My paper on motor cortex during free flight in bats is online. The dynamics look quite different from the usual picture. Maybe because flight is a hard control problem: hand-like wings, many degrees of freedom, millisecond precision. cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092…

I'm no mathematician, but if this ETH result holds up, could it be a reason for optimism? As @DavidDeutschOxf argues, our capacity to create knowledge may be unbounded. Could problems that seem to require brute force end up yieling to good ideas ?

Researchers mathematically proved that AI will cause something worse than mass unemployment. They call it “The Tragedy of the Cognitive Commons.” Every industry relies on a shared pool of deep professional expertise. This expertise doesn't just magically appear. It regenerates generation after generation. How? Through struggle. Junior employees do the hard, repetitive, frustrating work. In exchange, they slowly build what researchers call "Internalized Mastery." But right now, AI is completely annihilating junior-level work. Companies are celebrating massive productivity boosts by automating the entry-level grind. (Anthropic’s own data shows their technical junior hiring has plunged 33% as AI agents take over the pipeline). It looks like efficiency. But it is actually a time bomb. The researchers highlight a concept called the "Validation Tether." Effective human oversight of AI depends entirely on deep domain expertise. When an AI hallucinates or makes a critical error, a human expert catches it. The experts validating AI outputs today look competent because they spent a decade doing the grunt work before AI existed. The terrifying question the paper asks is this: Who comes after them? When the current generation of experts retires, there will be no one left with the Internalized Mastery required to spot when the machine is wrong. We are completely severing the pipeline that creates human competence. We are trading our long-term intellectual independence for short-term productivity boosts. Every time you let AI bypass the struggle, you are borrowing expertise from the future. And the interest rate is our ability to think for ourselves.

Dendritic computation for cognitive flexibility Our new paper in Science identifies rule-belief signals in the distal apical dendrites of cortical pyramidal neurons. These signals integrate with somatic sensory signals to support flexible decisions. science.org/doi/10.1126/scie…

New view on spinal motor function! Nearly every movement we make is partially generated by the spinal cord. Yet how remains a mystery, even though it is one of the oldest subjects in modern neuroscience, studied since Sherrington. Details here: doi.org/10.1016/j.conb.2026.…

❗️❗️❗️News︱Neuron 👏👏👏Major Breakthrough! How Does the Brain Control Backward Movement? Prof. Minmin Luo’s team Identifies a Center for Backward Locomotion, Uncovering a Brainstem Motor Circuit for Directional Selection. 👇MORE cell.com/neuron/abstract/S08…

Only skimmed it but when and how a few neurons can nudge the rest of the population and in what context does it matter for the actual movement... fundamental questions, excited to give it a full read soon.

A super cool story!

Check out my work on what motor cortex does during flight

Now online! A high-dimensional population code in the bat motor cortex during natural dexterous flight dlvr.​it/TVvMP6

New paper out in @NeuroCellPress! Using Multi-Site Neuropixels recordings in NHPs, we show that automatic behaviors are interrupted by the OFC "jamming" rather than "suppressing" the striatum! sciencedirect.com/science/ar…

Great to see how some of our early work layed the foundation for this impressive breakthrough

Happy to announce that I am searching for for a graduate student, starting Fall 2027. If you want to study the neural mechanisms of reaching and grasping, come join us in the rich environment of the Sensorimotor Superlab. For details: pruszynskilab.com/positions.…

Check out our paper on cortex-wide learning related dynamics in different layers published in @NatureComms! Congrats to lead author @yaelesther, @mattlark and Robert Sachdev. Short summary below rdcu.be/8jy3CofEx3Ua

@katy_willard and I discuss encoding by individual neurons versus the population in sensory cortex, particular barrel cortex, in our new Current Opinion review. 🧠 We explore how mixed selectivity and neural subspaces may support robust coding, generalization and flexible downstream readout.

We're looking for a postdoc with NHP ephys experience to do simultaneous Neuropixel recordings across the corticothalamic motor circuit to better understand the neural control of reaching and grasping. We start looking at applications on August 31st. docs.google.com/document/d/1…

The Sauerbrei Lab at Case Western Reserve University is recruiting a postdoctoral scholar to work on neural dynamics and motor control: apply.interfolio.com/189987

We're hiring! Postdoc position to study the neural control of reaching using high-density multi-area electrophysiology. 5 years of funding, great collaborative environment. Please share with anyone who may be interested. For details, see: docs.google.com/document/d/1…