The genetic changes that made the human brain may have made us uniquely vulnerable to Alzheimer’s, Adina Wise reports:

The Evolution of the Human Brain Set It Up for Failure

The genetic changes that made the human brain may have made us uniquely vulnerable to Alzheimer’s.

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*** Postdoc Position*** We have a unique opportunity for a postdoc with expertise in MRS/fMRS to investigate neurochemical changes in aging and Alzheimer's disease at MGH in Boston!! (Deadline extended)

*** Postdoc Position*** We have a unique opportunity for a postdoc with expertise in MRS/fMRS to investigate neurochemical changes in aging and Alzheimer's disease at MGH in Boston!! (Deadline extended)

Many of our members extended their stay in Innsbruck after our General Meeting to attend the Locus Coeruleus Meeting @lcmeeting.bsky.social Great showcase of our community’s work across talks & posters 📊, plus an intro to our COST Action! Many thanks to the organizers!

Another postdoc piece out today in @natneuro.nature.com! 🧠💤 In unimpaired older adults, frontal tau pathology tracked with lonely NREM slow waves that fail to travel — and these waves predicted worse overnight memory. full-text: rdcu.be/jDcgH2sK8VZa @ucberkeleyofficial.bsky.social 🧵👇

Human tau pathology is associated with lonely, nontraveling slow waves linked to memory impairment - Nature Neuroscience

Frontal cortical tau pathology in aging humans is associated with reduced slow-wave travel during sleep. This reduced propagation is associated with poorer overnight memory retention, supporting a lin...

nature.com

Excited to share work with cryostat wizard @heenadivecha.bsky.social looking at gene expression in my favorite brain region (LC) in adult postmortem brain! (Long URL to spare the trouble of identifying cars, buses, beds in 5x5 pixel imgs). (1/x) link.springer.com/epdf/10.1007...

Our latest paper is now online at Advanced Science. Li et al, Early spatial and contextual coding deficits in hippocampal CA1 precede performance decline in an Alzheimer’s disease model. advanced.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Early Spatial and Contextual Coding Deficits in Hippocampal CA1 Precede Performance Decline in an Alzheimer's Disease Model

Two-photon calcium imaging in behaving 5xFAD mice reveals early CA1 coding deficits before behavioral decline. Task-related place cell activity and splitter cell trajectory coding are impaired, with ....

advanced.onlinelibrary.wiley.com

Astrocytes mediate the dopaminergic modulation of tonic GABAergic signaling in substantia nigra | Science Advances www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Astrocytes mediate the dopaminergic modulation of tonic GABAergic signaling in substantia nigra

Recent studies have implicated dopaminergic signaling within the substantia nigra pars reticulata (SNr) in the emergence of Parkinsonian motor deficits. To better understand the mechanisms underlying ...

science.org

That's a wrap on our COST Action General Meeting in Innsbruck! ⛰️ Two days of high-impact discussions advancing brainstem research, clinical applications, and international collaboration. Key highlights from the meeting below 👇

📢 We’ve published our first issue! Read and download our inaugural issue here ➡️ www.thelancet.com/issue/S3117-... Thank you to our authors and reviewers for their valuable contributions ✨ As a gold open access journal, our content is free to read by everyone, always. #OA #MedSky #RadSky

🚨Now out in Science Advances @science.org: #Parkinson's patients off dopamine medication (PD-) explore too much and exploit too little. Modeling shows they overvalue uncertainty, not that they choose randomly. On levodopa (PD+) they become comparable to controls www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... 🧵👇

Dopamine depletion in Parkinson’s increases directed but not random exploration

Levodopa restores the balance between exploration and exploitation in Parkinson’s disease.

science.org

Excited to share our latest work: Inspired by animal work, we demonstrate that astrocyte reactivity amplifies the effect of lower #locuscoeruleus function on higher ptau, and these processes together are associated with steeper cognitive decline. alz-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Astrocyte reactivity modifies the effects of locus coeruleus norepinephrine‐related dysfunction on tau and its impact on cognition

INTRODUCTION Animal models demonstrated that pharmacologically-induced lesioning of the locus coeruleus (LC), the brain's primary source of norepinephrine, triggered astrocyte reactivity, exacerbati...

alz-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com

The primate claustrum as a hub for precision weighting of prediction errors across the cortical hierarchy. journals.plos.org/plosbiology/... #neuroscience

The primate claustrum as a hub for precision weighting of prediction errors across the cortical hierarchy

Understanding how signals are exchanged across the cerebral cortex is a central challenge for theories of perception and cognition. This Essay puts forward a roadmap for investigating cortical network...

journals.plos.org

🧠 A new paper from our lab is out! In this study, we explore how dorsal raphe nucleus (DRN) circuits modulate forebrain activity and behavior. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Topographically organized dorsal raphe activity modulates forebrain sensory-motor representations and contributes to defensive behaviors - Nature Communications

Functional heterogeneity of dorsal raphe nucleus is not fully understood. Here authors show topographically organized sensory and locomotor responses from the zebrafish dorsal raphe and its forebrain ...

nature.com

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Acetylcholine: a candidate substrate for hippocampal predictive learning? - Nature Reviews Neuroscience

Predictive models have emerged as a normative lens for understanding neural function. In this Perspective, de Cothi, Shipley and Barry plausibly unify the diverse roles of hippocampal acetylcholine in...

nature.com

I am so excited to get to share this paper that extends our work on understanding how circuitry between locus coeruleus and prefrontal cortex control attention. Just huge congrats to @rehg-j.bsky.social and @jorge-miranda.bsky.social - I am so proud of both of you 💙💙!!!

Jorge Miranda Barrientos@jorge-miranda.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Thrilled to share that our latest paper investigating how mPFC-LC projectors contribute to sustained #attention is now out in @npp-journal.bsky.social This is so meaningful to me and the team, Its @rehg-j.bsky.social first first-author paper and my first corresponding one. rdcu.be/fqBJp

LC influences OFC probablistic learning www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Orbitofrontal noradrenaline supports adaptive learning-rate adjustment in probabilistic reversal learning | PNAS

Adaptive decision-making in dynamic environments requires flexible adjustment of learning speed to balance stability and flexibility. When outcomes...

pnas.org

"When I look around this room, I see the people who are committed to celebrating our similarities and discussing our differences of opinion. Committed to seeing our field progress. Committed to global healthy aging. And committed to training the next generation of leaders.”

Fluoxetine did not affect serotonin neurons as one uniform group. In the dorsal raphe nucleus, two populations shifted in opposite directions, with one response appearing early and another later. doi.org/hb6z8d

New map reveals how antidepressants reshape the brain's serotonin system

A new study has uncovered how antidepressants affect different groups of serotonin-producing brain cells in opposite ways, offering new insights into why selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) can cause unpleasant side effects at the start of treatment but lead to symptom relief over time.

medicalxpress.com

And for our own contribution to the theme issue: Oliver Warrington and I show that the dentate gyrus encodes prediction errors during learning of perceptual predictions. This finding complements our previous work showing a transition from errors to predictions during learning (Aitken & Kok 2022). 🧠🟦

Dentate gyrus encodes prediction errors during learning of perceptual predictions

Abstract. The hippocampus is involved in learning predictive associations, responding to prediction errors as well as representing predictions of future in

royalsocietypublishing.org

Peter Kok@peterkok.bsky.social · 4mo ago

The hippocampus sits at the interface of perception & memory, allowing us to link past, present, & future through its role in generating predictions. Excited to share this theme issue in @royalsociety.org's Philosophical Transactions B, co-edited with @barense.bsky.social & @mariamaly.bsky.social

How do we update our predictions when our environment changes? The hippocampus rapidly integrates previously distinct sequences to support updated predictions. New work w/ @hannahtarder-stoll.bsky.social & @chrisbaldassano.bsky.social – part of the theme issue on hippocampal predictions!

The hippocampus rapidly integrates sequence representations during novel multistep predictions

Abstract. Memories for temporally extended sequences can be used adaptively to predict future events on multiple timescales, a function that relies on the

royalsocietypublishing.org

Norepinephrine signaling in the locus coeruleus causally regulates decision thresholds, a key determinant of the speed-accuracy tradeoff

Regulation of the decision threshold by the locus coeruleus

Neuropsychopharmacology - Regulation of the decision threshold by the locus coeruleus

nature.com

📣 Thrilled to share our recent work in @natneuro.nature.com. Using direct recordings from the human hippocampus and visual cortex, we asked how the brain prepares to encode information when upcoming events are unpredictable, and what ripples do in that process. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Human hippocampal ripples tune cortical responses based on predicted uncertainty - Nature Neuroscience

Using direct recordings from the human brain, Frank et al. show that hippocampal ripples increase ahead of unpredictable events and tune the visual cortex to respond faster and more strongly to surpri...

nature.com

Excited to see this study from @darshanakapri out in @npp_journal showing norepinephrine regulates mitochondria within hippocampal neurons via a β2-AR–Gs-cAMP–PKA-PGC-1α cascade, suggesting links between NE effects on mitochondria and cognition. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Norepinephrine regulates hippocampal mitochondrial biogenesis via β2-adrenergic receptor signaling and PGC-1α - Neuropsychopharmacology

Neuropsychopharmacology - Norepinephrine regulates hippocampal mitochondrial biogenesis via β2-adrenergic receptor signaling and PGC-1α

nature.com

Cholinergic and noradrenergic modulation of perceptual decision making and learning https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.06.22.732890v1

I am recruiting a postdoctoral researcher and a PhD student, funded by a new ERC grant. The grant focuses on the role of the hippocampus in visual perception, using 7T fMRI (hippocampal subfields, cortical layers) and MEG+iEEG. The intended start dates for both positions are in early 2027. 🧠🟦 1/3

Interested in how dysregulation of locus coeruleus-norepinephrine circuits contribute to neuropsychiatric symptoms in early Alzheimer's disease? Check out our new review article from freshly minted Dr. Anu Korukonda! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A new hope: locus coeruleus-norepinephrine system at the nexus of neuropsychiatric symptoms - Molecular Psychiatry

Molecular Psychiatry - A new hope: locus coeruleus-norepinephrine system at the nexus of neuropsychiatric symptoms

nature.com

The UK National Institute for Health and Care Research developed a systematic drug prioritization pipeline to identify repurposed drug candidates for inclusion in a planned platform trial for clinical AD. The norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor atomoxetine came in #1. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/42186115/

Really excited about this work with the awesome Will de Cothi & Sarah Shipley, just out in Nature Reviews Neuroscience. We propose acetylcholine is an analogue of dopamine — tracking not reward prediction errors but state-transition prediction errors. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41583-026-01058-w