Our new review is out now on the ventral hippocampus, highlighting a large body of recent work, from the information it represents to how internal state shapes its activity to how its circuits influence behavior.

Nature Reviews Neuroscience@natrevneuro.nature.com · 3w ago

The ventral hippocampus: computations, circuits and functions — a Review by Jeremy S. Biane, Julian Wagner-Carena & Mazen A. Kheirbek #neuroscience #neuroskyence @jawagnercarena.bsky.social @mazenkheirbek.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...

New preprint up! How do brain networks generate flexible behavior? Insula-prefrontal communication helps mice shift behavioral strategies, specifically when the new strategies use odor cues. Gamma synchrony between insula & PFC PV neurons enables this coordination! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Smells like γ-synchrony: Insula-prefrontal communication depends on γ-synchrony and supports modality-specific changes in behavioral strategies

The prefrontal cortex is critical for many aspects of flexible behavior, but how it interacts with other brain regions to perform this function remains largely unknown. The insula is bidirectionally c...

biorxiv.org

Excited for accepted #ACNP2027 panel co-chaired with @jojolab.bsky.social. @vikaassohal.bsky.social @suthanalab.bsky.social @rphillips3.bsky.social and Josh will present cross-species strategies that align rodent circuit interrogation w/ behavioral, physiological & molecular readouts in human 🧠

I joined the Sohal lab with one major hypothesis: psychedelic drugs can be powerful psychiatric treatments, depending on underlying neurobiology. Indeed, psilocybin restored cognitive flexibility in one circuit model of dysfunction, but not another! Then, we had to find out how! 🧠🍄🧪

Vikaas Sohal@vikaassohal.bsky.social · 3mo ago

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...

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

New paper out! For decades there has been a ‘standard model’ for gamma oscillations. This upends that model - PFC gamma oscillations are not one thing. Rather they dynamically recruit diverse cell type-specific synchrony motifs to implement multiple functions: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Prefrontal gamma oscillations engage dynamic cell-type-specific configurations to support flexible behavior

Cognitive dysfunction in conditions such as schizophrenia involves disrupted communication between the prefrontal cortex (PFC) and the mediodorsal tha…

sciencedirect.com

New paper online! How does plasticity at specific synapses drive specific forms of learning? We find that learning extradimensional rule shifts depends on strengthening long-range GABAergic projections from parvalbumin neurons to PFC-MD neurons in the contralateral PFC! www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...

Synaptic plasticity of prefrontal long-range inhibition regulates cognitive flexibility

While glutamatergic synaptic plasticity is believed to be a fundamental mechanism mediating learning, the behavioral significance of plasticity at cor…

sciencedirect.com

I’m very sad to share that Howard Fields has died. He made seminal discoveries in pain modulation, placebo, and addiction. He was also a wonderful mentor and friend who taught me how to think about the brain and the joy of scientific discovery. www.iasp-pain.org/publications...

In Memory of Howard L. Fields - International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP)

IASP is deeply saddened to hear of the recent death of Honorary IASP Member, Prof Howard Fields, and we offer our condolences to his family, friends and colleagues. We are […]

iasp-pain.org

Please come by the Sohal lab posters at #SfN2025 to join the discussion about all of our favorite things: cognitive flexibility, gamma oscillations, PFC social encoding, autism mouse models, dopamine, & more!

Two preprints up! The first, led by Aarron Phensy, uses red+green voltage indicators to show that prefrontal gamma oscillations dynamically engage various cell types, creating multiple synchrony configurations, each tied to a distinct aspect of cognitive flexibility: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Prefrontal gamma oscillations engage dynamic cell type-specific configurations to support flexible behavior

Cognitive dysfunction in conditions such as schizophrenia involves disrupted communication between the prefrontal cortex (PFC) and mediodorsal thalamus (MD). Parvalbumin interneurons (PVI) are known t...

biorxiv.org

(more news) New paper just published! Prefrontal representations of social and emotional information generalize across contexts (even though ensembles for socioemotional + contextual information are highly overlapping): www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Context-invariant socioemotional encoding by prefrontal ensembles - Nature Communications

How the ensemble encoding of social and anxiety-related behaviors interacts with encoding of context in the prefrontal cortex of mice is not fully understood. Here authors examine how prefrontal neurons encode socioemotional behaviors in different contexts and reveal that the prefrontal cortex encodes context-invariant representations of these behaviors in parallel with representations of context.

nature.com

New work! Learning is assumed to involve synaptic plasticity, but which specific synapses change to enable higher order cognitive functions? We actually find that cognitive flexibility involves potentiation of long-range GABAergic synapses from prefrontal PV neurons: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Synaptic plasticity of prefrontal long-range inhibition regulates cognitive flexibility

While glutamatergic synaptic plasticity is believed to be a fundamental mechanism mediating learning, the behavioral significance of plasticity at cortical GABAergic synapses remains less well underst...

biorxiv.org

One more post while I'm at it: my 'Meet-the-Clincian-Expert' @neuronline.sfn.org talk, describing my lab's work plus my career path, is now available on demand: neuronline.sfn.org/scientific-r...

Understanding Complex Systems: Leveraging a Background in Math to Tackle Problems in Psychiatry

<p>This session will describe the speaker&rsquo;s journey from studying math in college to performing some of the first experiments using optogenetics, training as a psychiatrist, and leading a neuros...

neuronline.sfn.org

Also while I’m posting on BlueSky for the first time, I want to thank to several folks for hosting me last month on a journey where I got to connect with neuroscience in India. First I got to participate in a great symposium on autism and visit Sourav Banerjee’s lab at the NBRC near Delhi. 1/2

New work online! Led by Marc Turner in collaboration with the Rubenstein lab. We studied how disruptions in autism genes alter neural activity to produce abnormal behavior in layer 5 Tbr1 cKO mice, & in the process, found new aspects of PFC socioemotional encoding 1/n www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Loss of the autism associated gene Tbr1 disrupts prediction and encoding by prefrontal ensembles during socioemotional behaviors

Disruptions in many genes linked to autism spectrum disorder (ASD) affect synaptic function and socioemotional behaviors in mice. However, exactly how synaptic dysfunction alters neural activity patte...

biorxiv.org

Excited to share our new paper out now @natureportfolio.bsky.social, where we identified neural signatures of stress susceptibility and resilience in the amygdala-ventral hippocampal network to enable control of anhedonia! <https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08241-y> Thread below: