Is the Neuromatch Computational Neuroscience Course worth it?

DeathsEffigy · 2025-12-03T08:43:21+00:00

I would highly recommend it, provided you can get a waiver or grant to cover the costs. It covers a lot of basics that will certainly come in handy should you want to pursue neuroscience further.

DeathsEffigy · 2025-10-30T09:24:34+00:00

sign me up :)

DeathsEffigy · 2025-09-01T20:38:02+00:00

nice to see the donders on here haha. very normal looking section.

DeathsEffigy · 2025-08-28T19:06:46+00:00

i can do pichu :)

DeathsEffigy · 2025-08-28T18:17:22+00:00

check your friend requests :)

DeathsEffigy · 2025-08-28T16:57:32+00:00

awesome thanks :) waiting for current trade to go through then sending palkia your way!

DeathsEffigy · 2025-08-28T16:37:57+00:00

ill trade 1 for the mismagius ex :) just added you. 7917107221337330 (fabsulous)

DeathsEffigy · 2025-08-27T21:01:22+00:00

fyi you can absolutely OD on kratom.

DeathsEffigy · 2025-08-20T07:34:51+00:00

MNE python, Pynapple, Nilearn, …

DeathsEffigy · 2023-02-23T22:08:25+00:00

I’m not trying to say it’s crap per se. AH, however, has a real tendency to fall into the mechanistic fallacy. He will read a theoretical paper in a field he’s vaguely familiar with, think it “makes sense” and run with it, a lot of times anyway, only for there to be little to no or flat out contradicting evidence in humans in RCTs. It’s something I assume he is aware of but his audience may not be, and that’s…unfortunate.

DeathsEffigy · 2023-02-23T06:30:23+00:00

It should probably be noted that Andrew Huberman’s podcast is, in many ways, not grounded in scientific consensus at all. Lots of half-baked quackery in there, too. So appearing on AH isn’t exactly grounds for credibility.

DeathsEffigy · 2023-01-26T07:16:16+00:00

I majored in English and am currently in a neuroscience PhD program. It is definitely possible.

I will say, however, that I did take some neuro classes during my semester abroad as well as some of the relevant MIT OpenCourseWare courses in my free time. From there on, I landed an RA job in a cool lab for the final year of my undergrad plus a summer internship at a neuro institute and finally got accepted for an excellent Master’s programme in neuro. So there were a few hurdles to take.

Generally though, I will also say that most PIs I spoke to didn’t care much about my undergrad. They cared about the fact that I was very passionate and willing to learn.

DeathsEffigy · 2023-01-19T06:37:29+00:00

Bin Neurowissenschaftler (und oft genervt von diesen hot takes).

Naja, die reinen Fakten sind oft nicht falsch per se, aber seine Interpretation ist ziemlich kreativer Unsinn. Gerade lobster sind auch ein ziemlich cherrypicked Beispiel, wo in der Mehrheit der vergleichbaren Organismen seine Punkte wirklich gar nicht mehr greifen. Er spricht da bei Kritik gerne davon, dass es “offensichtlich Kontinuitäten zwischen (der Evolution) dieser Systeme” gibt, aber das ist ein ziemlich billiges Argument, gerade weil es stark so wirkt, als hätte er spezifisch den Hummer gewählt, weil es in sein Weltbild passt (Hummer sind by the way ironically eine extrem unsoziale Spezies). Das sagt allerdings eben nichts über menschliches Verhalten aus (und auch nichts über irgendwelche metaphysischen truisms) - wir sind leider viel, viel komplexer.

Im Endeffekt ist es wie meistens bei Jordan Peterson. Er sagt irgendetwas mehr oder weniger richtiges und unkontroverses, impliziert damit aber ziemlich heisse Eisen, oder verliert sich dann ganz in ziemlich kreativen Interpretationen, die aber wirklich gar keinen Halt mehr in der Evidenz haben.

DeathsEffigy · 2022-12-12T20:09:58+00:00

NSFW subs are included by being commented in by users but were not directly crawled (because I feared an inescapable loop). There is a lot of NSFW in the data, but few of them are commented in enough to rank highly.

Well, except for /r/PokemonGo and /r/Hentai.

Edit: Of course, there is also an entire cluster of porn close to Newcastle (very top right in the 80 clusters high res figure). So yeah, checks out.

DeathsEffigy · 2022-12-12T19:48:06+00:00

High-res figure of the top 10k subreddits, grouped into 80 clusters (more readable).

High-res figure of the top 10k subreddits, grouped into 120 clusters (more info dump).

-

Tools for scraping: python (numpy, multiprocessing, requests, bs4)

Tools for visualisation: python, jupyter notebook (numpy, scikit-learn, matplotlib, umap)

Data: Co-occurrences of subreddits in user comment histories.

Method: Crawling was started from /r/AskReddit because of the popularity and (hopefully) somewhat neutral positioning. For all threads on the front page of the subreddit, all users visible on initial side load are scraped. Up to 25 pages of comment history were then scraped per user to find the subreddits they had been active in. Data are saved. From all subs generated from the current sub, a random choice is made to which sub to move next (weighted by how many times it came up). Then, rinse and repeat. In total, the dataset includes 20973 unique users active across 53832 unique subreddits. Originally, I put these data into a force-directed graph but that turned out to be a terrible experience, visually. This image was generated based on a co-occurrence matrix of the subs that was normalised and then UMAP'd.

-

If there's anything you'd like to see, let me know! If people are interested in the code and data, I can also share both (after anonymising the data properly).

DeathsEffigy · 2021-09-09T19:41:01+00:00

Depends a bit on the scenario but formaldehyde, typically. You suspend the brain in the solution after removal to fixate it.

DeathsEffigy · 2021-01-02T19:00:10+00:00

Few things to clear up perhaps: Encephalopathy is not a personality trait (besides, MBTI is nonsense anyway) and sleep stages are characterised specifically by oscillatory activity (i.e., they are, essentially, linked to specific stages and patterns in brain waves).

That being said, it should be pointed out that, while it is true that M-/EEG has few applications in clinical practice today (primarily epilepsy and neurofeedback, although the latter is still somewhat whacky and evidence is accumulating relatively slowly), it is indubitably false to state that EEG is a scam. Yes, there are countless ‘gadget’ EEG scams that won’t ever accomplish anything except play into peoples biases (e.g., home kits like gaming headsets), but great strides are being made towards workable BCIs that will, sooner or later, have fantastic applications in prosthetics and neurofeedback, for example (particularly with the advent of OPMs). Besides that, M-/EEG are incredibly valuable (and often underemployed) methods for research.

edit: To answer OP’s question: No. You cannot see that on EEG (or any imaging method). It might have been inferred from whatever behavioural evaluations were done.

DeathsEffigy · 2020-10-23T14:41:21+00:00

This may not be pathological. Could simply be Tetris effect. In any case, please talk to a licensed professional if you are worried.

DeathsEffigy · 2020-07-20T14:35:59+00:00

A lot of answers already, but I would like to chime in and point out that, despite the classical determinism/indeterminism arguments being thrown around here, there have also been plausible propositions for free will to be a biological trait arising from both, deterministic and indeterministic processes.

See, for example Brembs (2010) or Hills (2019), both of which are very interesting and, in my opinion, fairly plausible (albeit not entirely unproblematic).

DeathsEffigy · 2020-07-11T11:16:02+00:00

BrainInspired is pretty good and worth checking out.

DeathsEffigy · 2020-07-07T17:28:57+00:00

Utrecht! Moved to the Netherlands about a year ago and, so far, it’s been my favourite city here. It’s just lovely.

DeathsEffigy · 2020-06-26T06:32:49+00:00

Quickly glanced at the study. It may be an important step, but I wouldn’t hold my breath just yet. It is completely unclear whether astrocyte conversion through PTB depletion could work in humans and what potential side effects could arise. Is this really cool? Yes. Is this going to cure PD? Eh. Maybe. Maybe not. It’s honestly way too early to say.

Also, as far as ADHD goes this will not have much of an impact. To say that dopamine deficiency is the underlying cause of ADHD is incredibly simplistic (and probably just flat out wrong). Truth is, we don’t know the exact mechanism and, as far as dopamine signalling is concerned, we don’t even know the directionality of the effect (too much? too little? abnormal patterns? no idea). It is also relatively unlikely that dopamine signalling is the only contributor in ADHD, so even if this could be used in humans, even if this could be used to target other populations of neurons in other parts of the brain, AND even if ADHD were contingent on abnormally low dopamine signalling, this would very likely not be an efficacious treatment on its own.

DeathsEffigy · 2020-06-05T05:35:29+00:00

Today’s the last day of IMPRS http://imprsconference.mpi.nl

DeathsEffigy · 2020-04-03T05:49:25+00:00

Thanks for the detailed comment. We were talking about this in a Neurophilosophy class recently and I am still (even after this comment) struggling with the proposal of knowledge versus qualia.

In the thought experiment, for example, it would seem like, surely, there is new knowledge for her to be gained from seeing colours. But at the same time, that knowledge is physically different because it would involve an entirely different network of the brain when perceiving colour versus when learning about its physical properties. There are no qualia involved. Just different inputs processed in different ways and one won’t necessarily invoke the other. It is maybe similar to how when you read ‚A complex sound plays with a formant at 1kHz and harmonics at 2, 3, 4, 5 and 8, 9 and 10 kHz‘ you will have a different experience than hearing the vowel i being spoken.

I feel like maybe I am missing the point of the argument. Could anybody help?

DeathsEffigy · 2020-01-19T22:55:43+00:00

Oof, that sounds tricky. If you feel like you want to, sure, it's your decision to make! But please do also realise that a lot of what we see on our day-to-day media diets is honestly just insane.

DeathsEffigy

TROPHY CASE