Study finds that when a network with low-dimensional structure receives outside input or is perturbed by noise, it can produce either high- or low-dimensional responses depending on the finer structure of the network and its input. Read the study: https://go.aps.org/4fT3NLA

📣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

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

New paper: Spinal circuitry modeled for locomotion using spatial transcriptomics and cell-type projections. Local excitation, long-range inhibition, and a longitudinal skew—an asymmetric "Mexican hat"—give rhythm, rotational dynamics, and gait, with no pacemakers. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Happy to say our head-direction-cell-in-3D is finally out! doi.org/10.1038/s420... Confirms that the brain's compass uses a dual-axis rule (like an iphone does) to maintain a constant estimate of horizontal heading even when the head is not horizontal. Blogpost explanation here: shorturl.at/9VdGM

"Replay occurs in the dorsal striatum during offline consolidation of a procedural memory in mice" - even with total hippocampal lesions pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/42493550/ It looks like memory replay is a general capability of the brain - not a special feature of the hippocampus!

Parallel independent #voltage #computing along #dendrites of #CA3 pyramidal #neurons | Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Parallel independent voltage computing along dendrites of CA3 pyramidal neurons

Dendritic computation contributes to information processing in cortical circuits. Hippocampal CA3 plays a central role in navigation, but how the dendrites of CA3 pyramidal neurons process information...

science.org

Back to Bluesky to share the most exciting news: my postdoctoral research is now published in Neuron! We used cricket hunting to show how ethological learning persistently rewires juvenile (but not adult!) visual circuits by co-opting homeostatic plasticity. Full story www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...

Ethological learning during the critical period resets synaptic setpoints in mouse binocular visual cortex

Bissen et al. show that prey capture learning profoundly reshapes visual cortical circuitry and function during developmental critical periods, but not in adulthood. These learning-induced structural ...

cell.com

Brenda Milner is a hero and 108!! She did a lot more than discover the hippocampus is linked to declarative memory, but that work is the most famous.

Admirable Women@admirablewomen.bsky.social · 3w ago

Neuroscientist Dr. Brenda Milner is recognized as one of the fundamental founders of modern cognitive neuropsychology. She proved the hippocampus is essential for forming long-term "declarative" memory (facts, names & events). She was born #OTD in 1918--she's 108 years old today! #WomenInSTEM

Functional Logic of a Cognitive Brain System for Navigation A fascinating review of the Drosophila head-direction system by Gaby Maimon and Larry Abbott #neuroskyence #compneuro

Functional Logic of a Cognitive Brain System for Navigation

It is unusual for cognitive neuroscientists to reach consensus around which computations a brain region implements, what algorithms are used to achieve those computations and how the algorithms are im...

annualreviews.org

Sparse component analysis: A method that uncovers separable computations within neural population activity www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...

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

Our new paper is out in @nature.com! We uncovered how a naked mole-rat queen 👑 controls an entire colony: a natural contraceptive scent that suppresses reproduction in other females! A remarkable mammalian parallel to bees and ants! 🐝🐜 @garyrlewin.bsky.social youtu.be/enfv3zJrWKM?...

Naked mole-rats are ruled by a queen: this chemical puts her in power

YouTube video by nature video

youtu.be

So excited to be part of this one! Now officially out in Annual Review of Neuroscience 🎉 www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

Ecological Visual Processing in the Mouse

Visual systems evolved to extract behaviorally relevant information while animals move through and interact with their world. Such ecological vision differs fundamentally from standard laboratory paradigms in many key aspects, making this a much harder problem for the brain to solve, and for the neuroscientist to study. However, emerging technologies and experimental approaches have enabled investigation of visual computations under these ecological conditions. These approaches are particularly powerful in the mouse, combining well-developed genetic tools, high-throughput recordings, and quantifiable ethological tasks. Here we review computations that are engaged in ecological contexts, including active sensing, motion processing, scene analysis, distance estimation, and spatial perception. We delineate experimental approaches that engage these computations and synthesize current understanding of their neural implementations based on mouse research. These studies reveal how ecological vision engages distinct processing strategies and novel neural circuitry, while highlighting the vast territory that remains unexplored in understanding real-world visual computation.

annualreviews.org

Spencer LaVere Smith@spencerlaveresmith.bsky.social · 3w ago

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...

Your eyes constantly move to hunt for information, a strategy known as infotaxis. New work from Prof. Mackenzie Mathis's lab @trackingactions.bsky.social shows mice do it too: in a VR task, they actively sought out the most informative views, adjusting as visual info changed doi.org/10.1016/j.cu...

Is spatial navigation innate 🧠? Using #NeuroPixels we show that the #torus 🍩 underlying the #GridCell map exists already on day 10 in rats — before pups open eyes and ears and before they start upright walking. 🧵1:4 👇 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

How does the human brain extract abstract structure from experience? We show that sensory-independent relational representations emerge in mPFC over several days. Work with @mgarvert.bsky.social and @behrenstimb.bsky.social now out in @currentbiology.bsky.social: www.cell.com/current-biol...

This paper is an absolutely beautiful combination of a deep set of cognitive ideas, a super creative task, a surprisingly impressive behaviour, and an elegant modelling framework. One of my favourite things in the last year.

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

Dimensionality reduction is how the brain acquires knowledge. Cool new paper from the late, great, Mark Stokes. www.nature.com/articles/s41... #neuroscience

Learning shapes neural geometry in the primate prefrontal cortex - Nature Neuroscience

Learning transforms prefrontal cortex activity from flexible, high-dimensional representations into compact, task-relevant and abstract codes, enabling efficient generalization of learned rules to new...

nature.com

Really excited about this work with the awesome Will de Cothi & @shipleysj.bsky.social, out in Nature Reviews Neuroscience. We propose acetylcholine is an analogue of dopamine — tracking not reward prediction errors but state-transition prediction errors. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41583-026-01058-w

Our new paper is out this week in Nature Neuroscience! www.nature.com/articles/s41... We built a BCI that works with the brain's natural geometry — and we found that people could learn to play a video game with their brains in <1 hr of training. This efficiency is groundbreaking & here's why:

Human learning of noninvasive brain–computer interfaces via manifold geometry - Nature Neuroscience

Busch et al. use nonlinear neural manifolds to help humans gain rapid control over a noninvasive brain–computer interface, allowing them to learn how to play a video game with real-time fMRI neurofeed...

nature.com

Really enjoyed reading this paper by Pereira et al. Very smart design and optimization of a complex maze that tests the use of 'cognitive maps' during planning. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Flexible route planning and rapid structure learning by mice in complex environments

Action selection using predictive models of the environment plays a fundamental role in human and animal behaviour, yet is poorly understood at circuit and algorithmic levels. Spatial navigation is an...

biorxiv.org

Two brain circuits. Same learning problem. Shared learning outcomes. Different dynamical implementations. Our work shows that learning is not a single canonical solution but can emerge through distinct population dynamics shaped by circuit architecture. Excited to share our latest preprint! 🧵1/12

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

Equivalent volitional learning emerges through circuit-specific population dynamics in motor cortex and hippocampus https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.06.04.730137v1

Ever wonder how your brain navigates the real world? 🧠 Most spatial navigation studies use flat, 2D mazes. But the real world is hilly, irregular, and bumpy! ⛰️ Our new paper in #ScienceAdvances asked a simple question: How does the brain map uneven terrain? 📄 doi.org/10.1126/scia... 🧵👇️️️ 1/

Hillscape cells: Hippocampal place cells map terrain geometry independently of behavior #neuroskyence @roddy-grieves.bsky.social Eleonore Duvelle and Jeff Taube: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Hippocampal place cells map terrain geometry independently of behavior

Place cells map terrain geometry, not behavior, revealing a surface-based brain code for real-world navigation.

science.org

Spontaneous problem-solving in bumble bees. Amazing work by the bees who were put in these puzzling situations by @akshayebhambore.bsky.social in the lab of @olliloukola.bsky.social www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

A hackathon reveals that disagreement in neuroscience runs deeper than most researchers suspect—even in electrophysiology, a field that prides itself on hard data, write @mattiachini.bsky.social and Gaelle Chapuis. #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/reproducibil...

18 teams analyzed a neuro dataset and got different answers

Disagreement in neuroscience runs deeper than most researchers suspect—even in electrophysiology, a field that prides itself on hard data.

thetransmitter.org

New review with Cheng Xue at U Chicago @cxue.bsky.social in Trends Neurosci@cp-trendsneuro.bsky.social! We discuss the neural geometry of task-dependent computation: disentangled encoding, RNN modeling, switch cost, etc. www.cell.com/trends/neuro...

The ‘neat’ and ‘messy’ in task-dependent neural geometry and computation

To solve diverse real-world tasks, the brain must flexibly switch between task rules and adjust computations. Recent advances in analyzing neural data and modeling neural networks have revealed their ...

cell.com

🚨 New paper in @nature.com We asked why two hippocampal areas with very different anatomy, CA3 and CA1, often seem to code space so similarly? By recording bats flying up to 200m, we found that the difference was hidden by scale! www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🧵 1/11

Sparse-to-dense coding transformation between hippocampal areas CA3 and CA1 - Nature

The hippocampus&nbsp;exhibits a CA3-to-CA1 coding transformation that combines fast learning with an efficient, compressed neural code.

nature.com

Our new paper is out in Neuron! www.cell.com/neuron/fullt... How does the brain decide how much of the past to use when making decisions? In rapidly changing environments, recent experiences matter more; in stable environments, longer histories are useful.

Adaptive reorganization of history encoding in the retrosplenial cortex supports flexible decision-making strategies

Zhang et al. show that mice flexibly adjust how past experiences guide choices in fast- and slow-changing environments. Retrosplenial cortex neurons display a wide range of history-integration timesca...

cell.com