Nathan Insel
@networksunknown.bsky.social
Exploring social neuroscience and animal behavior. Based in Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario
New neuroscience job at Wilfrid Laurier University. You may not know the name, but science has been growing fast. It is also down the street from Canada's top tech university (Waterloo) and a world class physics institute (Perimeter). I feel happy and lucky to be here careers.wlu.ca/job/Waterloo...
Assistant Professor - Psychology (Behavioural Neuroscience)
Assistant Professor - Psychology (Behavioural Neuroscience)
careers.wlu.ca
One of the best books I read in 2025 was Nachum Ulanovsky's _Natural Neuroscience_. If my copy looks a little worn, it's because I was intent on reading it in natural habitats.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Generative AI creates synthetic regulatory DNA sequences for precision gene control - Nature Genetics
We developed DNA-Diffusion, a generative artificial intelligence (AI) method that creates synthetic regulatory elements showing enhanced activity. Multiple synthetic elements demonstrated superior cel...
nature.com
On the Nobel Prize winner, Camillo Golgi (from Cani and Mazzarello, 2016)
New preprint: There are some decent tools for multi-animal tracking, but it can still be difficult to track interacting animals without mixing them up. Isaac Robinson (with @wheelerlab.org and others) have developed a software solution that we are now using full time: doi.org/10.1101/2025...
DIPLOMAT: multi-animal tracking with efficient manual editing
Recent advances in computer vision have enabled the development of automated animal behavior observation tools. Several software packages currently exist for concurrently tracking pose in multiple ani...
doi.org
New strategy for grant and paper rejections
Hadas Weiss@hadas.bsky.social · last yr.ai confirmed to me that it’s their loss
Notable paper on sleep aid lemborexant (putting aside caveats of mouse models of Alzheimer's). I have collected 2 1/2 years of data on myself and can confirm even small (2 mg) doses add sleep hours. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Lemborexant ameliorates tau-mediated sleep loss and neurodegeneration in males in a mouse model of tauopathy - Nature Neuroscience
Parhizkar et al. show that lemborexant, an orexin receptor antagonist, protects against neurodegeneration in male tau transgenic mice by preventing tau protein build-up and inflammation, highlighting ...
nature.com
My university is accepting applications for the Visiting Researcher - Scholars at Risk Program, established to support scholars who are facing threats to their life, liberty or academic career, &/or have been forced to leave their academic position because of such threats. www.wlu.ca/academics/re...
Visiting Researcher-Scholars at Risk | Wilfrid Laurier University
wlu.ca
I appreciate the debates about machine intelligence, and how LLMs are forcing us to review our constructs. But I also think it's fun to think of LLMs as a mirror we've put in front of animals that don't have a concept of mirrors (image from @theonion.com)
My 12 yo after I told him that "datum" is singular for data: "Once my generation gets into the Miriam-Webster office, there are going to be a lot of changes"
New results for a new year! “Linking neural population formatting to function” describes our modern take on an old question: how can we understand the contribution of a brain area to behavior? www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 🧠👩🏻🔬🧪🧵 #neuroskyence 1/
Linking neural population formatting to function
Animals capable of complex behaviors tend to have more distinct brain areas than simpler organisms, and artificial networks that perform many tasks tend to self-organize into modules (1-3). This sugge...
biorxiv.org
@neuroai.bsky.social : years ago you tweeted about a thought expmnt that toyed with whether a conscious system depends on connections (like "lab records brain, also stimulates unconnected cells in synchrony w/recording--is the collection of cells conscious?") Do you know where this is published?
Journal article abstracts should include "<SPOILER ALERT>" immediately before the results of the study are revealed.
This hurts my brain. But I've also had a long term dependence on ATP
Fans are often surprised to learn that the most deadly species in the Star Trek universe is the hippopotamus.
Please be sure to check you kid's candy this year. I just found another project I have no time for in a Reese's cup
1. Imagine we land a space probe on one of Jupiters’ moons, take up a sample of material, and find it is full of organic molecules. How can we tell whether those molecules are just randomly assembled goo or the outcome of some evolutionary process taking place there? 🧪
Social bond dynamics and the evolution of helping https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.10.11.561838v1
Social bond dynamics and the evolution of helping https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.10.11.561838v1
Empiricists often struggle to apply game theory models to real-life cases of animal cooperation. One
biorxiv.org
Lateral entorhinal cortex subpopulations represent experiential epochs surrounding reward https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.10.09.561557v1
Lateral entorhinal cortex subpopulations represent experiential epochs surrounding reward https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.10.09.561557v1
During goal-directed navigation, 'what' information, which describes the experiences occurring in pe
biorxiv.org
MIT’s New Desalination System Produces Freshwater That Is “Cheaper Than Tap Water” scitechdaily.com/mits-new-des...
Light affects the prefrontal cortex via intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.09.22.556752v1
Light affects the prefrontal cortex via intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.09.22.556752v1
The ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) is a part of the limbic system engaged in the regulation
biorxiv.org
Best part of the Lumen festival in Waterloo was the photonics. I wouldn't call the installations controversial, but some were definitely polarizing. (Yes, I am licensed for terrible dad jokes.)
What are the neural correlates of drivers who respond to a blinker by cutting the other car off, versus opening up space to merge?
Naive question: can long covid be passed inter-generationally, through gametes? Mitochondrial dysfunction (if that's accurate) sounds like it could be insidious, no?