroskyence #compneurosky 🧪 1/12
- [Not loaded yet]
- [Not loaded yet]
- Of potential interest to those keen on motor control and/or multi-task networks. Congrats to Elom and Eric. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
- I think the church of everything is everywhere should check tumor removal surgeries. They all start by making sure they won't remove a specific function when removing a specific region. Can you guess how they do it? @benhayden.bsky.social @pessoabrain.bsky.social hint: it is not with decoders
@benhayden.bsky.social @tyrellturing.bsky.social @jmgrohneuro.bsky.social @pessoabrain.bsky.social I see a lot of talk on here about how we should avoid "x does y" talk because the brain is "a dynamic, reverberant, reciprocally interconnected system". But this does not follow. A thread...
- Yes, and how can one ignore the vast neuropsychology literature showing specificity of deficits following brain damage? The field of neuropsychology wouldn't even exist if everything was everywhere.
- Of course. It’s extraordinarily that we even need to have this discussion - again - I despair.
- 🚨 I’m excited to say that my CIHR Project Grant was funded! My NHP lab is now full-speed-ahead, and I’m hiring experimentalists (postdoc, PhD student, and/or a tech/manager). We’ll do multi-region ephys during reaching/grasping in macaques, with behavioral and spinal perturbations.
- Congrats Matt!
- [Not loaded yet]
- [Not loaded yet]
- [Not loaded yet]
- [Not loaded yet]
- More info on our funded project is here: webapps.cihr-irsc.gc.ca/decisions/p/.... In many ways, this directly follows our 2020 paper: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1.... But we have much broader ambitions too and are building a flexible platform for NHP motor ephys. Should be a fun 5 years!
- Congrats!
- [Not loaded yet]
- 🚨 New preprint + thread 🧵 We've gone back to studying motoneuron control principles and their applications & here's paper #1: A proof-of-concept study showing that people with tetraplegic spinal cord injury can control up to 2DoF from a single intramuscular implant www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...
- Check out @jordancollver.bsky.social’s great illustration of modular RNNs training to work like a bio-brain🦾🧠 Thanks to Crearte for featuring our collaboration! www.instagram.com/crearte.ca/p...
- Very happy about my former mentor Sara Solla having received the Valentin Braitenberg Award for her lifelong contributions to computational neuroscience! Sara will be giving a lecture at the upcoming @bernsteinneuro.bsky.social meeting which you shouldn't miss. bernstein-network.de/en/newsroom/...
- Great new review on neural manifolds by @juangallego.bsky.social and @mattperich.bsky.social. Amazing read. Lots of intuition and examples. Great synthesis of why manifold structure pops up everywhere in neuroscience, from motor control to cognitive tasks. www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🧠🧪 1/3
- Coming March 17, 2026! Just got my advance copy of Emergence — a memoir about growing up in group homes and somehow ending up in neuroscience and AI. It’s personal, it’s scientific, and it’s been a wild thing to write. Grateful and excited to share it soon.
- Finally, a book that combines early childhood trauma with neural networks and AI. Just what the field was missing.
- Neural manifold properties can help us understand how animal brains deal with competing and multifaceted information, execute flexible behaviors and reuse common computations, writes @mattperich.bsky.social. #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/neural-dynam...
- "people use it very differently".. this applies to so many concepts in neuroscience! We (@irinapochinok.bsky.social and Simon Musall) put together a #BernsteinConference Workshop on exactly this and @juangallego.bsky.social will be one of our speakers! @bernsteinneuro.bsky.social shorturl.at/4kV00
- 🚨New paper🚨 Neural manifolds went from a niche-y word to an ubiquitous term in systems neuro thanks to many interesting findings across fields. But like with any emerging term, people use it very differently. Here, we clarify our take on the term, and review key findings & challenges rdcu.be/ex8hW
- 🚨New paper🚨 Neural manifolds went from a niche-y word to an ubiquitous term in systems neuro thanks to many interesting findings across fields. But like with any emerging term, people use it very differently. Here, we clarify our take on the term, and review key findings & challenges rdcu.be/ex8hW
- [Not loaded yet]
- 'manifolds', and the overall conception of the brain using a dynamical systems framework, have come a long way.
- Check out our new review/perspective (w/ @juangallego.bsky.social & Devika Narain) on neural manifolds in the brain! It was a lot of fun to think through these ideas over the past couple of years, and I'm excited it's finally out in the world! 🔗: www.nature.com/articles/s41... 📄: rdcu.be/ex8hW
- [Not loaded yet]
- To be clear, I think the term "foundation model" is useful in AI in order to distinguish a general purpose, task-agnostic model from a specialized model. And, I think the authors are correct that we learn a general purpose model in early life. So, it's not totally off.
