😂

Abdus-Saboor on balancing the study of pain and pleasure David Anderson’s 2013 paper revealed the sensory neurons involved in pleasurable touch and led Ishmail Abdus-Saboor down a new research path.

“I like to work on problems where there’s still room to make a big impact.” In “This paper changed my life,” @ishmailsaboor.bsky.social discusses how a 2013 paper from David Anderson inspired him to study the circuits of pain and pleasure.

#neuroskyence

www.thetransmitter.org/this-paper-c...

👏🏻

In case anyone has been wondering what I have been doing for the past 40 years, it is summed up in this slide.
#neuroscience

Rhythmic sampling of multiple decision alternatives in the human brain - Nature Communications How humans process competing information when making multi-alternative decisions remains unclear. Here, the authors show that the brain resolves the trade-off between “evaluating within” and “comparin...

Cognition is not steady state.
Rhythmic sampling of multiple decision alternatives in the human brain
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
#neuroscience

Building compositional tasks with shared neural subspaces - Nature The brain can flexibly perform multiple tasks by compositionally combining task-relevant neural representations.

This is cool. Complex behavior is built from subcomponents.
Building compositional tasks with shared neural subspaces
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
#neuroscience

How eight initiatives are tackling neuroscience’s gender gap In honor of today’s International Day of Women and Girls in Science, The Transmitter spoke with eight women working to bolster their ranks in the field.

Happy International Day of Women and Girls in Science! For its 11th year, we’re celebrating eight women neuroscientists working toward gender equality in the field.

By Paige Miranda

#WomeninScience #neuroskyence

www.thetransmitter.org/qa/how-eight...

Tomorrow night After Dark at the MIT Museum
It's gonna be geeky cool fun.
Matt Wilson and I will tell you about minds and memory. Clever Hans will play songs of the mind. And perogies and beer!
tickets.mitmuseum.org/events/019b3...

If you work at the intersection of computational neuroscience and machine learning, consider applying for this postdoc position (January 2027 start date):
academicpositions.harvard.edu/postings/15868
An opportunity to work with a great group of people across Harvard, MIT, and UC Berkeley.

Cerebellum responds to language like cortical areas One of four language-responsive cerebellar regions may encode meaningful information, much like the cortical language network in the left hemisphere, according to a new study.

A region in the cerebellum is language-selective—something previously found only in the cortex, a new study suggests.

By @natmesanash.bsky.social

#neuroskyence

www.thetransmitter.org/language/cer...

Probabilistic inference in very large universes [Abridged] Some cosmological theories propose that the observable universe is a small part of a much larger universe in which parameters describing the low-energy laws of physics vary from region to r...

There's a lot in this, and much that looks interesting. It's a question I've idly wondered about: are we right to make any probabilistic inferences about (near) infinite universes of which our observable universe is only an infinitesimal part?
www.arxiv.org/abs/2602.02667

Bluesky Map Interactive map of 3.4 million Bluesky users, visualised by their follower pattern.

I made a map of 3.4 million Bluesky users - see if you can find yourself!

bluesky-map.theo.io

I've seen some similar projects, but IMO this seems to better capture some of the fine-grained detail

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗖𝗼𝗴𝗻𝗶𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲-𝗘𝗺𝗼𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗹 𝗕𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻
My book from 2013 might be of interest to students of how emotion interacts with perception, cognition, and motivation. But note that it's not written with a general reader in mind.
(unfortunately not open access)
mitpress.mit.edu/978026201956...
#neuroskyence

Forecasting the Brain: Scalable Neural Prediction with POCO - Kempner Institute Predicting future neural activity is a critical step toward achieving real-time, closed-loop neurotechnologies. To this end, we introduce POCO, a unified forecasting model trained on diverse calcium i...

🧠📈A new foundation model for #neuroscience! In the latest Deeper Learning blog, @duranrin.bsky.social and @kanakarajanphd.bsky.social describe their state-of-the-art POCO model, which accurately forecasts neural dynamics across individuals and species.

bit.ly/4afqx5A #NeuroAI #neuroscience

Cerebellar-cortical beta oscillations emerge as a predictive signal facilitating the stability of behavioral performance
doi.org/10.1016/j.cu...
#neuroscience

How to be a multidisciplinary neuroscientist Neuroscience subfields are often siloed. Embracing an integrative approach during training can help change that.

Neuroscience subfields are often siloed. Embracing an integrative approach during training can help change that, @austinacoley.bsky.social explains.

#neuroskyence

www.thetransmitter.org/craft-and-ca...

Cerebellum responds to language like cortical areas One of four language-responsive cerebellar regions may encode meaningful information, much like the cortical language network in the left hemisphere, according to a new study.

A region in the cerebellum is language-selective—something previously found only in the cortex, a new study suggests.

By @natmesanash.bsky.social

#neuroskyence

www.thetransmitter.org/language/cer...

Imagery modulates the pupillary response, but this does not reliably index differences in imagery vividness. Most people report that they can imagine seeing things in their mind’s eye. But there are large individual differences. A small proportion of people r…

Imagery modulates pupillary light responses (e.g. pupil constriction when imagining a bright visual scene) but the effect doesn't correlate with reported imagery vividness: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Cell type-specific calcium imaging of central sensitization in mouse dorsal horn - Nature Communications Altered mechanosensation by application of capsaicin to the skin is thought to be spinally mediated. Here, the authors use Ca2+ imaging in spinal neurons and develop a cell profiling approach to identify populations involved in central sensitization.

Cell type-specific calcium imaging of central sensitization in mouse dorsal horn
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Allodynia is a state in which pain is elicited by innocuous stimuli, for example in response to cutaneous capsaicin application. This phenomenon is mediated by spinal cord
/1

New discovery! Value-based decisions reorganize neural state space. Options are first encoded in orthogonal subspaces Then the selected option rotates into a "readout subspace".
Neural subspace reorganization reflects value-based decision making.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
#neuroscience

New Study Sheds Light on the Brain’s “Extended Language Network” - Kempner Institute For more than a century, scientists studying how the brain processes language have focused their attention on the cerebral cortex, specifically the left frontal and temporal lobes. But a new […]

New in Neuron! A team including #KempnerInstitute’s
@coltoncasto.bsky.social & @gretatuckute.bsky.social maps the cerebellum's role beyond motor control as part of an extended language network.🧠🗣️

More here: bit.ly/4rptQ13 #neuroscience #fMRI
@gsas.harvard.edu @evfedorenko.bsky.social

Toward model-based design of causal manipulations of brain circuits with high spatiotemporal precision
doi.org/10.1016/j.co...
#neuroscience

The representation of omitted sounds in the mouse auditory cortex
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
#neuroscience

Intelligence and consciousness can arise from the maintenance of coherent cortical dynamics.
Intelligence as high-dimensional coherence: The observable dimensionality bound and computational tractability
doi.org/10.1016/j.bi...
#neuroscience

Once Thought To Support Neurons, Astrocytes Turn Out To Be in Charge | Quanta Magazine New experiments reveal how astrocytes tune neuronal activity to modulate our mental and emotional states. The results suggest that neuron-only brain models, such as connectomes, leave out a crucial la...

Spiking is not all there is to brain function. Astrocytes propagate electric field influences, like neurons, but do not spike. And they are a large fraction of brain cells.
www.quantamagazine.org/once-thought...
#neuroscience

The Association between Oscillatory Burst Features and Human Working Memory Accuracy Abstract. Oscillatory power across multiple frequency bands has been associated with distinct working memory (WM) processes. Recent research has shown that previous observations based on averaged powe...

Working memory is an interplay between different rhythms. It is not steady state like we used to think back in the 20th century.
The Association between Oscillatory Burst Features and Human Working Memory Accuracy
doi.org/10.1162/JOCN...
#neuroscience

Advancing regulatory variant effect prediction with AlphaGenome - Nature AlphaGenome, a deep learning model that inputs 1-Mb DNA sequence to predict functional genomic tracks at single-base resolution across diverse modalities, outperforms existing models in variant effect...

I had intended to post something about this new Google DeepMind paper that appeared yesterday in Nature, but the press coverage has added to what there is to say. So this is a long 🧵
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I recommend this as a great summary of the debates and the state of play in eukaryotic regulation. I particularly commend the discussion of causation.

𝗦𝗽𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗮𝗻𝗲𝗼𝘂𝘀 𝗯𝗲𝗵𝗮𝘃𝗶𝗼𝗿 𝗶𝘀 𝗮 𝘀𝘂𝗰𝗰𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗼𝗳 𝘀𝗲𝗹𝗳-𝗱𝗶𝗿𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗲𝗱 𝘁𝗮𝘀𝗸𝘀
More hidden markov models for cool behaviors and brain data
#neuroskyence
doi.org/10.1016/j.ne...

Is Particle Physics Dead, Dying, or Just Hard? | Quanta Magazine Columnist Natalie Wolchover checks in with particle physicists more than a decade after the field entered a profound crisis.

There are lots of striking quotes in this sobering look at the state of play in particle physics by @nattyover.bsky.social for @quantamagazine.bsky.social.
www.quantamagazine.org/is-particle-...