Michael Okun
@michael_okun
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Associate Professor of (Systems & Computational) Neuroscience @UniofNottingham. Interested in cortical dynamics.
United Kingdom
Joined August 2017
Bombshell: Oliver Sacks (a humane man & a fine essayist) made up many of the details in his famous case studies, deluding neuroscientists, psychologists, & general readers for decades. The man who mistook his wife for a hat? The autistic twins who generated multi-digit prime
newyorker.com
The scientist was famous for linking healing with storytelling. Sometimes that meant reshaping patients’ reality.
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1. New preprint resolving a conundrum in systems neuroscience with an AI scientist, and humans @ReillyTilbury, @dabin_kwon, @ali__haydaroglu, @JacobMRatliff, Valentin Schmutz, Matteo Carandini, @kevinjmiller10, @neuro_kim
https://t.co/L0QDNd2UGn
biorxiv.org
The visual cortex contains millions of neurons, whose combined activity forms a population code representing visual stimuli. There is, however, a discrepancy between our understanding of this code at...
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🚀We are excited to share that bombcell is now available in Python! 🐍 Automatically sort your units into good/MUA/noise/non-somatic using quality metrics and adjustable classification thresholds. pip install and play around with our toy dataset: 🔗
github.com
Automated quality control, curation and neuron classification of spike-sorted electrophysiology data. Available in MATLAB and in Python. - Julie-Fabre/bombcell
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Join Neuromatch Academy courses for hands-on experience in computational neuroscience, machine learning, and data science with expert mentors. Apply by March 23rd! 🎯 Apply here: https://t.co/2aGOKQ86Dq
#Neuroscience #MachineLearning
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Check out Neuromatch's flagship course, Computational Neuroscience! This course is in its 6th year and has received rave reviews from students since 2020. Review the course curriculum, and apply as a student or TA before the March 23 deadline: https://t.co/m96VKL6k69
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Why academia is sleepwalking into self-destruction. My editorial @Brain1878 If you agree with the sentiments please RT. It's important for all our sakes to stop the madness https://t.co/5S5rL8Yda1
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🚨 Neuromatch Academy Course Applications are OPEN for 2025!! 🚨 Get your application in early to be a student or teaching assistant for this year’s courses. Applications are due Sunday, March 23 at midnight in your local time zone. Apply & learn more: https://t.co/LJIwRe45Dj
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Save the date! UK Neural Computation 2025 will be at Imperial College London 9 July: ECR day 10-11 July: main meeting 9 invited speakers, 4 talks from abstracts and many posters Abstract & registration opening soon Pls share! https://t.co/20OtknExHK
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"Among the generations that we synthesized, we found a bright fluorescent protein at a far distance (58% sequence identity) from known fluorescent proteins, which we estimate is equivalent to simulating five hundred million years of evolution." https://t.co/5LIUkhkxeJ
science.org
More than 3 billion years of evolution have produced an image of biology encoded into the space of natural proteins. Here, we show that language models trained at scale on evolutionary data can...
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📢 Apply now for the 7-week #Mathematics #SummerSchool in London! You will develop mathematics skills and intuition necessary to enter the #TheoreticalNeuroscience or #MachineLearning field. ℹ️ https://t.co/DJXiD3lbc6 Please help spread the word!
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Starting 2025 with some splendid northern lights (visible about now in Västerbotten, Sweden).
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The #NobelPrize in Physics 2024 for Hopfield & Hinton turns out to be a Nobel Prize for plagiarism. They republished methodologies developed in #Ukraine and #Japan by Ivakhnenko and Amari in the 1960s & 1970s, as well as other techniques, without citing the original inventors.
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Sleep-like state during wakefulness induced by psychedelic 5-MeO-DMT in mice | bioRxiv
biorxiv.org
Psychedelics lead to profound changes in subjective experience and behaviour, which are typically conceptualised in psychological terms rather than corresponding to an altered brain state or a...
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We’re seeking a research assistant to work on predicting which Parkinson’s patients would most benefit from deep brain stimulation. In collaboration with Machine Medicine and St George’s Hospital, London Closes December 4th Pls RT! https://t.co/RM9Zm936Ky
jobs.nottingham.ac.uk
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Our school (@UoNLifeSci ) is advertising a teaching-focused position of Assistant Professor in Neuroscience. Application deadline: 7-Nov.
jobs.nottingham.ac.uk
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We grieve the passing of Dr. Yves Frégnac. Yves has shaped the study of cortical processing and plasticity. He heralded interdisciplinarity and was one of the founding fathers of our institute. Our thoughts go to his family and to his friends in the community and beyond.
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Gyorgy Buzsaki just wrote an autobiography. The second paragraph starts with "I was 11 years old when I killed my best friend". Fascinating. https://t.co/uFYHM5cuYD
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Really glad to have this work identifying the key role of PV-neurons in the ventral hippocampus in gating the anxiolytic actions of the serotonergic psychedelic, DOI, out in @NeuroCellPress @TIFRScience
https://t.co/pfcVkxqQ8K
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The 2024 UCL Neuropixels course will take place on 14-16 October. Registration is free. Register today! More info:
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Mapping the brain’s visual world on psychedelics, texture and time. Meet the new #OpenScope projects tackling open questions in neural activity: https://t.co/pLVlp9Mid2
#OpenScience
alleninstitute.org
How do neurons react to magic mushrooms? What happens in the brain when we see motion, or when we recognize grain patterns in a piece of wood?
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