MD/PhD Candidate 🥼 | F30 Fellow 🔬 | Comp Neuro → Psychiatry 🧠 @DragoiLab | Jazz Sax 🎷 @TheChirpChirps
Houston, TX
Joined November 2022
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According to dynamical systems, psychiatric disorders can be seen as energy landscapes with peaks and valleys. OCD has deep valleys where neural activity gets stuck, while schizophrenia has shallow valleys that let neural activity roam too freely, connecting unrelated ideas.
Mitchell B Slapik retweeted
Between 1965 and 1975, before the industries knew how they would ultimately characterize the “kind” of work that chipmaking was, Fairchild had a plant on Navajo land in Shiprock NM and specifically tapped indigenous labor for chip production
Mitchell B Slapik retweeted
Today is our 181st birthday! 🥳
We debuted on this day in August 1845, starting as a weekly devoted primarily to inventions.
Watch the transformation of our logo over the decades and read more about them here. ⤵️
scientificamerican.com/blog/…
According to Marvin Minsky, consciousness and free will arise from incomplete self-models. We don’t model the machinery that constructs perception, so experience feels nonphysical. We don’t model the machinery that produces decisions, so choice feels free.
Citations:
Minsky, 1965: mit.edu/~dxh/marvin/web.medi…
Graziano & Webb, 2015: pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/article…
Wegner, 2004: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1589…
Mitchell B Slapik retweeted
In May 2016, 15-year-old Karinya “Yaya” Chen was in hospice care in Austin, Texas after years of fighting cancer. She had tickets to see Florence The Machine, but by the night of the concert, she was simply too sick to go.
So the people at Hospice Austin reached out to the band.
And Florence Welch came to her.
Florence and guitarist Rob Ackroyd walked into Karinya’s room and gave her the concert she couldn't make it to. They sang “Shake It Out” and “Dog Days Are Over,” with Karinya singing and harmonizing right alongside them.
A few months later, Karinya lost her battle with cancer at just 15 years old.
But for one afternoon, none of that seemed to matter.
There was just a young girl, one of her favorite singers, a guitar, a room full of people who loved her... and music.
Sometimes the smallest act of kindness can become one of the biggest moments of someone's life.
This is what being human is supposed to look like.🙏
Mitchell B Slapik retweeted
Silico is out🔥
General-purpose human motion AI models can meaningfully detect Parkinson's gait impairment. But how do they do it?? I used Silico to break these models open and figure out what about someone's walk actually drives their predictions. 🧵
Mitchell B Slapik retweeted
How many languages have existed over the Holocene—and what does that reveal about the design space of languages and cultures? Now out in @ScienceMagazine
science.org/eprint/QDZNYBWGC….
Mitchell B Slapik retweeted
1/4 @aran_nayebi and I have created a new mathematical Theory of Contravariance in NeuroAI. There are two high-impact concepts: weak-strong equivalence (WSE) and Zippering (ZIP) that shape how to think about NeuroAI going forward.
Mitchell B Slapik retweeted
There have been claims that visual regions in blind people and auditory regions in deaf people may reorganize as language regions. Varol et al. show that their activations during language tasks instead reflect domain-general or sensory processing demands. shorturl.at/aDETo
Mitchell B Slapik retweeted
🧠 Can we recover the equations governing a system directly from noisy, high-dimensional observations?
#DYSCO, by Paolo Muratore, is a first step: it learns latent spaces that capture the underlying dynamics & enables recovery of governing equations
📄arxiv.org/abs/2606.13260
Mitchell B Slapik retweeted
Anatomy of a Starpilot Ace
Ace is an agent trained on the Atari-style env Starpilot.
We can trace Ace's sensorimotor chain from pixel inputs to action. Ace's actions appear complex, often sophisticated, but when we pop open the hood they reduce to pure mechanism.
1/12
Mitchell B Slapik retweeted
Happy that our PD hallucinations paper is featured in the new @NatMentHealth editorial, highlighting notable parallels across psychiatric & neurological conditions in how hallucinations and delusions emerge.
nature.com/articles/s44220-0…
Paper: rdcu.be/fm8kx
Mitchell B Slapik retweeted
Daniel Cressy age 23 becomes the first person in Louisiana to be functionally cured of sickle cell disease through gene therapy
Mitchell B Slapik retweeted
"Myth-Busting"! Think the brain's left-side language dominance develops slowly over time? Think again. New @MIT research shows that by age 4, language processing is already firmly lateralized in the left hemisphere—just like an adult, revealing incredible early-childhood brain plasticity. news.mit.edu/2026/language-d… #Brain #Biology
#Neuroscience #BrainDevelopment #MIT #CognitiveScience #ChildDevelopment
Mitchell B Slapik retweeted
Over the past decade, MIT engineers have been working on ways to restore hepatocyte function without a surgical liver transplant. Injectable “satellite livers” could offer an alternative to liver transplantation. news.mit.edu/2026/injectable…
Mitchell B Slapik retweeted
Exactly how coral nourishes itself has long been a mystery—until now.
Learn more: scim.ag/4x0glIz #ScienceMagArchives
Mitchell B Slapik retweeted
This reminds me of the phenomenological line of thinking… in a healthy psychological state, our mental faculties have a “transparent” quality and they are the invisible lens through which we engage with the world. In psychopathology, the psyche loses its transparency, and becomes opaque, heavy, rigid, alien, forcing itself into conscious awareness and inviting obsessive introspection.
