This is wild. >1/2 of HC synapses disappear in artificial hibernation, come back in same/similar locations & memories intact. ~1/2 of engram synapses-between two memory-tagged cells-are clustered on dendrites, those preferentially spared. Not biggest synapses. 1/ www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Lovely result from the Stephenson-Jones lab at SWC: during sleep, mice replay newly-learned motor skills in the striatum — and it continues even after the hippocampus is fully removed. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-026-02362-5

📣New paper! How does the sleeping brain help us to integrate new experiences while managing memories from the past? For his PhD work, @sabbaspoor.bsky.social recorded hippocampal ensembles in freely moving monkeys and found something unexpected. 🧵1/n www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🧪🧠📈👩‍🔬#OpenAccess

Experience reorganizes content-specific memory traces in macaques - Nature Neuroscience

In macaques, old memories, relative to new ones, are supported by more stable and interconnected cell assemblies. New-biased and old-biased assemblies reactivate during overnight sleep and can sometim...

nature.com

Is organization close to saddle-node bifurcations a generic principle underlying neural computations? 🧠 To know more, give a read to our recent effort in this regard👀

@koseskalab.bsky.social · 2mo ago

New preprint! RNNs solving an interval timing task self-organize near bifurcations, where structured slow transients drive computation. These slow scaffolds predict generalization to unseen intervals and are alone sufficient for timing! @mpinb.mpg.de www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Is spatial navigation innate 🧠? Using #NeuroPixels we show that the #torus 🍩 underlying the #GridCell map exists already on day 10 in rats — before pups open eyes and ears and before they start upright walking. 🧵1:4 👇 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Exciting new preprint from the lab, led by @lizsiefert.bsky.social , together with @annaschapiro.bsky.social. Findings help to clarify when hippocampal ripples occur across wake and sleep, better aligning human data with animal models.

Liz Siefert@lizsiefert.bsky.social · 3mo ago

New preprint! We show low arousal states promote hippocampal ripple genesis in sleep and wake. This bridges rodent work, where ripples predominate during sleep, with human studies reporting ripples during active behavior, identifying low arousal as a common mechanism www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Why does dopamine ramp up during approach to predictable rewards? In this preprint with Luke Priestley, we explore the idea that dopamine ramps occur when reward predictions inferred using a world-model are used to train striatal cached values.

Dopamine ramps as a normative consequence of dual-process control

Midbrain dopamine neurons are thought to implement a temporal difference (TD) reward prediction error (RPE) that updates cached values stored in striatum. This has been challenged by evidence that dop...

biorxiv.org

1/ We work hard to factor "noise" out of behavior. But the brain doesn't. Strip away noise and you may miss what the brain evolved to do I wanted to share this pre-Bluesky paper where we found premotor (M2) corticostriatal circuits encode a broad history of behavior, beyond just action + reward 👇

Information normally considered task-irrelevant drives decision-making and affects premotor circuit recruitment - Nature Communications

Prior experience is used by the brain to guide adaptive behaviour during decision making. Here, the authors show that mice also selectively use information learned through recent and longer-term exper...

nature.com

If you use LLMs to do your data analysis, or if you listen to people who do, you should read this kucharski.substack.com/p/real-signa...

Real signals or artificial stereotypes?

Adventures with a cultural Copilot

kucharski.substack.com

New paper out in J. Neuro! We used MEG and pattern classifiers to ask: if a memory is reactivated in the brain, does that mean you'll recall it? Short answer: no. www.jneurosci.org/content/46/1... Read on for the details! [1/7] #neuroscience #memory

Alpha Oscillations Track the Projection of Reactivated Memories into Conscious Awareness

By definition, episodic memory is a conscious phenomenon. Memory traces reactivated by the hippocampus and reinstated in the sensory cortices need to enter conscious awareness for them to be re-experi...

jneurosci.org

I didn’t expect a short video about an octopus to stay with me this long. At first, it looks like a simple, almost playful interaction. But the more you watch, the more something deeper emerges: a learning process unfolding between two completely different forms of intelligence. 🧵 1/

Manlio De Domenico@manlius.bsky.social · 5mo ago

What a nice story about this learning process and this beautiful yet unconventional human-octupus interaction! youtu.be/PcWnQ7fYzwI?...

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

This preprint is about this! THIS!! Mindblowing.

Jeremiah Cohen@jeremiahycohen.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Delighted to share our discoveries about one of the brain's neurotransmitter systems: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Together with colleagues at the @alleninstitute.org, we have learned a lot about a tiny cluster of neurons in the brainstem locus coeruleus (LC) that releases norepinephrine (NE). 1

New preprint from my lab! We study how reinforcement learning & selective attention interact. To do so, we built a set of models describing different ways that value & reward prediction error can modulate top-down attention. We compare model outcomes to monkey data from a color value learning task

bioRxiv Neuroscience@biorxiv-neursci.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Modulation of feature attention by reward prediction error explains value learning behavior https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.04.10.717847v1

What do #neuromodulators do in the #brain? Two recent papers give new insights: @nishantjoshi.bsky.social shows they do not only reshape individual cellular properties, but also the architecture linking them, thereby expanding the computational repertoire. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Neural circuits encode prior knowledge of temporal statistics www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Neural circuits encode prior knowledge of temporal statistics - Nature Neuroscience

This study shows that cerebellar circuits learn and encode prior probabilities of event timing. Cell-type-specific neural activity reflects environmental statistics and guides predictive motor behavio...

nature.com

Oh wow, Anthropic accidentally leaked Claude Code and it’s been cloned and made public github.com/instructkr/c...

GitHub - instructkr/claude-code: Claude Code Snapshot for Research. All original source code is the property of Anthropic.

Claude Code Snapshot for Research. All original source code is the property of Anthropic. - instructkr/claude-code

github.com

Thrilled to share our new paper, which shows that the relative timing of cholinergic and dopamine release dynamically gates whether dopamine acts as an RPE for in vivo plasticity and reinforcement learning. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Acetylcholine demixes heterogeneous dopamine signals for learning and moving

Nature Neuroscience - Jang et al. measured dopamine and acetylcholine release in the striatum of rats performing a decision-making task and found that the relative timing of cholinergic and...

nature.com

Statistical Rethinking 2026 is done: 20 new lectures emphasizing logical and critical statistical workflow, from basics of probability theory to causal inference to reliable computation to sensitivity. It's all free, made just for you. Lecture list and links: github.com/rmcelreath/s...

Cortical circuits are often thought to be specialized, but the same large-scale activity patterns can arise from different circuit architectures. In other words, different instruments can play the same tune, and the same instrument can sometimes play different tunes. www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...

Linking neural manifolds to circuit structure in recurrent networks

Neural population activity can be described either by low-dimensional dynamics on neural manifolds or by single-neuron selectivities. Using a theoretical approach, Pezon et al. relate these two statis...

cell.com

Here's a lovely #blueprint on a new study from our lab led by @royeyono.bsky.social. tl;dr: it implies that there may be interneurons whose role is to normalize credit assignment signals during learning. #neuroscience 🧪

Roy Eyono@royeyono.bsky.social · 6mo ago

How do neural circuits in the brain implement normalization? 🧠 In our new paper, we show that just normalizing sensory input isn't enough. Crucially, we must also normalize the error signals! 🧵👇 Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2603.17676

(1/n) Presenting our NeurIPS’25 work at #cosyne2026 poster 3-109 We introduce a flexible framework to infer how animals learn new decision-making tasks from scratch without assuming REINFORCE/Q-learning. Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2509.04661 Joint w/ @vgeadah.bsky.social and @jpillowtime.bsky.social

Flexible inference for animal learning rules using neural networks

Understanding how animals learn is a central challenge in neuroscience, with growing relevance to the development of animal- or human-aligned artificial intelligence. However, existing approaches tend...

arxiv.org

Really neat work by Fountas and colleagues at UCL: arxiv.org/abs/2603.04688 They propose that consolidation reflects a form of "predictive forgetting" that aids generalization.

Why the Brain Consolidates: Predictive Forgetting for Optimal Generalisation

Standard accounts of memory consolidation emphasise the stabilisation of stored representations, but struggle to explain representational drift, semanticisation, or the necessity of offline replay. He...

arxiv.org

I tracked every keyword in 22 years of Cosyne abstracts to map how computational neuroscience evolved — from Bayesian brains to neural manifolds to LLMs — and where it's heading next.

22 years of Brain Science: what CoSyNe tells us about the evolution of Neuroscience

Tracking the intellectual DNA of Computational and Systems Neuroscience through its flagship meeting

open.substack.com

Out now in @plos.org CB: doi.org/10.1371/jour... Neural representations of tasks change over time, even in the absence of changes in task performance. But neurons change tuning at different rates. How does a neuron's stability relate to its interactions with the population? #compneuro #neuroskyence

Information theoretic measures of neural and behavioural coupling predict representational drift

Author summary Activity in the brain represents information about the outside world and how we interact with it. Recent evidence shows that these representations slowly change day to day, while memori...

doi.org

New in the BMJ: Our study of 600,000 people found GLP-1 drugs associated with 50% fewer substance-related deaths, 39% fewer overdoses, and reduced addiction risk across alcohol, opioids, cocaine, cannabis, and nicotine. www.bmj.com/content/392/...

Glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists and risk of substance use disorders among US veterans with type 2 diabetes: cohort study

Objectives To investigate whether initiation of glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) receptor agonists is associated with both reduced risks of incident alcohol, cannabis, cocaine, nicotine, opioid, and ot...

bmj.com

With this one in print, I think I finally earned that PhD... 😅 Presented for the first time at the cosyne when the world ended (March 2020). I'll bring over a summary thread from twitter when it was still twitter... www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Neuronal spiking in the mammalian forebrain is dominated by a heterogeneous ground state

Neuronal firing patterns have significant spatiotemporal variability with no agreed-upon theoretical framework. Using a combined experimental and mode…

sciencedirect.com

Our paper is out in @natneuro.nature.com! www.nature.com/articles/s41... We develop a geometric theory of how neural populations support generalization across many tasks. @zuckermanbrain.bsky.social @flatironinstitute.org @kempnerinstitute.bsky.social 1/14

Huge water consumer, destroying the planet with CO2 emissions, mostly a negative for their consumers. Something must be done. Yes, that’s right, it’s time to do something about cows.

The supplementary videos for this preprint are fantastic. Some wild examples of decoding the animal's attentional focus and/or intent www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Edvard I Moser@edvardmoser.bsky.social · 8mo ago

The hippocampal map has its own attentional control signal! Our new study reveals that theta #sweeps can be instantly biased towards behaviourally relevant locations. See 📹 in post 4/6 and preprint here 👉 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 🧵(1/6)