We get asked often - what is the duration of psilocybin's effects in the mouse brain? 🧠 There exist data, and now we have also measured it ourselves: Time to peak was 33 min and brain half-life was 56 min. Part of a preprint on drug-evoked dendritic Ca2+ signals: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Our new study ⬇️inspired by the question: does psilocybin influence meta-learning and cortical processing of unexpected uncertainty? Why is this important? Meta-learning may be critical for therapeutic effects of psychedelics and how the trip creates a window that facilitates clinical intervention

New preprint led by @christineliu.art! How do psychedelics improve cognitive flexibility? Psilocybin prevents inflexibility caused by aberrant mesocortical error signaling (but not inflexibility due to other mechanisms); this is tied to plasticity of PFC-MD neurons: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Psilocybin selectively rescues cognitive flexibility impairments caused by aberrant prefrontal error signaling

Psychedelic drugs show remarkable potential for treating psychiatric disorders, but the mechanisms underlying their therapeutic effects remain relatively unknown. Here, we demonstrate that psilocybin ...

biorxiv.org

No evidence for direct physical interaction of 5-HT2A-mGluR2 receptors in vitro or in vivo www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

No evidence for direct physical interaction of 5-HT2A-mGluR2 receptors in vitro or in vivo

It is well established that activating the mGluR2 metabotropic glutamate receptor (mGluR2), which is the main presynaptic autoreceptor for glutamate in the brain, attenuates the behavioral and electro...

biorxiv.org

The grant proposal can wait. Incredible first half by Japan 🇯🇵 #WorldCup

NIH grants have been under political scrutiny since early 2025. But what does the screening process actually look like? What is being flagged? I spent a month digging into leaked docs and emails. We've published the 235-word list that are being flagged by an internal AI tool. And so much more. 🧵

Inside the new political screening that’s stalling NIH grants

Mandatory reviews by top health officials and checks for 235 disfavoured terms have left hundreds of vetted grant applications in administrative limbo.

nature.com

Very nicely done Radiolab episode featuring @emilyjacobs.bsky.social and team’s work. Check it out! radiolab.org/podcast/this...

This is Your Brain on Hormones

We don’t have hormones, hormones have us.

radiolab.org

We worked hard to revise our #psilocybin & #ketamine snRNA-seq study to make it a resource. Interactive web portal: psilo-seq.kwanlab.org Annotated to @alleninstitute.org’s 16 neuronal and non-neuronal cell types, with updated analyses in preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Check it out!

A pyramidal cell in the mouse medial frontal cortex #FluorescenceFriday h/t Jiajun Li on the confocal 🔬🧠🧪

Central Jersey, today is election day. Vote by 8 PM tonight for Sam Wang! Great minds think alike. Here at Princeton Junction station with NJ-12 opponents Jay and Squire! SamForNJ.org

A few years back we started a collaboration to try to work out the mechanisms engaged by DBS for depression. Published today we found that it changes functional networks (expected) but also remodels specific white matter tracts (unexpected). Read more here: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Deep brain stimulation induces white matter remodeling and functional changes to brain-wide networks - Nature Neuroscience

In a nonhuman primate model, Fujimoto et al. show that deep brain stimulation promotes white matter remodeling and reorganizes brain-wide functional networks, detailing a mechanism through which this ...

nature.com

So I built a small tool that merges Allen CCFv3 with the traditional bregma-relative coordinate system (calibrated with Paxinos & Franklin's Atlas). Click any coronal or sagittal section, and get coordinates instantly. bohanzhao.com/Atlas Hope it saves someone a headache 🐭

Mouse Brain Stereotaxic Coordinate Viewer

Free interactive tool: enter bregma-relative AP/ML/DV coordinates to navigate Allen Mouse Brain Atlas coronal and sagittal sections. Brain regions identified in real time.

bohanzhao.com

This was a great read to learn about Mu-ming’s “pathfinding in neurobiology”. We crossed paths briefly in Berkeley and then I was glad to have visited ION in early 2010s. His effort to lift neuroscience in China has been incredible.

Society for Neuroscience@sfn.org · 2mo ago

Read about the life and career of Mu-ming Poo in SfN’s most recent volume of the #HistoryOfNeuroscience in Autobiography, Volume 13. 🔗 vist.ly/55hb5 #AAPIMonth #neurosky #neuroskyence #academicchatter

Now accepting proposals for ISSR 2027! Please share widely!

If you are at #SOBP2026 @sobp-org.bsky.social - Friday poster F159 - travel awardee 👏 Neil Savalia will talk about psychedelics, 5-HT2A/1A receptors, and imaging dendrites 🔬 Saturday poster S170 - travel awardee 👏 Pasha Davoudian will show work on psilocybin and GABAergic interneurons 🧠

Excited to share an early look at psilo-seq, a web portal for exploring our lab’s single-nucleus RNA-seq data in mice following psychedelic treatment.

Lab tradition when poster session is over: #NCMKobe

Excited to read this preprint by Yi Zuo's lab, using 2p imaging to track spine growth following psilocybin. Many similarities with our findings. The new study crucially also tested dose dependence and dived deep into spine characteristics like clustering. 👉 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Congrats to @neuroknox.bsky.social who received the NOA for her F31 fellowship today! 🎉 NEI will support her study on psychedelics, GABAergic cell types, and visual processing. Follow her for updates 😀

Excited to share our new study on how the brain generates placebo pain relief! We developed a mouse model that recapitulates key features of human placebo analgesia, then used it to identify causal circuitry. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... today.ucsd.edu/story/neurob... 1/n

Neurobiologists Hack Brain Circuits Tied to Placebo Pain Relief

Scientists have identified the brain circuits tied to placebo pain relief. Researchers have known that placebo effects can be a powerful treatment, yet the underlying neurological mechanisms have not ...

today.ucsd.edu

For nearly a century, we believed the therapeutic effect of ECT is the seizure. Our latest research suggests we may have been looking at the wrong event. A thread on why cortical spreading depression (CSD) might be the driver of therapeutic benefit. Work led by @therehugolad.bsky.social

For those interested in the history of psychedelic research… I wrote a narrative piece describing studies of psychedelic effects on serotonergic neurons in the dorsal raphe, from late 1960s to 1980s: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Dorsal Raphe Revisited: A Systems Neuroscience Lens on Psychedelic Drug Action - Alex C. Kwan, 2026

Psychedelics rose to prominence in the 1960s, around the same time when neurobiologists identified the midbrain raphe as the brain’s primary source of serotonin...

journals.sagepub.com

First off, these cells are gigantic. This one, for example, has >72 cm of axon! To our knowledge, it’s the longest neuron ever fully reconstructed. I leave it to the reader as an exercise to estimate the length of a human LC neuron. 5

It’s brutal in academia right now. A lot is out of our control, but it doesn’t cost anything to remember that there are humans behind papers and grants…reviewers, program officials and funders can be more empathetic in the face of unprecedented chaos in the US scientific enterprise.

Very excited to share new work by Leonardo Lupori. In mice, a single dose of the antipsychotic clozapine results in changes to behavior and cortical activity patterns that remain detectable a week later. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Seeing a different kind of brain on vacation 🧠 🏝️

For #FluorescenceFriday: an image that didn’t make the final paper. A dopaminergic, anaxonic OB neuron with dendritic release sites in magenta. Gephyrin in orange; TH in cyan confirms the GFP-labelled cell’s identity.

I defended my PhD 10 years ago today. That was the least remarkable thing that happened that day. Sharing something I wrote about it last year. Since then "the horrors persist but so do we." And with dignity.

Looking at raw data always reminds me why I chose to do this. Saw some handsome synapses yesterday.

Today I received a note from a grad student who lives in Tehran. Her note gives you firsthand experience of what it’s like to live in a city that is being bombed, and what it’s like to be young and feel despair about your future. rezashadmehr.blogspot.com/2026/03/hope...

Hopeless in Tehran

Essays on neuroscience

rezashadmehr.blogspot.com