Finally published: “Top-down and bottom-up neuroscience: overcoming the clash of research cultures” ... Looking for ways to better understand different neuroscientific perspectives and enable productive collaborations

I don't know who needs to hear this, but here goes. I apologize to all those who have sent me your life's work and didn't get a reply. Believe me, I know what it's like to dedicate oneself to a set of ideas, and pour all of one's blood, sweat, and tears into it. I know all about having an unconventional story to tell and finding it hard to get traction from the mainstream. I know the feeling when the idea GRABS you and demands you push it forward. But I get 500-700 new emails per day. I can barely get to the ones from my post-docs, students, collaborators, program officers, journal editors, and colleagues - people I have commitments to and promises to keep. There's a lot going on and the research and biomed roadmap are my main responsibilities. I simply do not get to see most of what I am sent by people with their favorite Theory Of Everything or brilliant idea (~20-30 of those per day); same with Tweets or replies - total chance if I see it or not. If you didn't get a reply, I almost certainly didn't have time to see it. It's no reflection on the quality of the work. Actually I'm sure that among the thousands of these are probably some real gems. But I do not have the time to sort those out. And many are outside my expertise anyway - from exorcisms to quantum theory, most have nothing to do with me or my knowledge base anyway. Oh and there's also the fact that I'm not allowed (for legal reasons) to look at anything unsolicited that isn't public information (e.g., a document and not a link to a preprint like OSF Preprints hosts). But regardless, to look at your big idea, I'd have to drop one of mine or my post-docs'. It's just simple math of 24 hours in a day. I'm sorry; I wish everyone had the opportunity to get qualified eyeballs on the product of their hard work. Oh and this is a fun pattern, it goes in stages... Stage 1 is a nice initial email - "I like your work, look at this, it's important". Stage 2 is still nice - "I'm sure you're busy, but this one really is good, not like the others, you have to make time to see this." Stage 3 is getting irritated: "You think you're too big to talk to me? What gives you the right to ignore this?". Stage 4 is cursing and various insults and profanity, mixed in with offers to collaborate (those are my favorite). Stage 5 is full-out threats (not all of them get to stage 5, but enough). So for those who stopped at stage 1 or 2, thank you for being rational, I appreciate it. For those that didn't, maybe I'll connect you to each other and you can thrash it out without my involvement... Also, if you're at stage 4-5, keep it up - your emails are saved for a book I'll publish someday - no commentary needed from me, just email after email, they speak for themselves. I envision huge sales for this one - it's some wild, wild stuff. Maybe I'll get an artist to illustrate them.

#NaturePhotography

A little #NaturePhotography More from this set are at

@OpenAI, which policy is violated by my request for a Voyager plaque targeting Earthly unconventional intelligences (not SETI, but SUTI, from ) instead of extraterrestrial alien life?!

Being a scientist is still the best job in the world. The constant frustrations, all the crap that goes with trying to keep the lab alive and move things forward - it all resets and washes away in those occasional moments when we catch a glimpse of nature revealing something remarkable and not seen before. This has been a good week - I saw a few completely amazing, wild new things; it will be a total slog to get them polished and out, but it doesn't matter because they've been seen and a new piece of the roadmap is revealed. Just feeling immensely grateful for the opportunity, and mentally sending a message back in time to childhood me (and anyone else who dreams of this now).

#AIForGood attendees: thanks for the great questions about xenobots! Some of you asked about the demo. If you missed it, it's here: .

I'm constantly irritated that I don't have time to read the torrent of cool papers coming faster and faster from amazing people in relevant fields. Other scientists have the same issue and have no time to read most of my lengthy conceptual papers either. So whom are we writing these papers for? I guess, at least until they fall in to the same issue from their own work, AI's will be the only ones who actually have the bandwidth to read all this stuff. I'm not specifically talking about today's language models - let's assume we mean whatever inevitable AI shows up, that is able to read the literature and have impact on the research (whether by talking to humans or by running lab automation/robot scientist platforms). So then: how should we be writing, knowing that a lot of our audience will be AI (plus cyborgs, hybrots, augmented humans, etc.)? Maybe it's too early to know what to do, but we better start thinking about it because assuming our audience will always be today's humans seems untenable. Taking seriously the idea that someday the impactful audience will be very different, and that the things we write now are in some sense a training set for truly diverse future beings, how does our writing change? or does it? what say you @danfaggella @mpshanahan @Plinz @blaiseaguera ?

A few recent talks, a bit further out than usual: the inimitable Chris Fields on non-causal information flow: my talk at a conference on consciousness (this is the full, very long version, they have a much shortened one on their site): my talk at Rob Philips' group at Caltech - teleology in biology: Murray Shanahan:

A bunch of people have contacted me asking why some of my video channel content covers the same issues repeatedly. Just to clarify: I don't make *content* per se - I do almost nothing especially for the purpose of putting things online. All I do is hit Record when people ask me to give zoom talks to academic audiences, and on ~20% of the meetings I have with my collaborators and other academics as part of my attempt to improve our work. That's it; I put those things up on our Allen Center channel as a contribution to Open Science but I don't edit or produce anything special; I make no $ from clicks or followers or however all that works, I have no clue and no time to learn about it or to check how things land with the viewers. (although, I've now had assistance for which I am grateful from @adithyan_ai, @dineshsai, and @DNAMediaEditing who actually know how to make these things convenient for people to see). Anyway, my talks often cover similar material from different perspectives because 1) very different audiences invite me to speak and I can't assume they already know the basics 2) it often takes hearing this stuff many times before it makes sense and I'm constantly working on new delivery approaches - how to describe which things and in what order, so that the global vision becomes clearer to experts from different fields and to young scientists entering the research arena 3) science is difficult and slow, and massive advances (such that would be priorities for a 45min talk for example) don't come around every month 4) and, though the background and some of my favorite examples are often the same, each talk has *something* new because I'm adding things to them all the time.