axoaxonic

axoaxonic, 2 days ago to random

I have a weirdly good memory for number strings, getting 100% of them right on the WAIS forward digit span test, which the examiner said they never seen before. This is helpful mostly because I can memorize license plates of cars that seem like they're about to hit me while riding my bike, and it's dangerous because I remember all my credit card info and can buy stuff online really fast lol

axoaxonic, 1 month ago to random

So much of my PTSD from 10 years of being involved in protests and direct actions is from how the the cops and counterprotestors reacted, but the memories of the actions themselves are the opposite of trauma memories yet equally indelible.

Stay safe out there, take care of yourselves and others, don't let them break your spirit and shred your message with cowardly brute strength.

#StudentSpring

axoaxonic, 1 month ago to Neuroscience

Can't find the original post thanks to Mastodon's lack of search, but this is happening in ten days: http://tchumatchenko.de/Workshop/workshop_schedulePage.html

Dendritic computation,
synaptic plasticity & molecular mechanisms

#Neuroscience #Dendrites

axoaxonic, 1 month ago to random

A lot of people are posting a video by Sabine Hossenfelder right now, and I'm not going to comment on the video or the points and discussion, but I wanted to post this video detailing her problematic views on trans issues, how she promoted (in a biased-centrist way) the harmful, TERF-associated, and unfounded view that gender affirming care for trans kids is a social contagion leading to "rapid onset of gender dysphoria," while making claims that transitioning before puberty is harmful https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6Kau7bO3Fw Also there's a line where she offhand belittles people who say early gender affirming care saves lives

"Whether or not she meant to, she repeatedly used a misleading rhetorical device to elevate transphobic talking points to the same level as scientific evidence, and she did that in front of a very large audience"

axoaxonic, 2 months ago to Seattle

Yesterday I met the final boss version of cars pulling into the bike lane: construction downtown #Seattle at Westlake redirected all car traffic to move around it by going into the bike lane. No warning signs, just cones and a stream of cars suddenly in front and behind me for two blocks

#BikeTooter

axoaxonic, 2 months ago to random

axoaxonic, 2 months ago to random

In this society that emphasizes competition and mastery to create value, so many people say you have to focus on one thing to be successful, but no one really says how to do that.. When I was younger I heard that advice, I decided to focus on neuroscience, but even within this field there's actually millions of potential things to focus on.

If anyone wants to share their method/s of deciding what to devote serious time to, feel free to reply

axoaxonic, 2 months ago to random

Some research suggesting that traveling waves exist in the spinal cord as well:

"Synergy temporal sequences and topography in the spinal cord: evidence for a traveling wave in frog locomotion", Saltiel, et al, 2016
https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/105252/429_2015_Article_1133.pdf?sequence=1

"Propagation of Sinusoidal Electrical Waves along the Spinal Cord during a Fictive Motor Task", Cuellar et al, 2009
https://www.jneurosci.org/content/29/3/798 [cat study]

axoaxonic, 2 months ago to random

I tried uploading three different pictures of me to a modern automatic photo captioning app that uses AI, and it referred to me as a "woman," a "person," and a "man"

This paper from 6 years ago is still relevant:
"The Misgendering Machines: Trans/HCI Implications of Automatic Gender Recognition", Os Keyes, 2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3274357

axoaxonic, 3 months ago to random

Went to the Shahdmehr lab youtube page too look if there were any #cerebellum vids, and was surprised to find a whole series of hour-long lectures from the Johns Hopkins Cerebellum Seminars

https://www.youtube.com/@shadmehrlab1352

Invidious version to avoid trackers and allow adblockers:
https://vid.puffyan.us/channel/UCSifaCZt1HmnZJ3440AOf8g

axoaxonic, 4 months ago to random

Applying information theory to cellular ion concentration gradients, these authors derive a principle where cells optimally code responses to environmental perturbations -- incl input from other cells -- by minimizing the cross entropy (Kullback-Leibler divergence) between intracellular and extracellular ion concentrations.

"We demonstrate the ion dynamics in neuronal action potentials described by Hodgkin and Huxley (including the equations themselves) represent a special case of these general information principles."

"Cellular information dynamics through transmembrane flow of ions", Gatenby and Frieden 2017 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-15182-2.pdf

axoaxonic, 5 months ago to random

I'm statistically unlikely to be successful in academia as a neurodivergent trans person who grew up below middle class and has lived in poverty since, but I'll do everything I can to keep trying, keep sharing and cooperating.

I'm not in it to win, I'm doing this because I want to contribute to something that can help people and because I actually just love it

axoaxonic, 6 months ago to accessibility

With sensory overresponsivity it's really hard to read PDFs, even with redshift (linux version of f.lux). Inverting the colors doesn't help because the white letters seem amplified by the back background and cause an afterimage effect that also makes it hard to read. Screenreaders are the best option but the free ones can't read equations or figures.

The other day I found that switching programs from atril to qpdfview allowed me to change the page color, and I can finally read whole docs on my screen with the letters remaining black and the page a gentle reddish orange color

#Accessibility

An example page from "Noise-Induced Phenomena in Slow-Fast Systems: A Sample-Paths Approach" There are two figures of dynamical phase portraits of the same system, a spiking neuron model. The one on the left shows smooth lines either going close enough to be pulled into an attracting point z, or avoiding it. The figure on the right is the same portrait but with noisy random-walk dynamics, and the same paths that would avoid the point can wander into it. The caption reads: "Fig.6.8. Dynamics of the normal form (6.3.12) describing the dynamics, near a saddle-node bifurcation point, of a system displaying Type II excitability. (a) Without noise, trajectories starting above and to the left of the particular solution x hat of y tilde, epsilon, which delimits spiking and non-spiking behaviour, are attracted by the equilibrium point z star. Those starting below and to the right escape a neighbourhood of the bifurcation point. In the original system (6.3.11), they ultimately converge to z star, having made a large excursion which corresponds to a spike. (b) Noise can cause sample paths to leave the vicinity of z star, cross x hat of y tilde, epsiolon and thus produce a spike
A really complicated category theoretical diagram from the book "Algebraic Theories: A Categorical Introduction to General Algebra" with eleven objects and fifteen morphisms.

axoaxonic, 6 months ago to random

I was interested in public health as a field before the pandemic, but witnessing the response, especially the USA's, devolve into "you do you" and conspiracy misinformation made me reconsider.

On the other hand, I gained a lot of faith in mutual aid and ingenuity. A lot of people have stepped up to take care of people and distribute resources, and so much amazing research and development happened in the past few years: DIY 3D printable masks, air filters etc, low cost rapid PCR tests with paper microfluidics, people reverse engineering the vaccines and open-sourcing the sequences https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/reverse-engineering-source-code-of-the-biontech-pfizer-vaccine/

axoaxonic, 6 months ago to trans

I wonder if this glasses frame company intentionally made these translucent acetate frames look like the #trans flag https://elklook.com/products/aloe-geometric-blue-pink-ace

axoaxonic, 6 months ago to random

This article in the new online neuroscience magazine The Transmitter on the interactions between nerve cells and #cancer cells is both amazing and scary https://www.thetransmitter.org/neurobiology/making-cancer-nervous/

axoaxonic, 6 months ago to random

"Context-dependent computation by recurrent dynamics in prefrontal cortex", 2013

https://doi.org/10.1038/nature12742

axoaxonic, 7 months ago to random

Me: money's really tight, it's hard to afford basic necessities in this really high cost of living city

Also me: maybe I'll buy myself an open source fNIRS system https://openfnirs.org/hardware/

axoaxonic, 7 months ago to random

I have no idea how to reconcile neural network models with the observed phenomena of representational drift and degeneracy. New models from scratch might be better, even tho the former type have been worked on for around like 80 years, but maybe there's a way

axoaxonic, 7 months ago to scifi

Just found this list of neuroscience themes in #SciFi literature https://dynamicsubspace.net/research/neuroscience-and-science-fiction-literature/

axoaxonic, 7 months ago to random

Today people are talking about attractor dynamics in brains, making me remember this paper "Repeller Neural Networks" https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.48.4091 and wondering if repellers (the opposite of attractors) can be applied to study decisions as well. Neurally activity falls into attractors of choices we make, so it might be driven away from repellers of unchosen options

axoaxonic, 7 months ago to random

rTMS, and tDCS have been shown to have little to no effect on executive dysfunction

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0149763421000282

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnagi.2018.00298/full

What does then? It really reduces my quality of life, but all I see for treatment options is like, use planners and colored pencils to take notes..

axoaxonic, 7 months ago to random

Cognition like inner speech and motor imagery can be seen as a #simulation, like Hesslow (2002, 2012) has shown, or as a hallucination/illusion as they reactivate sensorimotor networks but don't correspond one-to-one to direct stimuli from physical reality. That doesn't mean all of perception fits into illusion metaphors: the fidelity of sensory neurons is pretty faithful to the physical qualities they transduce, even if upsampled, mixed together, and modulated downstream.

If this distinction was public knowledge, maybe there would be less people thinking nihilistically that nothing is real and therefore meaningless. Instead ideas that the reality we experience is all a hallucination gets sensationalized in news stories and TED talks

axoaxonic, 8 months ago to random

Is it possible to include a function in TeX that randomly shuffles the order of author names on a paper every time it's rendered as a PDF?

axoaxonic, 8 months ago to random

If someone uses ableist language in their writing, even blog posts, I'm probably not going to give any of my time and energy to entertaining their ideas