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1 month ago | 
tandfonline.com | Mark Humphries |John McConnell |Isabella Murray |Meredith Legace
AbstractThis study demonstrates that Large Language Models (LLMs) can transcribe historical handwritten documents with significantly higher accuracy than specialized Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) software, while being faster and more cost-effective.
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2 months ago | 
thetransmitter.org | Calli McMurray |Benjamin Young |Jill Adams |Mark Humphries
Olfactory neuroscientists have known for a while that their stimuli stink. In many experiments, lab animals inhale puffs of a single strong odorant for only a few seconds at a time, an experience that “likely bears little resemblance—either in concentration or in form—to the ways in which animals naturalistically interact with odors,” says Sandeep Robert Datta, professor of neurobiology at Harvard University.
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2 months ago | 
thetransmitter.org | Katie Moisse |Laura Dattaro |Tyler Sloan |Mark Humphries
Contributing editor The Transmitter Share this article: Tags: Connectome, Artificial intelligence, Axons, Calcium imaging, Cellular neuroscience, Circuits, Connectivity, Dendrites, Excitatory signaling, Inhibitory signaling, Interneurons, Machine learning, Microscopy, Neural circuits, Synapses, Synaptic plasticity, Visual cortex The most comprehensive map to date of cell structure and function in the mouse cortex reveals a previously unappreciated level of coordination among inhibitory...
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2 months ago | 
thetransmitter.org | Daniel Graham |Holly Barker |Mark Humphries |Anthony M. Zador
To say that the brain is a communication device is almost cliché. The very name of this publication—The Transmitter—testifies to the ubiquity of the analogy. Yet most models of the brain take a sharply limited view of what communication in the brain really entails. Though couched in terms of networks and information, current approaches in systems neuroscience tend to view the brain from the point of view of the neuron.
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Mar 12, 2025 | 
thetransmitter.org | Calli McMurray |Mark Humphries |Olivia Gieger
Whenever William Smith runs a calcium imaging experiment, he spends 40 minutes staring at a screen. “It gives you a lot of reflective and contemplative time to think about what’s going on,” says Smith, a graduate student in Stefan Pulver’s lab at the University of St Andrews. During these reflections, Smith says he started to wonder how much energy he was using, and in turn how much carbon that released into the atmosphere. So he decided to find out.
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Mar 10, 2025 | 
thetransmitter.org | Mark Humphries |Grace Lindsay |Ben Scott |Anthony M. Zador
There are many ways neuroscience could end. Prosaically, society may just lose interest. Of all the ways we can use our finite resources, studying the brain has only recently become one; it may one day return to dust. Other things may take precedence, like feeding the planet or preventing an asteroid strike. Or neuroscience may end as an incidental byproduct, one of the consequences of war or of thoughtlessly disassembling a government or of being sideswiped by a chunk of space rock.
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Feb 25, 2025 | 
thetransmitter.org | Lydia Denworth |Katie Moisse |Mark Humphries |Austin Coley
When Mala Murthy and Sebastian Seung of Princeton University saw high-resolution 2D electron microscope images in a 2018 Cell paper, they decided to try to build a fruit fly connectome with that dataset. Funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health BRAIN Initiative, Murthy and Seung used the electron microscopy data to launch the work that resulted in FlyWire, a nine-paper package published in Nature in October 2024. The work made international headlines for its novelty and ambition.
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Feb 12, 2025 | 
thetransmitter.org | Paul Middlebrooks |Mark Humphries |Anthony M. Zador
Special faculty research associateCarnegie Mellon University Share this article: Tags: Brain Inspired, Computational neuroscience, Neural coding Your browser doesn't support the audio element Download Dmitri Chklovskii, group leader of the Neural Circuits and Algorithms group at the Flatiron Institute Center for Computational Neuroscience, believes every single neuron in your brain may act as an optimal feedback controller.
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Feb 7, 2025 | 
thetransmitter.org | Grace Lindsay |Mark Humphries |Ben Scott |Matthew G. Perich
From focused ultrasound to nonhuman primate optogenetics, the tools for controlling neural activity are growing rapidly. It is common for neuroscientists, when given the means to perturb components of the nervous system, to make claims about which of these components are either necessary or sufficient for different functions. To prove necessity, neuroscientists inactivate the component and show that the function fails to manifest.
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Jan 7, 2025 | 
thetransmitter.org | Holly Barker |Mark Humphries |Jill Adams |Claudia Lopez Lloreda
The vehemence of the discussion was surprising, says Lorenzo Posani, a postdoctoral researcher at Columbia University, recalling a packed session he co-organized for the 2023 Computational and Systems Neuroscience (COSYNE) conference.
