The crowd was LOVING this Maxey vs. Brunson 1-on-1 battle during @emirates NBA Cup action 🔥

Join @WashUGenetics next Thursday Nov. 5 at Noon in Connor Auditorium when Daniel Geschwind, MD, PhD presents, “Translating the autism genome through genomics and high-throughput iPSC phenotyping: towards precision therapeutics”, hosted by Dr. Joe Dougherty!

A brain under general anesthesia still registers sound, but anything as elaborate as the meaning or grammar of words was thought to shut down with consciousness. Katlowitz and colleagues had a rare chance to test that. Seven patients undergoing surgery for drug-resistant epilepsy already had hippocampal tissue scheduled for removal, so the team placed high-density probes in it and recorded hundreds of individual neurons while the patients lay fully anesthetized, playing them sequences of tones and, for some, podcast stories. Neurons responded to the tones, and the response to rare, unexpected tones grew over the following minutes, a simple form of learning in a patient with no awareness of it. During the stories, neural activity tracked how frequent each word was and carried information about its meaning and grammatical class. It also held signals that helped predict the upcoming word. The authors conclude that complex sensory processing in the hippocampus can occur without consciousness. The study rests on seven patients, on epileptic tissue already slated for resection, and on one anesthetic, propofol, so sleep, coma and other drugs remain open. Nothing here shows that patients remember any of it after waking, since recall was never tested. The result argues against the stronger version of the assumption, that nothing beyond elementary hearing survives the anesthetic. Fig. 1 from Katlowitz et al. (2026), Nature. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Unmodified.

on the flip side - an incredible opportunity for young students to devote themselves to deep understanding and scholarship when the pendulum swings back, they will have acquired discernment and wisdom, and become the most sought after scholars in the next (unpredictable) eras

It’s not which neurons fire. It’s the geometry of their activity patterns. The piriform cortex doesn’t just store odor “labels.” It continually reshapes that geometry to encode odors. Representational manifolds in olfactory cortex doi.org/10.1016/j.conb.2026.… #neuroscience

Assemblies form the building blocks of perception and memory, but how they form in real brains has long been a mystery. By @natmesanash thetransmitter.org/systems-n…

Many feel that AI is coming for neuroscience the way it is for math, but I don't think so. To begin with, math has well-defined problems, an extremely mature tradition of exposition, and an immense and reliable literature. Neuroscience, in fact most of the life sciences, has none of these. Where a life-science problem is well-defined, as in structural biology, AI can already dominate. Systems neuroscience has largely failed to pose comparably well-defined scientific problems. Questions of the form “what is the neural basis of X,” where X is an ordinary-language concept (e.g. attention, consciousness, reward, aversion), are not scientific problems. They are just transplanted philosophy. Feed such questions to an AI and it's garbage in garbage out. It's hard even to write a useful prompt. Generating real problems in systems neuroscience would require careful observation and experimentation. A solid finding, e.g. properties of head-direction neurons, can supply material for modeling or reasoning. But such findings constitute only a tiny fraction of what's needed. I think people generally overestimate the power of pure reasoning to solve scientific problems. Reasoning requires material to work with. You need to start with the right premise. In mathematics that material is already abundant and clean; in neuroscience it is not.

@sethblackshaw and I co-edited a special issue of Curr Opin Genet Dev on Lineage Specification in Development. Its 15 reviews, now online, cover how cells acquire their identities: lineage tracing, gene regulation, evolution. Free editorial: authors.elsevier.com/a/1nyIW…

Extreme actions historically lead to more extreme backlash. On what time scale will the pendulum swing back to humanity valuing deep thought, artistry, scholarship, and craftsmanship in writing once again? Paper books and in-person custom storefronts already en vogue

VJ Edgecombe as a foundational franchise player. Human story of the American dream. Generational talent and authentic humility combined with an exceptional mindset. Individuals with Edgecombe-like mindsets thrive in bleeding edge creative discovery laboratory environments too

Join @WashUGenetics next Thursday Oct. 29 at Noon in Connor Auditorium when Peng Jin, PhD @pengjinATL presents, “Two Faces of FMR1: FMRP Deficiency and CGG Repeat-Mediated Neurodegeneration”, hosted by Dr. Jenn Cremins @CreminsLab!

Few poems describe a gentleman's character better than Kipling's "If—," and few men read it better than Sir Michael Caine. Have a great Friday.

Huge congratulations to Bing! 🎉Extremely well-deserved recognition for his pioneering contributions to epigenomics, and his unwavering mentorship has shaped so many trainees, including me!

Want to get clean calcium signals from tons of deep-brain neurons in freely moving animals? ​Check our paper science.org/doi/10.1126/scia… ! We show how correcting GRIN lens aberrations transforms MINI2P performance, revealing sparse HD coding in sensory thalamus! @ScienceAdvances

Fantastic article on Canuck memory legend Karim Nader by Samia Madwar. Karim’s 2000 reconsolidation paper was a game changer, reorienting neuroscientific studies towards a more reconstructivist view of memory. thewalrus.ca/karim-nader/

Very excited to share the most important discovery of my career yet: your brain switches between a conscious and an unconscious mode ~15 times every second. Consciousness may depend not on where in the brain activity occurs but when. Find out more below. bit.ly/3WvA6di

In 2000, neuroscientist Karim Nader made a groundbreaking discovery that changed the field forever. When a long-term memory is retrieved, he found, it temporarily becomes unstable, prone to revision or erasure. Now, Nader is facing his own cognitive decline. But the legacy of his memory work continues. thewalrus.ca/karim-nader/

I spoke with The Daily about what’s happening to math in the age of AI—and what it feels like to be a mathematician right now. The conversation went places I hadn’t expected. I’m grateful to @RachelAbramsNY, @annieminoff, and their team. nytimes.com/2026/10/13/podca… via @NYTimes

RT @JamesClear: Your best performances will come when you are working in a way that is a full expression of you. The work becomes a natural…

EVERYTHING MATTERS 𝙃𝙤𝙬 𝙮𝙤𝙪 𝙙𝙤 𝙖𝙣𝙮𝙩𝙝𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙞𝙨 𝙝𝙤𝙬 𝙮𝙤𝙪 𝙙𝙤 𝙚𝙫𝙚𝙧𝙮𝙩𝙝𝙞𝙣𝙜. Jay Wright's philosophy on practice 🎥 @TheCoachJournal