Ali Mohebi
Loves stories. Behavioral Neurobiologist. Dopamine. Science. Technology. Reason. Photography. Baking. Films. Roger's Pink Floyd.
Assistant Professor of Psychology, UW-Madison
mohebi-associates.org
- Reposted by Ali MohebiWhere 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)
- No thank you. I've seen this show before.
- Capitalism is ridiculously funny.
- You will have a redeeming week, and will meet caring, brilliant people, which will make you realize why why why you signed up for this job... And there will be amazing coffee, right Gunnar?
- @kordinglab.bsky.social and I ran a summer school last year to help young profs (<5 yrs) in systems/comp neuro thrive. compneurosci.com/Neuro4Pros/i... It was great! Now we want to know if you'd be interested in participating if we did this again this year? Let us know!
- Reposted by Ali MohebiWith 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.
- Reposted by Ali MohebiThrilled to see the first preprint of the lab out 🤩 Check it out if you need to compare dynamics in your data and RNN (or any other combinations of dynamical systems)!
- Wanna compare dynamics across neural data, RNNs, or dynamical systems? We got a fast and furious method🏎️ The 1st preprint of my PhD 🥳 fast dynamical similarity analysis (fastDSA): 📜: arxiv.org/abs/2511.22828 💻: github.com/CMC-lab/fast... I’ll be @cosynemeeting.bsky.social - happy to chat 😉
- I was just informed on Slack: WE paid a $388 tariff on a $782 bill for an imported lab equipment. Nice!
- Want your renovation project at your favorite uni to move faster? Open a Kalshi tab on the completion date and send a link to the higher-ups, your contractors, or, I don't know, your state senate, the federalis. Let the markets do their magic! Will this wall be painted before April 1, 2028? Bid!
- At best, I see myself as a science 'curator'. The days are gone when you were the person in the room who knew more facts about the subject matter. Now there is a device in everyone's pocket that knows more than you and I combined. What we could do, if anything, is design a learning trajectory...
- That field can even be a poster hall. Let's meet there
- To date, this is the most convincing demonstration of nicotinic modulation of DA release (a subject close to my heart), conducted to Arifian standards of rigor. Kudos to Arif and team for this comprehensive and conclusive study. I saw the poster at SfN and cannot wait to read it carefully for our JC
- Excited to share latest study from the lab by an amazing RA, Dylan Flink. We solved a small (important) puzzle while in the trenches of a larger (wavy 🌊) puzzle. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 🧵...
- Started watching Pluribus. At first it felt like another COVID story, but soon after it turned into a narrative of a post AI history narrative where everyone knows everything and no one is anybody... Fascinating dark satire
- Reposted by Ali MohebiCool basal ganglia preprints today! 2 on DA/ACh 1. @paulkramer.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 2. @arifahamid.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Motor learning @juangallego.bsky.social and @clopathlab.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
- Reposted by Ali MohebiSpread 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
- "It was tailor-made to fit the valley’s technological and entrepreneurial ethos – endless workdays, relentless competition, the obsessive need to innovate. The drug traded hands as quickly as the latest packet-switching technology. IBM, Lockheed, Syntex, HP...." www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
- Using AI to write code 👍👍👍 Not reading the code to understand what AI generated 👎👎👎
- Reposted by Ali MohebiThank you for the great summary, @thetransmitter.bsky.social, and the shout-outs from scientists we admire. There is so much we don’t know about how sex hormones modulate behavior and we’ll keep exploring!
- “It’s giving mechanistic insight into how estrogen modulates reinforcement learning—all the way down to the molecular mechanism,” says Ilana Witten. By @avaskham.bsky.social #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/sex-hormones...
- I am revising our 'expectations document' in which I'm listing what I expect from lab members (at various stages of their career) and what they should expect from me. I would appreciate it if you could share yours with me. I will eventually share mine once completed.
- Reposted by Ali MohebiAs the Neuroscience 2025 meeting comes to a close, it's time for us to think about the future. Do you want to help us shape neuroscience research and future @sfn.org meetings? Consider nominating yourself or colleagues: www.sfn.org/about/volunt...
- Goodbye to the beautiful friends I made and met again at #SfN2025. Community is everything. You are everything. Go back home and spread kindness, share a laughter with a friend and smile. Smile big. That's all that remains. All other glories will wash away, like your posters... Smiles will prevail.
- Reposted by Ali Mohebiwhen I was young, i used to wonder how people like this would fare in life, as they didn't seem suited for gainful employment. it turns out, the internet allowed them to accumulate a massive audience of similar idiots, enriching them and turning them into a presidential advisor
- Reposted by Ali Mohebi🚨I am looking for a POSTDOC, LAB MANAGER/TECH and GRAD STUDENTS to join my new lab in beautiful Madison, WI. We study how our brains perceive and represent the physical world around us using behavioral, computational, and neuroimaging methods. paulunlab.psych.wisc.edu #VisionScience #NeuroSkyence
- If you want to figure out what this poster says (or discover the secret of life) come and hang out at the dopamine dinner. Tomorrow Sunday 8pm-End. Waterfront bar & grill. Share with friends, even serotonin people will feel welcome.
- SfN opening lecture: wine tasting as the most comprehensive cognitive workout at the age of digital content. Oh yeah? As the friend sitting next to me rightfully said: you can replace wine with cheese as the argument wouldn't change a bit.
- Reposted by Ali MohebiThought now was as good a time as ever to join bsky - Excited to share a big part of my PhD work is finally published- 7+ years of experiments from a great team of people. Wishing I could be at #sfn2025 to celebrate with you guys! www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- Reposted by Ali MohebiDelighted 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.
- Reposted by Ali MohebiHow do VTA DA neurons sculpt downstream representations to reinforce actions? VERY excited about our new preprint (by Alex Pan Vazquez & @czimmerman.bsky.social )
- VTA dopamine neuron activity produces spatially organized value representations biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/202…
- Friedman once famously wrote: "The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits", which arguably changed the way most Americans started thinking about business... So I'm asking Cornell and others, what do you think the social responsibility of universities are?
- What a great TV show...
- Somehow missed this one. It appears to be yet another important study from the Kaeser group: "GRAB signals aren't pure; there is always cross-talk, and sometimes the cross-talks become problematic. And no, HEK cell measurements don't immediately translate in vivo..." www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
- Your job is not to protect the institution. You have it backwards: it's the institution's job to protect you.
- Nice! The newest version of my favorite figure-editing/poster-making software is now free! Give it a chance, shift+delete Adobe. www.affinity.studio (I don't know how to feel about the Canva acquisition thing going on. My gut feeling: I don't trust it, but I will give them a chance)
- This is the end. Gotham is falling. Ra's al Ghul has won. Sad day for our democracy, if I may say so.
- Talk about an in-flight meal. For the first time, researchers have captured rats hunting bats by grabbing them from the sky. Learn more: scim.ag/3Jqldmn
- All canonical views are wrong, but some are useful.
- Reposted by Ali MohebiThe Cummings Lab is hiring a postdoc to work in the areas of reward and addiction! Please see the ad below:
- Nature manuscript adviser. Not too bad, I uploaded one of my previously published manuscripts and got some good feedback. I suppose it's just GPT, further trained on a corpus of manuscript peer reviews that Nature owns...
- Reposted by Ali Mohebi[Not loaded yet]
- Powerful essay by Byung-chul Han: From a pathological standpoint, the incipient 21 century is determined neither by bacteria nor by viruses, but by neurons...
