Daniel Pollak

I'm hoping this trellis will give my doorway shade once buds break in mid-late March (fingers crossed), not to mention delicious leaves and grapes. Stay tuned.

In the meantime, Los Angeles, not to be an ahole but what is going on?

Espaliering this vine has been an exercise in utter ignorance. And guess what? It's come back each Spring. So there's no technical or knowledge barrier keeping you from free food, shade, and aesthetics. See the current state of my vine: I cut it down to the nubs. I have no idea what I'm doing.

"But Daniel how do I even get a grapevine?" Do what I did. Steal a branch from an existing grapevine. In general, we should all steal more plants. (Thanks Caltech community garden!)

There are tons of trellis structures all over the place in residential buildings! These unadorned, trellised spaces are unfit for humans when it's hot. Why no grapes? Do people not know that grapes are wildly heat resistant? My vine has essentially ignored heatwave after heatwave.

Like most other people in LA county, I live in a concrete structure that becomes an oven in the summer: three walls with an opening facing West.

Grape vine growing up a trellis over a doorway.

I never feel like I have something about science I'm comfortable posting. But I just realized I have too many gardening thoughts to just keep to myself. So...

Why do I never see grapevines in urban LA landscapes?

Poster X8 on Tuesday morning, 8-12

#SfN25 's hottest club is Poster X8 Tuesday Morning. This club has everything: mice hunting robotic bait, quantitative behavior modeling, chronic superior colliculus Neuropixel data, and GLM encoding/decoding, not to mention the cheap new DAQ EVERYONE's been rumbling about. See you there!

Parsing social context in auditory forebrain of male zebra finches To understand the influence of natural behavioral context on neural activity requires studying awake-behaving animals. Microdrive devices facilitate bridging behavior and physiology to examine neural ...

8/ Want a deeper dive? Check out the full paper at journals.plos.org/plosone/arti.... Happy to chat more about social neural coding or how to implement similar recording gear!

7/ Tools: Our open-access microdrive design—orchestrating reliable, long-term neural recordings—is freely shared (CaltechDATA repository) for the community to use and build upon.

6/ Takeaway: NCM isn’t sensitive to whether it’s the bird singing or hearing itself—but it is sensitive to the presence of other birds. Suggests a specialized auditory representation tuned to social environment.

5/ Key insights:
• Behavioral context (self- vs. external song) → no change in neural encoding
• Social context (alone vs. with conspecifics) → marked modulation in response strength & selectivity
Plus, we observed stimulus-specific local field potential correlates in NCM.

4/ Our microdrive system is lightweight, durable for months, and broadly accessible—overcoming major hurdles in chronic recordings in small animals.

3/ We compared two contexts:
• Behavioral – hearing own song vs. actively singing it
• Social – listening while alone vs. in the presence of others
We found that NCM responses remained consistent across behavioral contexts but were changed social listening situations.

2/ Why zebra finches? They’re highly vocal and social—perfect for studying how neural responses in the auditory cortex (aka caudomedial nidopallium, or NCM) change with behavioral and social context.

A picture of our microdrive design

1/ Late to the game to publicize my paper with @healeylab.bsky.social ocial: Parsing social context in auditory forebrain of male zebra finches (PLOS ONE, March 19, 2025). We also developed a low-cost microdrive for long-term neural recording in freely behaving finches.

a man says you know i hate the attention ALT: a man says you know i hate the attention

Wow! Thank you @animal-prattle.bsky.social and @timsainburg.bsky.social for reading this paper and skeeting it up! I haven't even skeeted it myself yet.