Our 2nd preprint this week tackles a puzzle in reward prediction: BF bursts are both stable and flexible. Across conditions, neurons preserve relative response amplitudes, yet population burst amplitude scales with reward prediction. How can a circuit do both? bsky.app/profile/bior...

bioRxiv Neuroscience (@biorxiv-neursci.bsky.social)

A dynamical attractor computes reward prediction in the basal forebrain https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.10.01.755868v1

bsky.app

Congratulations to @deisseroth.bsky.social !!!

Nature@nature.com · last wk.

BREAKING: The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel “for their discoveries concerning light-gated ion channels and optogenetics.” More to follow.

New preprint from our lab ⚡ Why do DA and BF bursting neurons carry such similar reward-prediction signals? Are they independent, driven by common input, or causally linked? We find a direct answer: DA activity rapidly and causally drives BF. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 1/10

New lab paper in #ScienceAdvances: we identify a modality-common selective-attention signal in noncholinergic #BasalForebrain (BF) “bursting” neurons, distinct from the modality-specific attention signals typically described in corticothalamic circuits. 1/n www.science.org/doi/full/10....

🚨Our preprint is online!🚨 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... How do #dopamine neurons perform the key calculations in reinforcement #learning? Read on to find out more! 🧵

Now out in @natcomms.nature.com‬: Mice and monkeys spontaneously shift through comparable cognitive states - and it's written all over their faces! (1/7) www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Inferring internal states across mice and monkeys using facial features - Nature Communications

Here, the authors created a virtual reality task for monkeys and mice to explore if internal states like attention are similar across species. Their facial expressions during the task were similar, su...

nature.com

Together with this paper by the group of Joe Paton www.nature.com/articles/s41... our results across the two papers complement each other providing strong evidence that distinct dopamine neurons discount future rewards at different rates providing a substrate for multi-timescale RL in the brain

A multidimensional distributional map of future reward in dopamine neurons - Nature

An algorithm called time–magnitude reinforcement learning (TMRL) extends distributional reinforcement learning to take account of reward time and magnitude, and behavioural and neurophysiological...

nature.com

Our work with Pablo Tano, @hyunggoo-kim.bsky.social Athar Malik, Alexandre Pouget and @naoshigeuchida.bsky.social exploring how dopamine neurons could enable multi-timescale reinforcement learning in the brain is out in @nature.com www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Multi-timescale reinforcement learning in the brain - Nature

Individual dopaminergic neurons encode future rewards over distinct temporal horizons.

nature.com

Great work from my next door neighbor!

Tsai-Wen Chen@tsaiwenchen.bsky.social · last yr.

My debut on BlueSky! Here’s how we harvest the firing of neurons to see them better in the living brain! 👇 www.nature.com/articles/s41... Grateful for the amazing dyes from @rhodamine110.bsky.social and insightful suggestions from @adamezracohen.bsky.social !

Big Congratulations Tsai-Wen! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Imaging neuronal voltage beyond the scattering limit - Nature Methods

ALI is an approach for analyzing voltage imaging data that is inspired by algorithms used in super-resolution microscopy. It allows resolving the activity of single neurons in densely labeled populati...

nature.com

Impressive study in @nature from my colleague Marcus Stephenson-Jones at UCL in the @sainsburywellcome.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Dopaminergic action prediction errors serve as a value-free teaching signal - Nature

Dopaminergic action prediction error signals are used by mice as a value-free teaching signal to reinforce stable sound–action associations in the tail of the striatum.

nature.com

1/7 Our paper on individual variability in decision-making is finally out in @nature.com! Inspired by the classic work by Mante and Sussillo, we trained many rats to solve context-dependent decision-making, and we found that different brains use different neural mechanisms to solve the same task!

Individual variability of neural computations underlying flexible decisions - Nature

Behavioural experiments to study decision-making in response to context-dependent accumulation of evidence provide testable models that are consistent with the heterogeneity in neural signatures among...

nature.com

Congrats to @kepecslab.bsky.social !

Kepecs Lab @ WashU@kepecslab.bsky.social · 2y ago

1/ Why do patients with late-stage cancer lose motivation & sink into apathy? 🔥 Our new Science paper shows chronic inflammation activates a cytokine-sensing brain circuit that lowers motivation. Huge team effort: Aelita Zhu, Sarah Starosta, Pignatelli & Janowitz labs! 🧵 🔗 doi.org/10.1126/scie...

Some glimmers of hope (but mostly confusion) this morning. I have heard that no intramural tenure track investigators were supposed to be on the termination list although some folks clearly got termination notices. I am actively checking into this every way I can. 1/2

a picture of a pikachu with the words " i still have hope " written below it

ALT: a picture of a pikachu with the words " i still have hope " written below it

media.tenor.com

This is atrocious!

Jeremy Berg@jeremymberg.bsky.social · 2y ago

The damage today (actually yesterday) to the intramural program appears to especially bad. It also appears (although I need more confirmation) that most or all of the tenure track investigators in their first 2 years in several, and perhaps all, institutes were terminated. 7/n

Very interesting paper on a potential role for proprioceptors in sensing muscle acidosis and driving the perception of soreness. "Sng" is a Taiwanese word for both sour taste and muscle soreness. It also imitates the natural vocalization of humans feeling sore. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

A role for proprioceptors in sngception

Proprioceptors mediate acidosis sensation that contributes to acid-induced pain chronicity.

science.org

(1/30) New preprint! "Symmetries and continuous attractors in disordered neural circuits" with Larry Abbott and Haim Sompolinsky bioRxiv: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Symmetries and Continuous Attractors in Disordered Neural Circuits

A major challenge in neuroscience is reconciling idealized theoretical models with complex, heterogeneous experimental data. We address this challenge through the lens of continuous-attractor networks...

biorxiv.org

Two papers out showing that thalamic inputs determine how cortex responds to a hierarchical task with rule switching: www.nature.com/articles/s41... journals.plos.org/plosbiology/... 🧠📈 🧪

Prefrontal transthalamic uncertainty processing drives flexible switching - Nature

By examining neural responses from tree shrews performing hierarchical decision tasks with rule reversals, the authors identify a thalamocortical mechanism for regulating cognitive flexibility.

nature.com

These essays offer the neuroscience community a place to explore the culture and practice of the field; to debate major questions; to examine the craft of neuroscience; and to trace its evolution over time. Download the book now: www.thetransmitter.org/transmitter-...

The Transmitter books

The Transmitter’s first book, “Thinking about neuroscience: Essays from the field,” features a rich collection of writing from researchers Nicole Rust, Anthony Zador and many more.

thetransmitter.org

Our preprint of my PhD’s work in @gisellavetere.bsky.social lab is finally out on BiorXiv: doi.org/10.1101/2024..., and I’m so excited to share it! If you’ve ever wondered about reconciling engram manipulation experiments and neuronal activity during encoding, you’re on the right thread! 1/14

Deconstruction of a memory engram reveals distinct ensembles recruited at learning

How are associative memories formed? Which cells represent a memory, and when are they engaged? By visualizing and tagging cells based on their calcium influx with unparalleled temporal precision, we ...

doi.org

Neuroscience students asked us to teach a PRACTICAL course on experimental methods, and it is now on YouTube! Please like and repost to help us get the word out! www.youtube.com/playlist?lis... Lecture 1: Signals and data acquisition Focusing on hardware, digital/analog I/O, synchronization 🧵

Neuroscience methods - YouTube

Nanocourse: Approaches to Study Neural Circuits This course was taught by Anita Autry, Tiago Gonçalves, and Luke Sjulson at Albert Einstein College of Medici...

youtube.com

Really elegant work by @behrenstimb.bsky.social group. The idea of structured memory buffers provides a nice framework to understand 'goal-progress cells’ activity in the mPFC while mice learn a common task structure across many tasks. Not the easiest paper to read but really worthwhile!

Earl K. Miller@earlkmiller.bsky.social · 2y ago

A cellular basis for mapping behavioural structure www.nature.com/articles/s41... #neuroscience

Thrilled to present our latest BioRXiv on brain/body interactions during defensive freezing behaviour! (www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...). You might think that a frozen animal has, well, frozen muscle activity, right? Wrong! Underneath the still surface of a fly, something in the legs is beating… 🧵

Thanks Kevin! And thanks to my collaborators @alexkoulakov.bsky.social Sergey Shuvaev and Divyansha Lachi ! (S & D -- have you joined the party here yet?)

Kevin Mitchell@wiringthebrain.bsky.social · 2y ago

A wonderful paper from @tonyzador.bsky.social and colleagues: Encoding innate ability through a genomic bottleneck www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Another huge influx of colleagues to BlueSky this week, so let me attach the fully updated Neurophysiology starter pack for anyone interested. go.bsky.app/9FY1ReG

OpenScholar: AI for scientific paper research - Finds papers & summarizes content for user queries - Trained on 45M+ Semantic Scholar papers - 8B parameters GitHub: github.com/AkariAsai/Op...

GitHub - AkariAsai/OpenScholar: This repository includes the official implementation of OpenScholar: Synthesizing Scientific Literature with Retrieval-augmented LMs.

This repository includes the official implementation of OpenScholar: Synthesizing Scientific Literature with Retrieval-augmented LMs. - GitHub - AkariAsai/OpenScholar: This repository includes the...

github.com

Just immigrated to Bsky. Really like the atmosphere and discussions here and reminded me of why I loved science twitter. Starter packs are very helpful and there are tools to convert starter packs into lists like this one: nws-bot.us/bskyStarterP...

Huge influx of neuroscientists migrates to Bluesky www.thetransmitter.org/community/hu... #Neuroscience

‘Huge influx’ of neuroscientists migrates to Bluesky

Daily neuroscience-related posts on the social-media platform this week have increased more than 400 percent, on average, compared with October.

thetransmitter.org

Just put together the beginnings of a systems & behavior neuro starter pack (focus on rodent work) - obviously a lot of people missing, and most included are in my own little bubble, so if you want to be added do reply here! go.bsky.app/Hxpe53o

I made a systems neuroscience starter pack, focused on experimentalists who study the brain at the level of populations of neurons! Also want to be on the list? Reply or DM me a picture of your ephys rig or 2p setup and I'll add you 🤭 go.bsky.app/UiqX7ry