🧠 New publication: Rethinking acetylcholine's role in how we learn and remember 🔗 Read more: www.ucl.ac.uk/life-science... #Hippocampus #Acetylcholine #UCL #CellAndDevelopmentalBiology #BarryLab

Brain chemical acetylcholine may help us update our understanding of the world

A Nature Reviews Neuroscience perspective suggests hippocampal acetylcholine serves as a learning signal, tracking prediction errors to update brain models during memory and learning.

ucl.ac.uk

Acetylcholine: a candidate substrate for hippocampal predictive learning? A Perspective by William de Cothi, Sarah Shipley & Caswell Barry @shipleysj.bsky.social @caswell.bsky.social #neuroscience #neuroskyence www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Acetylcholine: a candidate substrate for hippocampal predictive learning? - Nature Reviews Neuroscience

Predictive models have emerged as a normative lens for understanding neural function. In this Perspective, de Cothi, Shipley and Barry plausibly unify the diverse roles of hippocampal acetylcholine in...

nature.com

Really excited about this work with the awesome Will de Cothi & Sarah Shipley, just 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

Had so much fun at Pint of Science last night. Brilliant talk from Holly Gregory. If you missed out last night there’s another night of talks tonight!

Caswell Barry@caswell.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Last three tickets for tonight's Pint of Science. Get them while they are hot.

Join our team at the London @pintofscience.uk events. You'll get to hear from @caswell.bsky.social and Holly Gregory about how the body works! Still a few tickets for tomorrow! Book now! pintofscience.co.uk/event/maps-m...

Maps, Memories and Mending: Stories from the Nervous System

Your brain is a mapmaker, a memory keeper, and — sometimes — in need of repair. Join neuroscientists Caswell Barry and Holly Gregory for two pint-sized tal…

pintofscience.co.uk

We have several events that are part of the Pint of Science event series. If you're free this week check out our academics. You won't regret it! pintofscience.co.uk/event/maps-m...

Maps, Memories and Mending: Stories from the Nervous System

Your brain is a mapmaker, a memory keeper, and — sometimes — in need of repair. Join neuroscientists Caswell Barry and Holly Gregory for two pint-sized tal…

pintofscience.co.uk

If you're in London on Tuesday and fancy an evening of science and beers (who doesn't?!) come along to the Pint of Science night that I'm organising. There are also events on the 18th and 20th if you can't make this one. See you there! pintofscience.co.uk/event/maps-m... @pintofscience.uk

Maps, Memories and Mending: Stories from the Nervous System

Your brain is a mapmaker, a memory keeper, and — sometimes — in need of repair. Join neuroscientists Caswell Barry and Holly Gregory for two pint-sized tal…

pintofscience.co.uk

I'm hosting a #PintOfScience night on the 19th May! Come along for a fun evening with awesome talks from UCL's @caswell.bsky.social and Holly Gregory! @ucllifesciences.bsky.social pintofscience.co.uk/event/maps-m...

Maps, Memories and Mending: Stories from the Nervous System

Your brain is a mapmaker, a memory keeper, and — sometimes — in need of repair. Join neuroscientists Caswell Barry and Holly Gregory for two pint-sized tal…

pintofscience.co.uk

⚠️New review straight out of the oven! "Spatial navigation in preclinical Alzheimer's disease: A review" arxiv.org/abs/2603.23082 We focus on spatial navigation as a sensitive cognitive marker in preclinical AD, compiling evidence from cognitively unimpaired individuals with positive AD biomarkers.

Thanks for the feature @ucllifesciences.bsky.social! I plan to let the fame go straight to my head 🧠👩‍🔬

UCL Faculty of Life Sciences@ucllifesciences.bsky.social · 6mo ago

New research has uncovered a critical breakdown in how the brain consolidates memories. While we rest, our brains typically "replay" recent experiences to move them into long-term storage. www.ucl.ac.uk/life-science... #AlzheimersResearch #Neuroscience #UCL #DementiaAwareness #UCLBrainSciences

Really interesting from the Burgess stable — theta sweeps in entorhinal cortex show a dorsoventral gradient, with different spatial scales coordinated at different frequencies. Nice work @zilong-ji.bsky.social @neilburgess10.bsky.social 👏 biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2026.03.08.710351v1

Thanks Caswell! Happy to see this out. Recent interesting work from Vollan et al @azvollan.bsky.social showed that the decoded locations from grid cell activity sweep out in a left-right alternative way across successive theta cycles, steered by an “internal direction” signal in parasubiculum.

Caswell Barry@caswell.bsky.social · 6mo ago

Really interesting from the Burgess stable — theta sweeps in entorhinal cortex show a dorsoventral gradient, with different spatial scales coordinated at different frequencies. Nice work @zilong-ji.bsky.social @neilburgess10.bsky.social 👏 biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2026.03.08.710351v1

Human hippocampal theta–gamma coupling coordinates sequential planning during navigation Impressive study from Dan Bush's Lab at UCL: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

What drives the sequential emergence of spatial neurons in developing rats? In our ICLR 2026 paper, we show how changes in movement statistics drive spatial tuning. Our model replicates experimental timelines and predicts novel conjunctive tuning maturation. doi.org/10.64898/2025.12.30.696864

So happy to finally see this out in @currentbiology.bsky.social! We found that disrupted replay structure in an AD model was linked to reduced place cell stability and more repetitive behaviour on a radial maze 🧠 @abrate.bsky.social @caswell.bsky.social #neurosky tinyurl.com/yx52vzjd

Disrupted hippocampal replay is associated with reduced offline map stabilization in an Alzheimer’s mouse model

Shipley et al. show that spatial memory deficits in an Alzheimer’s mouse model are associated with place cell instability and degraded reactivations in rest. Although reactivation rates are preserved,...

tinyurl.com

Memory dysfunction in Alzheimer’s disease may be linked to impairment in how the brain replays our recent experiences while we are resting, according to a new study in mice led by Dr Sarah Shipley @shipleysj.bsky.social and Prof Caswell Barry @caswell.bsky.social @ucllifesciences.bsky.social

How the brain's 'memory replay' goes wrong in Alzheimer's disease

Memory dysfunction in Alzheimer’s disease may be linked to impairment in how the brain replays our recent experiences while we are resting, according to a new study in mice by UCL scientists.

ucl.ac.uk

Wooo! Exciting news - Inside Your Brain - the children's neuroscience book I wrote with @lucyannunwin.bsky.social has been listed in the 2025 Children's book of the year shortlist. Please vote for us: tinyurl.com/yhr8vawe (some of those other books look amazing too)

Books of the Year 2025 Voting Form

School Reading List Children's Books of the Year 2025. To take part, vote for one book in each category and press 'submit' at the end of this form. For more information, book synopses and purchasing ...

docs.google.com

Three must read papers for PhD students. #scisky #PhD #science #research #academicsky 1. The importance of stupidity in scientific research Open Access journals.biologists.com/jcs/article/...

OK If we are moving to Bluesky I am rescuing my favourite ever twitter thread (Jan 2019). The renamed: Bluesky-sized history of neuroscience (biased by my interests)

Excited to share that our preprint is out! doi.org/10.1101/2024... The structure of place cell reactivations was disordered in AD mice compared to WT! This was predictive of reduced place cell stability and memory performance on a radial-arm maze task. Here are a few details: 1/5🧵

Disordered Hippocampal Reactivations Predict Spatial Memory Deficits in a Mouse Model of Alzheimer's Disease

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is characterised by progressive memory decline associated with hippocampal degeneration. However, the specific physiological mechanisms underlying hippocampal dysfunction in A...

doi.org

Our latest preprint has landed www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Fantastic work from @laurenb29.bsky.social and Will de Cothi showing how many of the cell types associated with subiculum (e.g. boundary vector cells, corner cells) can be understood as successor features. TLDR: SUB not CA1 is the SR

Unifying Subicular Function: A Predictive Map Approach

The successor representation has emerged as a powerful model for understanding mammalian navigation and memory; explaining the spatial coding properties of hippocampal place cells and entorhinal grid ...

biorxiv.org

Huge congrats to @karyna-mi.bsky.social for her paper published today in Science! She found that the hippocampus is really important for a key strategy we use to make decisions called hidden state inference! 🧪 🧠https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adq5874 1/7

Hidden state inference requires abstract contextual representations in the ventral hippocampus

The ability to use subjective, latent contextual representations to influence decision-making is crucial for everyday life. The hippocampus is hypothesized to bind together otherwise abstract combinat...

science.org

What are the brain’s “real” tuning curves? Our new preprint "SIMPL: Scalable and hassle-free optimisation of neural representations from behaviour” argues that existing techniques for latent variable discovery are lacking. We suggest a much simpl-er way to do things. 1/21🧵