Lorenzo Posani

Out today on @nature.com! Connecting neural specialization, population geometry, and their functional implications across the cortical hierarchy. So grateful for this beautiful and fun collaboration with @shuqiw.bsky.social, S Muscinelli, L Paninski, and @stefanofusi.bsky.social!

Excited to see this work published! We find that the brain codes semantic relationships similar to contextual LLMs (like GPT2) but unlike LLMs, uses contrastive coding to prevent confusion of highly similar words. Many thanks to the reviewers and BCM neurosurgery team! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

If you are at Bernstein, come by at poster 60 session IV (Wed 2pm), Charlotte will present our results on compositional and abstract representations of social stimuli in the monkey face patch system. Particularly proud of this as it’s the first poster from the first student of the lab 😊

Summer xkcd.com/3299/

🎯

pay living wages for all workers. tax the shit out of billionaires. happy labor day.

The superposition of these two studies — both incredible — reflect a snapshot of "one big thing" systems neuroscience has yet to resolve. In mice: 1. Task-related signals are everywhere. 2. Absent large swaths of "everywhere," suprisingly sophisticated learning & behavior remains.

Textbook: tracking position during navigation is primarily the job of the hippocampus. Recent findings suggest a more complicated story. Recording >20k neurons brainwide, we indeed find spatial representations in every region! With @kenneth-harris.bsky.social and @carandinilab.net

🚨Update: Our analysis of global APC expenditure has now been expanded to cover more publishers (7 -> 14) and more years (2019-2025). We estimate $15B in APCs paid over seven years, $3.7B in 2025 alone. Elsevier crosses the $1B threshold by itself in 2025. arxiv.org/abs/2608.16322 #ScholComm

Excited to share that I'll be starting as a junior professor and Emmy Noether awardee at the University of Göttingen this October! 🥳 🚀 I'll be hiring #phd students and #postdoc across #machinelearning, #neuroscience and #cogsci: modirlab.github.io/open-positio... Please spread the word! 🙏

Today in @thenation.com: a harrowing piece written from inside the Dilley ICE detention center by Maryam Tahmasebi, a green card holder who's been locked up along with her husband and son for months despite none of them committing any crime. www.thenation.com/article/soci...

Confused about all this talk of compositionality in neuroscience? Read our new perspective www.nature.com/articles/s41... with authors Reidar Riveland and Alex Pouget.

Fin/ check out the paper at www.nature.com/articles/s41...! Huge thanks to Pia O'Neill (new assistant prof at Dartmouth sites.dartmouth.edu/oneill-lab/) for leading this project, and to @stefanofusi.bsky.social & Daniel Salzman for the fantastic collaboration! Cover artwork matteofarinella.com/

Very proud to announce our recently published paper led by Gustavo Rodriguez et al. Impaired spatial coding and neuronal hyperactivity in the medial entorhinal cortex of aged APP knock-in mice: www.cell.com/cell-reports...

Most neurons seem to be generalists, not specialists. Cortical circuits prioritize diversity over categorical structure. Rarely categorical, highly separable representations along the cortical hierarchy www.nature.com/articles/s41... #neuroscience www.newscientist.com/article/2581...

This recent post by @earlkmiller.bsky.social got my attention. It shows how abstraction could emerge in the primate PFC. The paper is hard, but the main idea can be simplified to low-dims, so I made fun a little animation. A🧵with my toy model and notes: #neuroskyence #compneuro #NeuroAI

Scientists have long debated whether neurons are jacks of all trades or tend to specialize in one thing. Now @stefanofusi.bsky.social, @lorenzoposani.com & Liam Paninski present new evidence in @nature.com shedding light on how the brain performs complex tasks. tinyurl.com/yj3ew8en

From a great collaboration with @lorenzoposani.com, @shuqiw.bsky.social, Samuel Muscinelli, Liam Paninski, now in Nature: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Our paper "Rarely categorical, highly separable representations along the cortical hierarchy" is now out in Nature! www.nature.com/articles/s41... In this paper, we studied whether the brain is well-organized and interpretable, both globally and locally. (See thread below.)

New lab paper ! "Shared neural geometries for bilingual semantic representations in human hippocampal neurons" led by @xinyuanyan.bsky.social. 🧵 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

When reality surpasses fiction! Top: fictional forecast for August 2050, broadcast by French TV in 2014 to warn about the consequences of global warming. Bottom: Real French forecast for yesterday, June 22, 2026.

Every summer I repost this article on how to spot drowning. Please read it and pass on. In the last few years I’ve had SIX messages from people who saved a kid’s life after clicking on the link from my feed. slate.com/technology/2...

more seriously congrats to the hungarian people for kicking that asshole out

Becoming a parent is much more detrimental to women’s academic careers than it is to men’s Read the full story: go.nature.com/4v4rxmQ

In my utopian vision of the future, instead of offloading all the pointless, annoying work tasks (like reports that none one will read and needlessly opaque forms) to robots, we restructure work and society so that the pointless tasks don't happen at all.

Somebody should invent a socioeconomic system which is good at allocating resources

Postdoc position in Paris: come help develop new generation human brain computer interfaces ⚡🧠💻 Interested? Contact me if you have experience with machine learning (e.g. simulation-based inference, RL, generative/diffusion models) or dynamical systems. See below for + details and retweet 🙏

Reminder: All it would take to end the murder of American citizens by an untrained government goon squad is 16 Republicans in Congress voting with Dems to defund ICE (or 23 to impeach and remove Trump — 3 in House & 20 in Senate). That’s it. 23 Americans can vote for the public and end all of this.

Good things are possible and we don’t have to settle.

Everyone is hope scrolling now

Europe's MSCA postdoctoral fellowships are now attracting many researchers who would have gone to the US. So the payline has dropped below 10% (~1,600 fellowships to 17k applicants). Super tough situation. One more reason to double the next Horizon budget, as proposed by the EU Commission.