Really excited to share our new preprint. Here we use our holographic optogenetics to ask a key question about how neurons need to fire to drive movements. We find a bunch of interesting things about what does, and doesn't drive movements. Brief summary below www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

The Importance of Synchrony in the Neural Control of Movement

Throughout the mammalian cortex, populations of neurons must work together to enact behaviors. While population recordings in motor cortex have revealed many aspects of when neurons fire during behavi...

biorxiv.org

🔬🧠 Releasing the 1.0 version of #Suite2p and THE PAPER w/ @marius10p.bsky.social! Now with GPU acceleration. Want to use Suite2p but don’t have 100,000 neuron recordings? We show you how to get those with a standard 2p microscope #neuroscience #imaging #neuroAI www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Really interesting work on sequential activity in the odor system!

Jon Gill@jonvgill.bsky.social · 6mo ago

Excited to share our new preprint for this project!

Democrats in the Senate must grow a spine. They can rein in this murderous regime next week. Why on Earth would they continue to fund this tyranny? Call your senators now: indivisible.org/campaigns/ho...

How to Rein in ICE–NOW | Indivisible

Act now with Indivisible to demand Congress rein in ICE, end aggressive enforcement, restrict ICE and Border Patrol funding, and protect communities.

indivisible.org

It's difficult to know how motivated a fly is, and how motivated behaviors change with experience. To do this, we've been developing new ways to measure operant learning in flies, as described in our new Open-LA paper below.

Dr. John Hernandez@cranialnurv.bsky.social · 7mo ago

Ever wonder how individuals decide what to eat & what to avoid? We used our novel #OperantLearningAssay (Open-LA) to let #Drosophila control their sensory world and study their motivated choices over time. Read my full work with @karlakaun.bsky.social & co-authors at doi.org/10.1242/jeb....

Sequences are everywhere! In every brain region. And are written in stone. Invariant Activity Sequences Across the Mouse Brain. Out today, by Célian Bimbard, with @kenneth-harris.bsky.social. Based on data by Célian and by @intlbrainlab.bsky.social. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Most iPSC lines come from European donors. Now, two teams in Africa are studying neurodevelopment and neurodegeneration using iPSCs and organoids from African donors. By Lauren Schenkman www.thetransmitter.org/cellular-neu...

Bringing African ancestry into cellular neuroscience

Two independent teams in Africa are developing stem cell lines and organoids from local populations to explore neurodevelopmental and neurodegenerative conditions.

thetransmitter.org

By the way, if you’re interested in working together on problems like this, I’m starting my lab at UCSF this summer. Get in touch if you’re interested in doing a postdoc! More info here: wj2.github.io/postdoc_ad (7/7)

When and why do modular representations emerge in neural networks? @stefanofusi.bsky.social and I posted a preprint answering this question last year, and now it has been extensively revised, refocused, and generalized. Read more here: doi.org/10.1101/2024... (1/7)

Caleb Watney of IFP talking about why academia and science sucks. Broken record here, but we can’t have this discussion without talking about agendas and conflicts of interest. IFP is funded by tech and rightwing billionaires who want to privatize science. 1/

"pattern completion circuits in lower cortical areas may reinforce activity patterns that match prior expectations..." Yes. That's active filtering. Sensory cortical recurrent networks learn the structure of the sensory world. New paper from Shin, Adesnik et al. 🧠🤖🧪

Recurrent pattern completion drives the neocortical representation of sensory inference

Nature Neuroscience - Neurons that respond emergently to illusory contours drive pattern completion in V1. Pattern completion in lower cortical areas may therefore mediate perceptual inference by...

nature.com

Does predictive coding work in SPACE or in TIME? Most neuroscientists assume TIME, i.e. neurons predict their future sensory inputs. We show that in visual cortex predictive coding actually works across SPACE, just like the original Rao+Ballard theory #neuroscience www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/...

The two key studies of the International Brain Laboratory @intlbrainlab.bsky.social are out today! A brain-wide map of neural activity during complex behaviour www.nature.com/articles/s41... Brain-wide representations of prior information in mouse decision-making www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A brain-wide map of neural activity during complex behaviour - Nature

The International Brain Laboratory presents a brain-wide electrophysiological map obtained from pooling data from 12 laboratories that performed the same standardized perceptual decision-making task i...

nature.com

My first paper with @naoshigeuchida.bsky.social is finally out in @natcomms.nature.com ! rdcu.be/eACGf TL;DR: asymmetric learning rates can be induced by shifts in tonic dopamine giving rise to pessimistic/optimistic biases in agents or animals undergoing reinforcement learning .

Tonic dopamine and biases in value learning linked through a biologically inspired reinforcement learning model

Nature Communications - Accurate future predictions are essential for guiding behavior, and disruptions in this process are associated with psychiatric disorders. Here the authors show that changes...

rdcu.be

Thrilled to share our new Adesnik lab paper!! Using holography in excitatory & inhibitory neurons, we reveal how a single cortical circuit can both complete and cancel predictable sensory activity, sharpening representations 📄https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.08.02.668307v1 🧵

When neurons change, but behavior doesn’t: Excitability changes driving representational drift New preprint of work with Christian Machens: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Representational drift without synaptic plasticity

Neural computations support stable behavior despite relying on many dynamically changing biological processes. One such process is representational drift (RD), in which neurons' responses change over ...

biorxiv.org

Oh! Seems like a big deal, this. Makes sense too. Like, how would the rest of the brain know which neurons to sample, and if it did already know what the stimulus is, then it wouldn't need those neurons' signals to classify it.

The Transmitter @thetransmitter.bsky.social · last yr.

Some neurons respond more strongly to visual stimuli than others. But the rest of the brain doesn’t prioritize signals from those neurons, according to a new study. Read more in this month’s Null and Noteworthy. By @ldattaro.bsky.social #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/null-and-not...

Thanks to @thetransmitter.bsky.social and @ldattaro.bsky.social for this coverage of our recent paper!

The Transmitter @thetransmitter.bsky.social · last yr.

Some neurons respond more strongly to visual stimuli than others. But the rest of the brain doesn’t prioritize signals from those neurons, according to a new study. Read more in this month’s Null and Noteworthy. By @ldattaro.bsky.social #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/null-and-not...

This is a simplistic but commonly-held view about how science actually works. Doing rigorous& impactful science often means ignoring (some) null results. Intermediate results, null and positive, arise on the way to a publishable contribution, and not all are perfectly rigorous.🧪#neuroscience 1/

John Holbein@johnholbein1.bsky.social · last yr.

“just 68% of the 7,057 researchers whose work had produced null results had shared them in some form, and just 30% had tried to publish them in a journal.” What a joke. #NullEffectsMatter www.nature.com/articles/d41...

A new study led by @timothysit.bsky.social reveals that different layers of mouse V1 integrate visual and non-visual signals differently. Activity is dominated by vision (or spontaneous fluctuations) in L2/3 and by movement in L5. This leads to different geometries. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Reminder that we still have time to fight this! This bill is being crafted & debated in the coming days and weeks. Organize NOW to do outreach and get people in your neighborhood contacting their reps. @standupforscience.bsky.social has resources. Instructions for Postcards-for-Science are here:

Postcards for Science Instructions

Postcard Drive Instructions The main goals for this outreach are: A.) Get individuals to contact their Senators to support funding for NIH, NSF, NOAA, and NASA. B.) Get the public to (continue to) ...

docs.google.com

Eric Topol@erictopol.bsky.social · last yr.

Summary Table of the massive defunding of biomedical research in the United States www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Mahmoud Khalil is free.

Breaking: The Trevor Project received a stop-work order last night on its contract with the national 988 suicide prevention hotline. The Trump administration is eliminating the option for LGBTQ callers to the hotline to press 3 and connect with someone who specializes in LGBTQ mental health.

The firing of neural populations is high-dim even if their subthreshold activity is low-dim! This work by @bio-emergent.bsky.social and @haydari.bsky.social shows how, with a solvable model, a data analysis technique, and data from mouse visual cortex: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

High-dimensional neuronal activity from low-dimensional latent dynamics: a solvable model

Computation in recurrent networks of neurons has been hypothesized to occur at the level of low-dimensional latent dynamics, both in artificial systems and in the brain. This hypothesis seems at odds ...

biorxiv.org

New #NeuroAI #compneurosky preprint! To better understand how target-directed learning works in the brain, we sought to engineer an artificial neural network capable of solving complex image classification tasks that comprises only experimentally-supported biological building blocks. (1/15)

Aaron Milstein@neurosutras.bsky.social · last yr.

Cellular and subcellular specialization enables biology-constrained deep learning www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

We're now appreciating how the immune and nervous systems communicate across body & brain, and there's still more to explore! Had a fun time co-writing this with some amazing immunologists and neuroscientists @nickmroz.bsky.social @arimolofskylab.bsky.social @annamolofskylab.bsky.social 😎🧠

Cross-regulation between the nervous system and type 2 immunity

The nervous and type 2 immune systems regulate each other via cytokines and neurotransmitters, suggesting previously unidentified therapeutic avenues.

science.org

I’m thrilled to announce that I will start as a presidential assistant professor in Neuroscience at the City U of Hong Kong in Jan 2026! I have RA, PhD, and postdoc positions available! Come work with me on neural network models + experiments on human memory! RT appreciated! (1/5)

These very cool findings match up perfectly with our human psychophysics data from this paper: jov.arvojournals.org/article.aspx... Brains are fine using dumb (aka suboptimal) strategies when they can get away with it.

Hayley Bounds@hayleybounds.bsky.social · last yr.

Excited to share my PhD paper! In it, we use targeted 2-photon optogenetic stimulation to determine how V1 activity is read-out in a detection task. We found that network influence, not visual coding properties, predicted the impact of ensembles on behavior - contradicting our expectations (1/5).

Excited to share my PhD paper! In it, we use targeted 2-photon optogenetic stimulation to determine how V1 activity is read-out in a detection task. We found that network influence, not visual coding properties, predicted the impact of ensembles on behavior - contradicting our expectations (1/5).

Neuron@cp-neuron.bsky.social · last yr.

Online now:

The Deaf Scientists Pipeline in Rochester, NY offers support for students and researchers from high school to postdoctoral levels. Now, due to NIH funding cuts, this one-of-a-kind initiative has been dismantled. My recent story for @science.org

Crucial training pipeline for Deaf scientists dismantled by NIH funding cuts

The one-of-a-kind initiative offered support from high school to postdoctoral levels

science.org