Jay Hennig
@jhennig.bsky.social
Computational neuroscientist interested in how we learn, and dad to twin boys Asst prof at Baylor College of Medicine https://www.henniglab.org/
🚨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
One of my favorite things at museums is finding the pineal eye in the skulls of fossils. Once you start looking for them, they are everywhere.
Kelsey Jenkins, PhD@reptiliferous.bsky.social · 19h agoNew research out today! Some animals have three eyes?! This eye isn't for "seeing" per se, but it's connected to a part of the brain responsible for regulating body temperature. So if you see a lizard basking out in the sun to get warm, oftentimes this eye plays a central role. But there's more...
How does the brain represent the value of knowledge? In our paper--out now at Nature Neuroscience--we identify a representation of intrinsic information value within neural population structures in the orbitofrontal cortex in mice. www.nature.com/articles/s41593-026-02377-y #neuroskyence 🧠🧪 (1/8)
Representations of the intrinsic value of information in mouse orbitofrontal cortex - Nature Neuroscience
Mice are motivated to seek information of no extrinsic value. Recording neural activity in orbitofrontal cortex reveals a representation of the value of information that is distinct from the value of ...
nature.com
Children’s Representations of Possibility: Uncertainty About “What” Is Easier Than Uncertainty About “Where”
Children’s Representations of Possibility: Uncertainty About “What” Is Easier Than Uncertainty About “Where”
Abstract. Young children struggle in situations involving mere possibility, such as when a target object could be in one of two possible locations. This difficulty is often interpreted as a general…
direct.mit.edu
If an action results in error, each neuron requires an individualized teaching signal that guides change in its output. This is the credit assignment problem of learning. Are there neurons in the brain that can compute such a sophisticated teaching signal? Yes. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Climbing fibers encode the gradient of a loss function for the cerebellum
Neurons in the brain are often many synapses away from motoneurons, yet if a movement results in error, each distant neuron needs a teacher that considers its specific contribution to production of th...
biorxiv.org
Why do people stop pursuing goals they care about❓ Motivational deficits are among the most disabling symptoms, yet current treatments often have only modest effects. In @lillyt.bsky.social new paper, she asks if we're missing an important piece of the puzzle 🧠 #neuroscience #cogpsyc #psychscisky
Arousal shapes motivation: an integrative framework for understanding motivational deficits - Translational Psychiatry
Translational Psychiatry - Arousal shapes motivation: an integrative framework for understanding motivational deficits
nature.com
A question: does anyone know about communities or groups for scientists who are committed to writing without the use of LLMs / genAI?
"..CA3 operates as a nonlinearly gated scene constructor and CA1 as a continuous landmark integrator to build and maintain the cognitive map." How visual scenes recruit spatial maps: threshold-gated activation in CA3 versus continuous integration in CA1 Inah Lee Lab: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
How visual scenes recruit spatial maps: threshold-gated activation in CA3 versus continuous integration in CA1
The hippocampal cognitive map is constructed from environmental sensory inputs, but the conditions that recruit a spatial map from a quiescent baseline remain unclear. Using a parametric virtual reali...
biorxiv.org
6/ A complex, modulated, information-rich song says more, but it degrades fast as it travels. A simple song says less, but it survives the trip. So every species faces a trade-off between how much a song says and how far it carries.
1/ The world's songbirds sing in just 8 basic sounds. And where a bird lives decides which ones it uses. My first PhD paper is out now in @science.org (www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aee6239) Here is what we found:
The cerebellum plays a role in motor learning and reinforcement learning. But does cerebellar learning generalize to all sorts of tasks? Here we test strong prediction: that cerebellar activity tracks passively learned sensory-sensory associations (statistical learning). See below for the answer!
bioRxiv Neuroscience@biorxiv-neursci.bsky.social · 2w agoUnsupervised nonmotor learning in the human cerebellum https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.07.22.740142v1
A reminder that UC _faculty_ and Faculty Associations — not the universities themselves nor their administrators — are waging this battle in court, demonstrating great bravery and moral clarity.
White House admits it used keywords to kill billions worth of California research grants
Federal agencies that terminated more than a thousand research grants at the University of California last year admitted that they used keywords related to diversity, gender, vaccine hesitancy and COV...
apnews.com
Remember when NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya said there were no banned words and NIH Program Officers were making them up? Here’s the proof he lied: apnews.com/article/cali... I know, Jay Bhattacharya lying is not news. But it’s still really validating to have the admission.
White House admits it used keywords to kill billions worth of California research grants
Federal agencies that terminated more than a thousand research grants at the University of California last year admitted that they used keywords related to diversity, gender, vaccine hesitancy and COV...
apnews.com
How do children’s exploration strategies change across development? New preprint with Azzurra Ruggeri, Silja Kessler, and @ericschulz.bsky.social: “Tiny Alchemists: The Developmental Emergence of Empowerment in Exploration” osf.io/preprints/ps... Paper summary below 1/6
Out today on @nature.com! Connecting neural specialization, population geometry, and their functional implications across the cortical hierarchy. So grateful for this beautiful and fun collaboration with @shuqiw.bsky.social, S Muscinelli, L Paninski, and @stefanofusi.bsky.social!
Rarely categorical, highly separable representations along the cortical hierarchy - Nature
Cortical circuits prioritize diversity over categorical structure, supporting a computational regime geared towards high-dimensional, highly separable neural representations.
nature.com
Hard to overstate the importance of this paper. Acategoricality and mixed selectivity together kill a lot of sacred cows. For starters, place cells aren't real, in that they are not a meaningful category. They are just a thing we scrape out of the data. Scientists focus on them because...
Columbia University's Zuckerman Institute@zuckermanbrain.bsky.social · 3w agoScientists have long debated whether neurons are jacks of all trades or tend to specialize in one thing. Now @stefanofusi.bsky.social, @lorenzoposani.com & Liam Paninski present new evidence in @nature.com shedding light on how the brain performs complex tasks. tinyurl.com/yj3ew8en
Excited to share this work, led by Andrew Zimnik and Sherry An, from @mchurchland.bsky.social and my labs! www.cell.com/neuron/fullt... 1/2
Sparse component analysis: A method that uncovers separable computations within neural population activity
Zimnik et al. provide a new, interpretable, unsupervised dimensionality approach for neural population activity. Their approach, sparse component analysis (SCA), reveals the latent factors correspondi...
cell.com
The global neuronal workspace (GNW) is currently the best documented neuroscience mechanism by which conscious processing arises in the human brain — and now Anthropic researchers have discovered a similar workspace inside their large language model ! www.anthropic.com/research/glo...
A global workspace in language models
Interpretability research on Claude's internal thoughts.
anthropic.com
I have always believed that ideas from basic systems neuroscience could eventually help people. But for years that felt more like hope than reality. But look! This is one of the most personally satisfying papers my lab has produced because we’re getting there. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 🧪🧵 1/
During sleep, neurons in the hippocampus 'replay' past activity patterns. This is thought to underlie memory consolidation 🧠 After a busy day, how does the brain sort out what is worth replaying? 🤔 Check out this preprint 📃 from Tirole, Duvelle and Bendor for answers! doi.org/10.64898/202...
Time, but not reward, shapes replay-based episodic prioritization
Why are some experiences remembered better than others? Leading theories propose that hippocampal replay prioritizes memories for consolidation according to their expected future value. We recorded hi...
doi.org
Learning Shapes the Energy Cost of Neural Tasks https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.07.01.735889v1
My department, Neurobiology and Biophysics at the University of Washington (nbio.uw.edu), is hiring a new tenure-track Assistant Professor, application deadline 09/30/26. It's a broad search — molecular to organismal, all of neuroscience/physiology/biophysics welcome. apply.interfolio.com/187735
I'm excited to share our latest work “Representation Learning Enables Scalable Multitask Deep Reinforcement Learning”. In this work, we revisit a fundamental question in reinforcement learning: What if representation learning was the key ingredient behind scalable RL? 1/🧵
Both brains and RNNs can re-use components of computation across similar tasks or contexts. But what exactly are those “shared components”? How can they be used to solve several tasks? We address these questions in a new preprint with @avm.bsky.social! Link: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Interpretable compositional computation with recurrent neural networks
Flexible cognition utilizes reusable components to enable rapid adaptation of behavior to different contexts or tasks. Analysis of artificial neural networks trained on multiple tasks suggested that t...
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
“agents should not directly touch the text of the paper. Paper text should be written by a human.” This is my lab’s explicit policy as well. As always, @mcxfrank.bsky.social nails it.
Mike Frank@mcxfrank.bsky.social · last mo.Some thoughts on how to collaborate on reproducible paper writing with AI agents, without them introducing hallucinated references or other issues into your paper. babieslearninglanguage.blogspot.com/2026/06/help...
We find that hallucination in world models is, first and foremost, a *data coverage* problem. Below viz shows visited state density (blue) and our developed hallucination predictor u_r (purple) side-by-side for four different tasks. Hallucinations tend to happen in less visited regions! 4/n
Super excited to share the last paper of my PhD: "Hallucination in World Models is Predictable and Preventable" ✨ We train a 350M-parameter generative world model on a large dataset spanning 210 tasks and show that we can predict *when* hallucination will happen and use that info to fix it! 🧵1/n
Let's retire smooth "homunculi" (as an olfactory scientist, mosaic representations warm my heart :-)
Nature@nature.com · last mo.Nature research paper: A mosaic of whole-body representations on the human precentral gyrus go.nature.com/44k08Ru
This work is now published in Nature Communications! We were able to train participants to have near-perfect memory for lists of 40 words - they added creative details to their memory representations that we could measure in their behavior and brains 🧠 doi.org/10.1038/s414...
Binding items to contexts through conjunctive neural representations with the method of loci - Nature Communications
This study of a mnemonic technique found that highly effective memory is supported by “conjunctive” representations in the brain’s Default Mode Network, which reflects the unique, creative details use...
doi.org
Jiawen Huang@huangjiawen.bsky.social · 2y agoNew preprint with Akshay Manglik, Nick Dutra, Hannah Tarder-Stoll, @tchamberlain.bsky.social, Robert Ajemian, @qiongzhang.bsky.social, @ptoncompmemlab.bsky.social, @chrisbaldassano.bsky.social looking at conjunctive representation during Method of Loci! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
