Tamir Eliav

Neuroethology: How the brain controls natural behaviours Neuroethology, the study of the neural mechanisms underlying natural behaviours, has faced challenges due to the complexity of behaviours, limitations in genetic manipulation, and recording constrain…

Only a few days left to register for the India-EMBO Lecture Course on Neurethology meetings.embo.org/event/25-neu... taking place in Pune Dec 7-11, 2025. #EMBOneuroethology
Fantastic speaker line up!
Deadline July 31st.

The new issue is out👉https://www.cell.com/cell/current
⁠
On the cover, Eliav et al. reveal that hippocampal replays in bats flying in very large, naturalistic environments were highly fragmented and short, depicting trajectories covering only a small portion of the environment size.

Congratulations! That's great news

Thank you 🙏

📄 Read our new paper here (free access):
🔗 authors.elsevier.com/c/1lG3hL7PXu...
RTs welcome 🙏
#Neuroscience #Memory #Replay #Sleep #Bats #Hippocampus

This isn't about species differences!
When bats flew in a short tunnel, replays covered much larger fractions of space.
And key replay features — duration, compression ratio, co-occurrence with SW-ripples — were similar to rodents.
It’s the environment size that changes the game!

This fragmentation wasn’t random:
🧠 Replays were biased toward meaningful events (landings, crossovers with other bats).
🔥 Suggests selective memory consolidation or chunking of memory.

We recorded CA1 activity in bats flying in a 200m long tunnel🦇
💡Replays were short, fragmented snippets—covering only ~6% of the full flight experience.
Even though the bats flew continuously the entire long tunnel, replays during sleep or pauses recapitulated only chunks.

Previous studies (in rodents in small environments) showed that the hippocampus replays entire past trajectories during rest.
But what happens when animals navigate natural-scale environments? 🏞️

🚨New in @cellpress.bsky.social
We discovered that hippocampal replays in natural-scale environments are highly fragmented, not full-length.
doi.org/10.1016/j.ce...
👇🧵

Natural Neuroscience Natural neuroscience departs from the classical reductionist approach, which emphasizes control at the expense of natural behaviors, by proposing a shift tow...

mitpress.mit.edu/978026204499...

📖🧠Thrilled to see Natural Neuroscience by Nachum Ulanovsky! It argues for studying the brain in the complex environments it evolved to handle, not overly simplified setups. A perspective that deeply influenced me during my time working with Nachum. Highly recommend!
@mitpress.bsky.social

‘Natural Neuroscience,’ an excerpt In his new book, Nachum Ulanovsky calls on the field to embrace naturalistic conditions and move away from overcontrolled experiments.

In his new book, published today, Nachum Ulanovsky calls on the field to embrace naturalistic conditions and move away from overcontrolled experiments.

#neuroskyence

www.thetransmitter.org/systems-neur...

See more on the PhD position [here](www.activesensingcollectives.com/openings/) - and am also happy to receive informal queries. Please re-post and share in your circles!

Hello World!
After almost a month of starting a research group - finally the announcement :)
We are the 'Active Sensing Collectives' group (tinyurl.com/yckehxys) at the CASCB in the University of Konstanz. We're still growing, see PhD position ad below. @cbehav.bsky.social @uni-konstanz.de z.de

Meet the Klaus Tschira Boost Fund Fellows 2025!
15 early-career researchers in Germany have been selected for the program, giving postdocs the freedom and funding to explore bold scientific questions and gain independence. More info about the fellows: gsonet.org/funding-prog...

How does sleep help birds learn songs? Tamir Eliav has now been awarded the Klaus Tschira Boost Fund grant of 120k to investigate how the sleeping brain of young birds shapes their learning! Congratulations! 🎉

@tamir-eliav.bsky.social @gso-forresearchers.bsky.social @klaus-tschira-stiftung.de

New from the lab!! 👉🏼 authors.elsevier.com/a/1kgT43BtfH... 📝 @cellpress.bsky.social We discovered that genetically-defined neuron types in the hippocampus form unique manifolds! Dual color imaging, chemogenetics and topological analysis all at once! With Juan Gallego @juangallego.bsky.social

A Neuropixels Opto probe with 3 blue emitters and 3 red emitters lighting up in succession, with corresponding neural activity in different layers of the cortex.

Neuropixels and Optogenetics are delighted to announce the birth of

Neuropixels Opto

Combining high-resolution electrophysiology and optogenetics

Today in bioRxiv

960 sites, 28 emitters, 2 colors

By Lakunina, @karolinazsocha.bsky.social, Ladd, et al

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

(1/2)

Excited to share that our paper is now published in Nature! In this study, we uncovered a grid-cell-based circuit in medial entorhinal cortex that probes the surrounding environment with theta-paced, sweeping spatial representations 🧵
www.nature.com/articles/s41...