Dr. Jan Zimmermann
@janzimmermann.bsky.social
Associate Professor of Neuroscience at UMN. Circuit enthusiast, organic or silicon(e). Opinions all mine.
Very happy to share our new review on visual computation in the cephalopod brain, with @vangeliqueallen.bsky.social, out now! We discuss exciting recent advances in understanding how the radically different brain of cephalopods processes the visual scene. 🐙🔬👀 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
The final version of our amygdala dopamine paper is out! BLA dopamine dynamically tracks emotional salience and not value or reward prediction error. Congrats to Dr. Megan Brickner!! www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Basolateral amygdala dopamine transmits emotional salience - Nature Communications
The basolateral amygdala dopamine system has received little attention. Here, authors show that BLA dopamine plays a unique role in learning, by encoding the emotional salience of sensory cues to supp...
nature.com
Protect our program officers!! Spend a few minutes standing up for their worker’s rights!
I-270, Exit 1@i270exit1.bsky.social · 3d ago🚨🚨 FEDS and everyone else 🚨🚨 🧵Tomorrow is the last day to comment on the Office of Personnel Management rule, “Promoting Employee Accountability" at www.regulations.gov/commenton/OP... This rule eliminates employee protections and rights, and hastens the firing process. Specifically, it... 1/4
1. We—@eduede.bsky.social, @mjcrockett.bsky.social, Kevin Gross, and I—have a new preprint on the arXiv today, based on ideas that emerged during an @sfiscience.bsky.social workshop in November 2024: The unintended consequences of large language models as a labor-augmenting technology in science.
The unintended consequences of large language models as a labor-augmenting technology in science
As a labor-augmenting technology, large language models (LLMs) have the potential to accelerate scientific activity across the research pipeline. But even if LLMs perform on par with human experts at ...
arxiv.org
Where does curiosity come from? Neuroscientist @jenbussell.bsky.social wants to know. She found that mice, like us, seek information with no external benefit. Her new Nature Neuroscience research links this desire for knowledge to cells in the brain's orbitofrontal cortex. See tinyurl.com/3xjt8e5c
📣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
Clinical 7T gradients can go fast — but peripheral nerve stimulation (PNS) stops you at high-res fMRI. ⚡ Meet POPE 🌍: we reshape EPI pulses to dodge PNS exactly when it spikes → robust 0.3mm fMRI, seeing intracortical veins. 🧠 w/ @SiemensHealth 👉 doi.org/10.64898/202...
Population geometry reveals largely distinct value-coding dimensions for saccades vs. reaches across 8 cortico-basal ganglia nodes—challenging motor-invariant RL models: doi.org/10.64898/202...
Embodied reinforcement learning in the primate cortico-basal ganglia system
Learning the value of environmental stimuli from reward experience allows animals to make advantageous choices. Existing biological accounts of reinforcement learning (RL) often assume that this value is represented as a single, motor-system-invariant neural signal. Here we recorded neuronal activity across eight nodes of the macaque cortico-basal ganglia system — from limbic to neocortical regions — while monkeys learned stimulus-reward associations using either saccades or reaches as the required motor response. The geometry of population activity revealed largely distinct value-coding dimensions for saccades and reaches, including in limbic regions typically associated with motor-system-invariant value coding. Consequently, value information was substantially reduced when read out across motor systems. These results provide circuit-wide evidence that challenges existing neural implementations of RL. They link biological accounts of value learning to embodied frameworks in cognitive science and artificial intelligence, in which behavior is grounded in an agent’s physical structure rather than abstracted from it. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. Custom code used to generate the results reported in this study is publicly available at <https://github.com/GiarroccoFranco/Cortico-BasalGanglia>. The data supporting the findings of this study will be made publicly available in a suitable repository upon publication. Prior to publication, the data are available from the corresponding authors upon request. NIH, ZIAMH002928
doi.org
We're hiring! Postdoc position to study the neural control of reaching using high-density multi-area electrophysiology. 5 years of funding, great collaborative environment. Please share with anyone who may be interested. For details, see: docs.google.com/document/d/1...
Pruszynski Postdoc 2026
Postdoctoral Researcher, Control Policies in the Primate Motor Circuit Pruszynski Lab @ Sensorimotor Superlab The Pruszynski Laboratory at Western University is seeking a postdoctoral researcher to j...
docs.google.com
Reminder: Only 8 days left to apply! Join our lab at the Ernst Strüngmann Institute as a Technical Assistant. From training rats to assisting with wireless brain recordings, you'll contribute firsthand to our research on how the brain navigates the world. 🔗 esi-frankfurt.de/career/techn...
Zapping without mapping = no bueno ! Cool paper www.science.org/doi/full/10....
Focused ultrasound blood-brain barrier opening reveals a paradoxical remote metabolic response in the primate brain
Using focused ultrasound to open the BBB paradoxically induces metabolic stress in distant brain regions.
science.org
The President of OHSU Shereef Elnahal and the OHSU Board of Directors will be voting to effectively gut research and shutdown the Oregon National Primate Research Center on 7/27/2027. Public comments can be submitted here until 3PM EST today. savescienceoregon.org/contact
🧠 New preprint alert! 🧠 Leo led the heroic effort to improve how we map connections across large cortical networks in macaques—stably—over weeks to years. The secret sauce: a combo of optogenetics + µECoG + new signal processing to localize stim-driven responses. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Combining phase analysis and causal stimulation enables longitudinal mesoscale connectivity mapping
Uncovering the circuit mechanisms of flexible behavior requires characterizing how neural signals propagate across large-scale networks and tracking how those networks evolve over time. Signal propaga...
biorxiv.org
Interested in how people perceive and remember the speed of visual objects? Our paper (see also the blueprint/ thread below) is now out in the Journal 📔 of Vision!
Better performance when recalling speed from object motion compared to texture motion | JOV | ARVO Journals
jov.arvojournals.org
Rosanne Rademaker@rademaker.bsky.social · 8mo agoMany things in the world move, and can even move behind other things. When will the cat reappear? To predict this, remembering the cat’s speed will likely help. But... how do people remember something like speed, which is defined by displacement over both (🤯) space and time? TWEEPRINT ALERT! 🚨🧵1/n
Some professional news: In mid-May, I was appointed to be the Associate Director of Scientific Strategy & Innovation at @nbri-ucdavis.bsky.social. One of my tasks in this role is to facilitate other people's science. If you are interested in working with our 🐒s or other resources, please reach out!
Eliza Bliss-Moreau@eblissmoreau.bsky.social · 3w agoTime flies! Today is my 18th anniversary at @ucdavis.bsky.social! I arrived as a new social psych PhD ready to learn 🐒🧠 anatomy. 18 years later, I'm the Associate Director of Scientific Strategy at @nbri-ucdavis.bsky.social and Chancellor's Leadership Professor of Psych @ucdavispsych.bsky.social!
🚨 Big news 🚨 After 10 years at Harvard, my lab is moving to Barcelona in Spring 2027 to join @cbc-upf.bsky.social and the Department of Engineering at @upf.edu. 1/4
Ecological Visual Processing in the Mouse - with @michaelgoard.bsky.social @crisniell.bsky.social @mbeyeler.bsky.social Visual computations that are engaged in ecological contexts: active sensing, motion processing, scene analysis, distance estimation, and spatial perception. doi.org/10.1146/annu...
My home institute, @ucleye.bsky.social, is looking for a new Director! www.veredus.co.uk/job/job-1183a/
Director of the UCL Institute of Ophthalmology - REF 1183 | Veredus
University College London Director of the UCL Institute of Ophthalmology Location: London Salary: An attractive remuneration package UCL is a world leading, global university with a community of more...
veredus.co.uk
Our labs first paper! Some 😳 surprising effects. Turns out everything comes back to context 🤓
bioRxiv Neuroscience@biorxiv-neursci.bsky.social · 4w agoVentral tegmental area acetylcholine generates appetitive and aversive incentive motivation https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.07.09.737546v1
Wohoo
Roxana Zeraati@roxana-zeraati.bsky.social · 4w agoOur paper "Neural timescales from a computational perspective" is finally out in @natneuro.nature.com: www.nature.com/articles/s41... We discuss how computational models and methods can distill empirical observations on neural timescales into quantitative, testable theories of brain computation.
Hi all! I’m looking for a full-time RA / lab manager (start date: late Aug or Sept, 1 year of funding guaranteed). Ideal candidate is a recent grad w/ relevant research experience. App review has begun, so if you’re interested, please apply here ASAP, by 7/12! Thx! phf.tbe.taleo.net/phf02/ats/ca...
Hiring Research Assistant, - Garden City, N.Y.
View job details and apply now
phf.tbe.taleo.net
There is this common human failing (not just tech bros) where people misunderstand the incentives of those around them. People have both financial and social incentives to tell you that you are right and great. Smart people create incentives for people to disagree with them.
Gillian Brockell@gillianbrockell.com · last mo.There's a part in the book "Careless People" where the author beats Zuck at Settlers of Catan, and he is absolutely wrecked by it. Someone pulls her aside to explain everyone else has been letting him win for years. I think about this a lot re: why tech bros think everyone will love AI chatbots.
We (@neuroprinciplist.bsky.social & I) will soon open joint PhD & postdoc positions on cross-species mechanisms of different adaptive behaviors. If you’re interested and would like to chat during #FENS2026, drop me a message :)
Go Julia Pai, Fatih Sogukpinar et al. Heavily revised work on astrocytes role in learning. Incredibly grateful for the team's hard work on this. Extended biology and theory now added! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Ventral striatal astrocytes contribute to reinforcement learning
Astrocytes influence synaptic plasticity and neuronal function through astrocytic calcium dynamics (ACD). However, astrocytes’ contribution to cognitive operations like reinforcement learning (RL) rem...
biorxiv.org
www.nature.com/articles/s41... cea!
A brain reward circuit inhibited by next-generation weight-loss drugs in mice - Nature
Humanized glucagon-like peptide 1 receptor (GLP1R) mouse models are used to investigate the neural circuitry through which small-molecule GLP1R agonists modulate feeding, with implicati...
nature.com
AI can determine the best papers. There are 4 key findings in this preprint and 3 R's in "cherry"
I’m all for challenging the status quo… but you really missed the mark here @odedrechavi.bsky.social
Oded Rechavi@odedrechavi.bsky.social · last mo.Gloves are off! TODAY WE RELEASE THE 1% A list of the year’s very best papers 👇 (see thread)
Tremendously excited to announce that I will be joining @rockefeller.edu as an Assistant Professor and Head of Lab starting in January 2027! My group will be broadly focused on theoretical neuroscience, and mathematical problems in neural computation in the large.
