Eran Kopel
Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences, Tel Aviv University
Builder The claim is about what the hardware does, and the philosophy is left open
Eran Kopel is a researcher in the Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences at Tel Aviv University whose September 2026 study, “A Pre-Registered Spectral and Certified Mixing Analysis of the Adult Male Drosophila Central Nervous System Connectome” (arXiv:2609.33054), brought pre-registered falsification discipline to whole-CNS connectome graph analysis. Testing five locked hypotheses on the Janelia MaleCNS v1.0 dataset of 166,700 neurons and 124,177,617 synapses, Kopel audited whether pure row-normalized random walks on a synaptic graph actually mix across the brain and ventral nerve cord.
Two of the five hypotheses held and three failed, and Kopel published both sets of results without post-hoc adjustment. Regularizing degree normalization with the median input floor ($F = 342$) confirmed that dominant photoreceptor R7 and R8 modes are normalization artifacts and uncovered a localized structural mode in the ellipsoid body carried by 20 contralateral GABAergic ring neurons (ER3d_b and ER3p_a, participation ratio 96.6). At the same time, the thresholded giant strongly connected component ($157,821$ neurons at $w \ge 5$) exhibited a tiny spectral gap of $0.0035$ and a certified Dobrushin mixing coefficient still between $0.669$ and $0.816$ at 128 steps, traced to an 11-neuron near-closed efferent boundary set in the ventral nerve cord.
Kopel’s profile is Builder, included for both the released spectral audit pipeline and the demonstration that static synaptic counts without physiological gain control and rebound dynamics overestimate functional trapping at motor boundaries.
Known for. Pre-registered spectral and certified Dobrushin mixing analysis of the adult male Drosophila central nervous system connectome (MaleCNS v1.0)
Coverage on this site
Related researchers
- Guoyu LuSchool of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of GeorgiaFlyCNS connectome-grounded directional communication prior and NeuroRoute dynamic sparse routing for embodied quadruped locomotion
- Jinchang ZhangSchool of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of GeorgiaFlyCNS connectome-grounded embodied control and NeuroRoute Lagrangian sparse communication for quadruped locomotion
- Vikas AgnihotriIndependent Aerospace and Neuromorphic Systems ResearcherNeuromorphic Satellite Intelligence framework, radiation-induced energy overhead model for spiking neural hardware, constrained on-orbit STDP
- Matt AngleParadromicsFounder and CEO of Paradromics, developer of the Connexus Direct Data Interface high-data-rate brain-computer interface
- Isabella R. BeckettCoauthor of the MaleCNS preprint comparing male and female Drosophila brain connectomes
- Stuart BergFirst author of the MaleCNS preprint on the male Drosophila central nervous system
Eran Kopel is listed with the other builders, who hold that the claim is about what the hardware does, and the philosophy is left open. The positions themselves are set out in the index of consciousness theories. Every researcher covered on this site is indexed in the directory of consciousness researchers.