Climbing fibers encode the gradient of a loss function for the cerebellum

Neurons in the brain are often many synapses away from motoneurons, yet if a movement results in error, each distant neuron needs a teacher that considers its specific contribution to production of th...

biorxiv.org

Don’t compete, collaborate: why collective funding applications are the future

Scientists with disparate expertise writing grants together can identify knowledge gaps and drive progress — but systems must change to incentivize them.

nature.com

White matter pathways mediating dorsolateral prefrontal TMS therapy for depression - Nature Neuroscience

Seguin et al. show that the efficacy of transcranial magnetic stimulation for depression depends on how stimulation spreads through the brain’s wiring. Patients with shorter communication pathways bet...

nature.com

Thalamic activation of the visual cortex at the single-synapse level

Deciphering thalamocortical (TC) activation at the level of individual synapses is essential to understanding how the cortex processes sensory information. In this work, we studied TC computation unde...

science.org

Exploring the Role of the Rich Club in Network Control of Neurocognitive States

Using a network control theoretical framework, we found that the brain's rich club does not optimally control dynamics of the brain. Instead, size-matched sets of random peripheral regions had a sign...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

Will's Wild Website

shorturl.at

Parkinson’s disease as a somato-cognitive action network disorder - Nature

The substantia nigra and all Parkinson’s disease deep-brain stimulation targets are selectively connected to the somato-cognitive action network rather than to effector-specific motor regions.

nature.com

Scientists May Have Found the True Source of Parkinson’s Disease

A newly identified brain network may be the real driver of Parkinson’s—and precisely targeting it just delivered a major boost in symptom relief.

scitechdaily.com

Attention-like regulation of theta sweeps in the brain's spatial navigation circuit

Spatial attention supports navigation by prioritizing information from selected locations. A candidate neural mechanism is provided by theta-paced sweeps in grid- and place-cell population activity, which sample nearby space in a left-right-alternating pattern coordinated by parasubicular direction signals. During exploration, this alternation promotes uniform spatial coverage, but whether sweeps can be flexibly tuned to locations of particular interest remains unclear. Using large-scale Neuropixels recordings in freely-behaving rats, we show that sweeps and direction signals are rapidly and dynamically modulated: they track moving targets during pursuit, precede orienting responses during immobility, and reverse during backward locomotion — without prior spatial learning. Similar modulation occurs during REM sleep. Canonical head-direction signals remain head-aligned. These findings identify sweeps as a flexible, attention-like mechanism for selectively sampling allocentric cognitive maps. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. European Research Council, Synergy Grant 951319 (EIM) The Research Council of Norway, Centre of Neural Computation 223262 (EIM, MBM), Centre for Algorithms in the Cortex 332640 (EIM, MBM), National Infrastructure grant (NORBRAIN, 295721 and 350201) The Kavli Foundation, https://ror.org/00kztt736 Ministry of Science and Education, Norway (EIM, MBM) Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences; NTNU, Norway (AZV)

biorxiv.org

Methodological flaw may upend network mapping tool

The lesion network mapping method, used to identify disease-specific brain networks for clinical stimulation, produces a nearly identical network map for any given condition, according to a new study.

thetransmitter.org

A synaptic locus of song learning

Learning by imitation is the foundation for verbal and musical expression, but its underlying neural basis remains obscure. A juvenile male zebra finch imitates the multisyllabic song of an adult tutor in a process that depends on a song-specialized cortico-basal ganglia circuit, affording a powerful system to identify the synaptic substrates of imitative motor learning. Plasticity at a particular set of cortico-basal ganglia synapses is hypothesized to drive rapid learning-related changes in song before these changes are subsequently consolidated in downstream circuits. Nevertheless, this hypothesis is untested and the synaptic locus where learning initially occurs is unknown. By combining a computational framework to quantify song learning with synapse-specific optogenetic and chemogenetic manipulations within and directly downstream of the cortico-basal ganglia circuit, we identified the specific cortico-basal ganglia synapses that drive the acquisition and expression of rapid vocal changes during juvenile song learning and characterized the hours-long timescale over which these changes consolidate. Furthermore, transiently augmenting postsynaptic activity in the basal ganglia briefly accelerates learning rates and persistently alters song, demonstrating a direct link between basal ganglia activity and rapid learning. These results localize the specific cortico-basal ganglia synapses that enable a juvenile songbird to learn to sing and reveal the circuit logic and behavioral timescales of this imitative learning paradigm. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. National Institutes of Health, K99 NS144525 (DCS), F32 MH132152 (DCS), F31 HD098772 (SB), R01 NS099288 (RM), RF1 NS118424 (RM and JP)

biorxiv.org

Brain implant lets man 'experience joy' for the first time in decades

A device that has been likened to a pacemaker for the brain has given a man with severe depression great relief

newscientist.com

Sleep-dependent infraslow rhythms are evolutionarily conserved across reptiles and mammals

Nature Neuroscience - Bergel et al. show that an infraslow rhythm connecting the brain and body during sleep is shared by lizards, mammals and birds, revealing an ancestral process and reshaping...

rdcu.be

A theory of multi-task computation and task selection

Neural activity during the performance of a stereotyped behavioral task is often described as low-dimensional, occupying only a limited region in the space of all firing-rate patterns. This region has...

biorxiv.org

Robust Foraging Competition

Can your AI visually navigate better than a mouse?

robustforaging.github.io

SIPLab

siplab.gatech.edu

Neuroscience needs engineers—for more reasons than you think

Adopting an engineering mindset will help the field focus its research priorities.

thetransmitter.org

Falling asleep follows a predictable bifurcation dynamic - Nature Neuroscience

Li et al. propose a conceptual framework to study the phenomenon of falling asleep based on electroencephalogram data. They show that a tipping point marks the brain’s nonlinear wake-to-sleep transiti...

nature.com