Happy to share our preprint! We show that hypothalamic hunger-promoting AgRP neurons reflect proximity to food across different mazes in hungry mice. After mice discover food, AgRP activity decreases as they approach the food and increases as they move away.

bioRxiv Neuroscience@biorxiv-neursci.bsky.social · 6d ago

Hunger neurons track available food locations during foraging and spatial memory recall https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.07.28.741066v1

New Study! @cbehav.bsky.social @mpi-animalbehav.bsky.social Often foraging models assume that the forager knows the environment and proceed to predict decision strategies but how does the foraging learn the structure of the environment ? A new preprint delves into this question

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

Hunger neurons track available food locations during foraging and spatial memory recall https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.07.28.741066v1

The brain uses a lot of energy. But it's not using that energy all the time and at the same intensity. It's not just more neuronal activity = more energy. There is also a lot of background process demending energy. 🧪 Link: https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-026-10646-6​

jaxon: a differentiable, GPU-native simulator for peripheral-nerve fiber models https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.07.30.741846v1

First public dataset from the Mormann/Bonn lab! Congrats to @alanadarcher.bsky.social and @franzigrkn.bsky.social 🧠🎥!

Alana Darcher@alanadarcher.bsky.social · 6d ago

🎉 *extremely* excited to share our human single neuron + movie dataset is out in #ScientificData! 📄 Human neuron activity during an 83-minute movie from 2,286 neurons and 29 patients 🔗https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-026-07955-0 1st public dataset from @humansingleneuron.bsky.social!🧵

A key challenge for computational psychiatry is to distinguish state from trait markers and go beyond cross-sectional studies. Here we show that as paranoia waxes and wanes in patients with schizophrenia, so too do volatility priors

Biological Psychiatry@biologicalpsych.bsky.social · last wk.

Individuals with schizophrenia spectrum disorders expect greater volatility in the world, and this cognitive bias is linked to paranoia and delusion severity over time.

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

Replay of procedural memory is independent of the hippocampus 👀👀 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Replay of procedural memory is independent of the hippocampus - Nature Neuroscience

Thompson, Rollik and colleagues show that, during sleep, the brain replays procedural memories in the striatum independently of the hippocampus. Replay content was shaped by prior reward and error out...

nature.com

Dopamine and sodium appetite! Sodium appetite causes a 'sign change' in the taste of hypertonic NaCl solutions. We've previously shown that generation of the appetite recruits phasic dopamine to the taste of NaCl; here we show the 'derecruitment' process during satiation.

bioRxiv Neuroscience@biorxiv-neursci.bsky.social · 2w ago

Rapidly decreasing phasic dopamine responses precede a hedonic switch during satiation of sodium appetite https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.07.16.738888v1

Sensing your body (‘Interoception’) is everywhere in theories of mental health. But when we tested how well hundreds of people sensed their heart and lungs, the link to symptoms was almost nowhere to be found. 💣 🚨New @natmentalhealth.nature.com paper 🚨🎉 asks why 🧵 www.nature.com/articles/s44...

'At elite journals, editors play a central role, rejecting a large majority of submissions without formal peer review, recruiting specific outside experts as reviewers, and guiding authors in how to respond to them.' www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Editorial and peer review dynamics at elite general science journals

Analyses of deidentified data reveal complex interactions that quantify success at elite general science journals.

science.org

Does the brain's response to non-invasive vagus nerve stimulation depend on the current state of the body? Our new paper suggests yes. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Non-invasive vagus nerve stimulation modulates Pavlovian bias in a state-dependent manner

The vagus nerve transmits vital signals between organ systems of the body and the brain. Despite growing interest in non-invasive transcutaneous vagus…

sciencedirect.com

#Neuroeconomics has long focused on reward values, ignoring their identity. @joeycharbonneau.bsky.social & @erinlrich.bsky.social explore a new @PLOSBiology.org fMRI study showing how identity-specific expectations steer choice selection. 🧪 Paper: plos.io/3R9rIxZ Primer: bit.ly/4vWIn6W

People with depression and anxiety symptoms are surprisingly better at overriding gut-instinct motivational biases, while those with compulsions and intrusive thoughts showed the opposite pattern, suggesting distinct motivational disruptions across psychiatric dimensions.

Adaptive suppression of motivational biases increases with mood/anxiety traits

Changes in motivational biases appear central to many psychiatric disorders including depression, anxiety, and substance abuse. Motivational biases, theorized to embody default response strategies…

biologicalpsychiatrycnni.org

Very happy to see this Review with @diegopizzagalli.bsky.social out in @cp-trendsneuro.bsky.social www.cell.com/trends/neuro... This piece brings together a lot of what we’ve been thinking on depression, predictive processing and EEG. Many thanks for the support from @sfb-trr-289.bsky.social

Brain rhythms of depression: A predictive processing perspective

Depression is marked by anhedonia, social withdrawal, and a diminished capacity to learn from positive experiences—features that can be framed within predictive processing. Here, we review findings fr...

cell.com

Fascinating history of screwworm eradication: open.substack.com/pub/construc...

The Fall and Rise of Screwworm

Every spring, as sure as the seasons, and for generations unknown, screwworms began their annual march northward from their overwintering sanctuaries in Mexico and South Texas.

open.substack.com

I am so excited and proud to see this study now published in Neuron. Congratulations to @kr-maynard.bsky.social @stephaniehicks.bsky.social who led this outstanding work, co-first authors @prashanthi-ravi.bsky.social & @svitlanabach.bsky.social, @rphillips3.bsky.social and the whole team. 🧵👇

Kristen Maynard@kr-maynard.bsky.social · last mo.

Excited to share our new study characterizing spatial gene expression in the human NAc led by @prashanthi-ravi.bsky.social @svitlanabach.bsky.social @rphillips3.bsky.social in collaboration with @martinowk.bsky.social @stephaniehicks.bsky.social @alexisbattle.bsky.social @lcolladotor.bsky.social.

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...

Arousal state modulates human hippocampal ripples

Hippocampal ripples are transient, high-frequency oscillations linked to memory replay and consolidation. Ripples are well-characterized in rodents to occur during periods of behavioral inactivity (i....

biorxiv.org

Predicting continuous outcomes: Some new tests of associative approaches to contingency learning journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...

Predicting continuous outcomes: Some new tests of associative approaches to contingency learning

Author summary When we learn about cause and effect in everyday life—such as whether a medicine helps recovery from illness—we experience outcomes that vary in degree rather than simply happening or n...

journals.plos.org

Out now in @pnas.org We present a new metabolism-weighted brain connectome that incorporates each region’s energy expenditure into the mapping of brain connectivity. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Our new preprint shows potential benefit for semaglutide (Wegovy) to stabilise weight gain & ⬇️ hyperphagia in 12 adults with PWS. Well tolerated. Caveat: small open label retrospective observational cohort, most w/ T2DM. medrxiv.org/cgi/content/... @imppsych.bsky.social @imperialbrains.bsky.social

Very interesting postdoc position with Woo Ri Chae @unimarburg.bsky.social on motivational and psychomotor symptoms of mental disorders, as well as their immunometabolic mechanisms and metabolic comorbidities. - job alert - @biodgps-dgpa.bsky.social stellenangebote.uni-marburg.de/jobposting/f...

Happy to share that our paper on objective quality assessment for "precision" fMRI is now out in @cp-neuron.bsky.social A recap of what it does, what's new since the preprint, and code you can run on your own data. cell.com/neuron/fullt...

The human #endocrine system orchestrates critical physiological processes, but how much of each circulating #hormone is there? This study provides an analysis of all known circulating human hormones, revealing patterns in their abundance & distribution @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/4erIp0A

Sometimes, I think I have seen it all in grant or paper reviews by now. But this job comes with so many surprising takes every week 🙃.

Some of the most intriguing findings in our recent JAMA Psychiatry study of anorexia nervosa were not the ones we originally set out to study.

📢 Promotionsstelle an der TU Dresden! Wir suchen eine wiss. Mitarbeiter/Doktorand (m/w/d; E13 TV-L) für Forschung zu Essstörungen und affektiven Störungen – mit Neuroimaging, Digital Phenotyping u. v. m. Bewerbung bis 30.06.2026: www.ukdd.de/psm www.transdenlab.de/home

New preprint alert! doi.org/10.64898/202... Throughout life, we are often told to persist in the pursuit of our long term goals. However, the most important factor to consider in the real world for whether to continue pursuit or abandon one's goal is knowing how much progress you are making.

Prefrontal mechanisms of goal progress inference and monitoring in macaque monkeys

Primates pursue goals over extended periods and over multiple steps. The ability to track progress and its rate is critical for such pursuit, yet the neural mechanisms of this tracking are unclear. We...

doi.org