Seneca Scott

🚀 New preprint from the lab! Our first foray into the subiculum uses in vivo whole-cell recordings to show that dendritic plateaus are a prominent, learning-dependent signaling mode of subicular neurons. Feedback is welcome!

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

🔬🧠 Releasing the 1.0 version of #Suite2p and THE PAPER w/ @marius10p.bsky.social! Now with GPU acceleration. Want to use Suite2p but don’t have 100,000 neuron recordings? We show you how to get those with a standard 2p microscope #neuroscience #imaging #neuroAI www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Projection-specific Routing of Odor Information in the Olfactory Cortex https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2025.12.12.694045v1

The hippocampal map has its own attentional control signal!
Our new study reveals that theta #sweeps can be instantly biased towards behaviourally relevant locations. See 📹 in post 4/6 and preprint here 👉
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
🧵(1/6)

Videos Contradict U.S. Account of Minneapolis Shooting by Federal Agents See how immigration officers escalated a fatal confrontation on Saturday.

Worth noting that the @wsj.com has joined with the @nytimes.com and Bellingcat to say that ICE is lying in its description of the shooting of Alex Pretti. The video evidence more and more supports the view that this was a gratuitous execution. www.wsj.com/us-news/vide...

ICE has now carried out two summary executions of innocent people in the streets of an American city.

If you work for ICE, there's no denying that's the mission you're supporting now. You don't get to claim in one year or ten or twenty that you didn't know what ICE was doing. You're complicit.

Why does life explore so few of the forms it could possibly take? Using fractal descriptors, this #scienceadvances paper shows that Earth’s biosphere clusters around simple shapes, reflecting deep evolutionary constraints. @artemyte.bsky.social @manlius.bsky.social www.science.org/doi/pdf/10.1...

Dual cholinergic mechanisms for sculpting striatal dopamine in vivo Striatal dopamine (DA) and acetylcholine constitute a computationally powerful neuromodulatory dyad that orchestrates action selection, motivational vigor, and reward learning. Striatal cholinergic in...

Excited to share latest study from the lab by an amazing RA, Dylan Flink.

We solved a small (important) puzzle while in the trenches of a larger (wavy 🌊) puzzle.

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
🧵...

Pre-print 🧠🧪
Is mechanism modeling dead in the AI era?

ML models trained to predict neural activity fail to generalize to unseen opto perturbations. But mechanism modeling can solve that.

We say "perturbation testing" is the right way to evaluate mechanisms in data-constrained models

1/8

Modular Organization of Electrical Fluctuations in the Mouse Brain A powerful computational feature of the brain is its ability to compartmentalize different functions in a way that can be flexibly recombined. Experimental evidence for such modularity arose from cyto...

Link to the paper I talked about: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Live updates: Two deceased in active shooter incident at Brown University Serving the Brown University community since 1891

Kudos to the Brown University students who are posting continuous live updates, spaced just minutes apart, on the campus shooting. A lot of grace and professionalism under immense pressure.

www.browndailyherald.com/article/2025...

An Amygdalar Oscillatory Switch Governs Valence Assignment https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2025.12.10.693439v1

Our group has been looking at beta bursts for the last 5 years, but we do it a little differently than most - we group into types them based on their waveforms. In this open access article we lay out why and what we think this might mean
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
#neuroskyence

Oh look we are still having this debate

bsky.app/profile/behr...

bsky.app/profile/behr...

A cholinergic mechanism orchestrating task-dependent computation across the cortex In an ever-changing environment, animals often need to switch between performing different tasks involving distinct sets of cognitive processes. Many such tasks involve neural activity distributed acr...

The basal forebrain plays the cortex like a piano.

Impact of precisely-timed inhibition of gustatory cortex on taste behavior depends on single-trial ensemble dynamics Primary taste cortex does far more than code tastes by turning taste codes into motor commands via population dynamics.

Very cool work! It’s super exciting to see these bifurcation dynamics in higher order regions. Seems parsimonious with work from the Katz lab on attractor state transitions in primary taste cortex!

elifesciences.org/articles/45968

Infraslow histaminergic dynamics govern priming states to gate moment-to-moment memory accessibility https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.11.13.687922v1

Great study showing how histaminergic signaling shapes head-direction cell activity in the presence of objects, with important implications for how animals get oriented. A huge amount of work, really impressive.

www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-7...

TT faculty job opening in #Neuroscience!
We are looking for a colleague to join us in our fantastic Biology Department and Neuroscience Program at Brandeis. We are a group of *very* collaborative, supportive, and productive scientists (& humans!) so please apply
academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/30961

It’s not the thought that counts: Allostasis at the core of brain function The authors review evidence that the primary function of the brain, supported by distributed neural systems, is the predictive regulation of physiology (i.e., allostasis). An example from Alzheimer’s ...

It’s not the thought that counts: Allostasis at the core of brain function: Neuron www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...

This looks super cool; by @jtheriault.bsky.social
By the way congrats really!

Meningeal macrophages exhibit diverse calcium signaling at steady-state and in response to aberrant cortical hyperexcitability in awake mice The meninges, which envelop and protect the brain, host a large number of resident macrophages that play a crucial role in regulating homeostasis and neuroinflammation. Intracellular Ca2+ signaling me...

A new preprint out from the Levy lab, adding knowledge to the exciting world of brain border macrophages and neuroimmunology.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Amygdala–liver signalling orchestrates glycaemic responses to stress Nature - Studies in mice show that acute stress activates hyperglycaemia via activation of a medial amygdala–ventral hypothalamic circuit that controls glucose metabolic responses in the...

Excited to share that my PhD work has been published! www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🧠🧪

Vascular draining confounds laminar decoding in fMRI https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.08.26.672278v1

Abstract Oxytocin is a neuropeptide that has historically been recognised for its role in childbirth, lactation, and sexual reproduction. Subsequently, research expanded its influence to include social bonding and behaviors, emphasising its role in facilitating interpersonal relationships. More recent studies, however, have revealed its broader influence, extending to non-social behaviors and cognitive processes, underscoring its ability to modulate a diverse array of behavioral and mental functions. This evolving understanding calls for a critical re-evaluation of oxytocin’s classification as a “social” hormone. The Allostatic Theory of Oxytocin, which integrates both psychological and physiological dimensions, provides an alternative framework that accounts for how oxytocin modulates both social and non-social behaviors. At the core of this framework is behavioral flexibility, which is essential for adapting to dynamic environments. In this review, we explore the role of oxytocin in facilitating behavioral and cognitive flexibility using mechanistic, survival, and evolutionary perspectives. Additionally, we focus on the interactions between oxytocin and other signalling systems that influence behavioral flexibility. Collectively, our findings underscore the benefits of reframing oxytocin’s function in behavior within a broader framework that encompasses both social and non-social aspects. This more expansive perspective not only deepens our understanding of oxytocin’s multifaceted roles but also opens avenues for novel research approaches.

I think it's time to retire the idea that oxytocin is exclusively a 'social' hormone.

In our latest preprint, led by @kjerstimw.bsky.social, we argue that oxytocin should be reframed as a behavioral flexibility hormone osf.io/preprints/os...

Brain endothelial gap junction coupling enables rapid vasodilation propagation during neurovascular coupling Vasodilatory signals are rapidly communicated across long distances by endothelial-endothelial gap junctions, enabling coordinated dilation of the arterial network during neurovascular coupling.

We’re excited to share our recent study published in @cellpress.bsky.social! In this work, we show that brain endothelial cells, connected by gap junctions, form a signaling highway to enable fast, long-range arterial vasodilation in neurovascular coupling.

You can find it below:

Astrocytes connect specific brain regions through plastic gap junctional networks https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.07.18.665573v1

Very cool work! I’ve been on the edge of my seat for the final version since reading the pre-print!

Reward history guides focal attention in whisker somatosensory cortex Nature Communications - Mice flexibly shift attention between specific whiskers on a rapid timescale based on recent stimulus reward history in a detection task. Attention is correlated with a...

New paper from Deepa Ramamurthy in my lab, just out. Mice flexibly shift attention between different whiskers based on the recent history of whisker stimuli and rewards, during a tactile detection task. We saw a strong neural correlate of this attentional capture in S1 cortex.

rdcu.be/euij3

The interoceptive origin of reinforcement learning Rewards play a crucial role in sculpting all motivated behavior. Traditionally, research on reinforcement learning has centered on how rewards guide learning and decision-making. Here, we examine the ...

Trends in Cognitive Sciences

The interoceptive origin of reinforcement learning

www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

I got an NoA for NINDS F31 about a month ago. Unsurprisingly, Brown has yet to receive any money though