Miscellaneous Research Thread

[Amw66]

An apsect that has been there in plain sight, ( even without ASD diagnosis) that Bath have ignored for years, and simply made kids worse with sleep hygiene.
Previous issues with Bath include kids aligning reponses with what they thought was desired to gain school accommodations and avoid FII . There's a limit to how robust any (subjective) data is.

 

[Nightsong]

The brain’s code seems to be in constant flux. Neuroscientists are baffled

Neurons fire much more erratically than researchers thought. What does that mean for how the brain works?

Link | PDF (Nature News, May 2026)

 

[EndME]

Link | PDF (Nature News, May 2026)

Interesting that they wrote a whole article on this presenting it as novel and yet remain so vague. When I dabbled a bit in computational neuroscience inherent stochasticity of neuronal firing patterns was such an a priori assumption that it usually wasn’t even mentioned or was just glossed over.

 

[Jonathan Edwards]

Yes, there is nothing the least bit surprising about this. Something similar was found by Walter Freeman for olfaction a very long time ago.

And it does not go against neuroscience at all. We understand that a lot of neurons are tuned to higher level inferences/responses. They have to be to give us higher level concepts, like "I am in the same place". These neurons will fire in a context dependent manner and that includes an accumulation of recent experiences. A cell that was used for one sort of inference a week ago might be used for a different inference after having to wander through mazes for a week.

This does not seem to be randomness they are talking about, but drift in responsiveness. Randomness used to be accepted as a key factor in cell firing and synaptic vesicle release. Christof Koch has fairly recently come to the conclusion that a lot of what was thought to be random is just a reflection of shifts in artefacts relating to crude experiments on cells being activated in a non-physiological way.