WilluhnLab

Exciting news! 🎉 Our Computational Neuroscience course has been awarded NIH BRAIN Initiative funding! Students will get hands-on experience w real BRAIN Initiative datasets, helping them build computational skills that are essential for the future of neuroscience.

www.linkedin.com/feed/update/...

I’m super excited to finally put my recent work with @behrenstimb.bsky.social on bioRxiv, where we develop a new mechanistic theory of how PFC structures adaptive behaviour using attractor dynamics in space and time!

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

Very excited and proud to share my postdoctoral research with @neurrriot.bsky.social looking at the context-specific encoding of social behavior 💃🕺 in hormone-sensitive, large-scale brain networks in mice!

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

#neuroskyence #compneurosky 🧪
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Authors retract Science paper on controversial fMRI method Several MRI artifacts contribute to the neuronal activity signal picked up by the method, according to a preprint the authors posted this month.

A method for capturing neuronal activity using fMRI excited the neuroimaging field but couldn’t be replicated. Today, the authors of the original paper retracted their work.

By @callimcflurry.bsky.social

#neuroskyence

www.thetransmitter.org/retraction/a...

FixGrower: An efficient and robust curriculum for shaping fixation behavior in rodents Center-port fixation is a common prerequisite for many freely-moving rodent tasks in neuroscience and psychology. However, typical protocols for shaping this behavior are non-standardized and ineffici...

🛑 Attention researchers who train freely-moving rodents!

Jess Breda and I developed a protocol for training center-port nose fixation 61% faster than a previous curriculum while keeping violation rates low.

Preprint here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

I once saw a (very interesting) talk about sleep in which the speaker started by saying that we don't really know how to define sleep, and then proceeded to operationalize sleep in flies as basically periods when they are still for a long time. This got me thinking...

The new TOC from academia dot edu. By creating an Account with Academia.edu, you grant us a worldwide, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable license, permission, and consent for Academia.edu to use your Member Content and your personal information (including, but not limited to, your name, voice, signature, photograph, likeness, city, institutional affiliations, citations, mentions, publications, and areas of interest) in any manner, including for the purpose of advertising, selling, or soliciting the use or purchase of Academia.edu's Services.

If you’re on academia dot edu, let me suggest that you strongly consider deleting your account.

We’re searching for TWO tenure-track cognitive neuroscientists here in the Wesleyan University Psychology Department! Apply here wesleyan.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/careers

WAChRs are excitatory opsins sensitive to indoor lighting www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

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🚨 New preprint! 🚨

Excited and proud (& a little nervous 😅) to share our latest work on the importance of #theta-timescale spiking during #locomotion in #learning. If you care about how organisms learn, buckle up. 🧵👇

📄 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
💻 code + data 🔗 below 🤩

#neuroskyence

Transitions in dynamical regime and neural mode during perceptual decisions - Nature Simultaneous recordings were made of hundreds of neurons in the rat frontal cortex and striatum, showing that decision commitment involves a rapid, coordinated transition in dynamical regime and neura...

How does the brain decide? 🧠

Our new @nature.com paper shows that neural activity switches from an 'evidence gathering' to a 'commitment' state at a precise moment we call nTc.

After nTc, new evidence is ignored, revealing a neural marker for the instant when the mind is made up.

rdcu.be/eGUrv

Out today in @nature.com: we show that individual neurons have diverse tuning to a decision variable computed by the entire population, revealing a unifying geometric principle for the encoding of sensory and dynamic cognitive variables.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Welcome to Almería everyone. Remember to tag us or use #EBPS2025 to promote everything you are enjoying about your time here.

Can a single cell learn? Even without a brain, some microbes show simple forms of cognition. Can this basal cognition be engineered? Check our new paper with @jordiplam.bsky.social on the minimal synthetic circuits & their cognitive limits. @drmichaellevin.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Where do some of Reinforcement Learning's great thinkers stand today?

Find out! Keynotes of the RL Conference are online:
www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...

Wanting vs liking, Agent factories, Theoretical limit of LLMs, Pluralist value, RL teachers, Knowledge flywheels
(guess who talked about which!)

‪@benhayden.bsky.social‬
@tyrellturing.bsky.social‬
@jmgrohneuro.bsky.social‬
@pessoabrain.bsky.social
I see a lot of talk on here about how we should avoid
"x does y" talk because the brain is "a dynamic, reverberant, reciprocally interconnected system".
But this does not follow.
A thread...

Wat gebeurt er in het brein van iemand met een dwangstoornis? Voortdurend je handen willen wassen, continu de drang voelen om aan plekjes op je huid te krabben of dwangmatige bewegingen uit moeten voeren gestuurd door angstige gedachten. Wat gebeurt er precies i...

Here is the recording (in Dutch): www.nporadio1.nl/fragmenten/d...

In case you have time at 12:30 today (in 25 min): Tune into www.nporadio1.nl/live to listen and watch our very own Dr. Tara Arbab talk about her latest findings for 10min (in Dutch): Intracranial electrophysiological biomarkers of compulsivity in OCD. www.nature.com/articles/s44....

Did You Work on a Terminated NIH Grant? ProPublica Wants to Hear From You. The National Institutes of Health is canceling grants that are seen as conflicting with the Trump administration’s priorities. We want to hear from researchers who have been affected.

Related to our previous post- if you had a grant terminated, Pro Publica wants to hear from you. Your work was funded because it was good, important science meant to help Americans. Reach out, and make your voice heard.

www.propublica.org/getinvolved/...

This link is open access, I think: www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2025/...

Elektrofysiologische metingen in de hersenen van een ongekend groot aantal OCD-patiënten leveren belangrijke nieuwe inzichten op. Geweldig artikel over ons werk onder leiding van Tara Arbab!

In the Dutch news today: www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2025/...

LabGym Symposium LabGym is a free software suite for automated video analysis and quantification of animal behavior. LabGym has now been downloaded over 55,000 times from GitHub in just about two years. The 2024 LabGy...

🧵 I’m excited to announce that the 2025 LabGym Symposium & Tutorial will be held online via Zoom on Friday, August 22, 2025. Don’t miss this opportunity to learn about cutting-edge AI-based behavioral analysis! www.lsi.umich.edu/events/2025-...
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Serotonin drives choice-independent reconfiguration of distributed neural activity Serotonin (5-HT) is a central neuromodulator which is implicated in, amongst other functions, cognitive flexibility. 5-HT is released from the dorsal raphe nucleus (DRN) throughout nearly the entire f...

🚨Pre-print alert🚨

We stimulated serotonin with optogenetics while doing large-scale Neuropixel recordings across the mouse brain. We found strong widespread modulation of neural activity, but no effect on the choices of the mouse 🐭

How is this possible? Strap in! (1/9) 👇🧵

doi.org/10.1101/2025...

We're looking for a research assistant to work in our neuroscience lab at @princetonneuro.bsky.social @hhmi.org where we study learning and decision-making circuitry.

Apply here: research-princeton.icims.com/jobs/21001/r...

Pls share w/ anyone who might be interested!

A neural manifold view of the brain - Nature Neuroscience Recent advances in neuroscience have revealed how neural population activity underlying behavior can be well described by topological objects called neural manifolds. Understanding how nature, nurture...

Check out our new review/perspective (w/ @juangallego.bsky.social & Devika Narain) on neural manifolds in the brain! It was a lot of fun to think through these ideas over the past couple of years, and I'm excited it's finally out in the world!

🔗: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
📄: rdcu.be/ex8hW

Work by Tara Arbab, Ingo Willuhn et al. on neural biomarkers in OCD was published in Nature Mental Health.🗨️Arbab about the study: "It's unique that we were able to measure deep brain activity with very high spatial and temporal precision.” @willuhnlab.bsky.social www.amsterdamumc.org/en/research/...

🧠 On the hunt for your dream job in #neuroscience?

Good news: The #FENS Job Market can help you find it! 🚀

👉 https://loom.ly/o0lWfYE

Explore some of the recent listings below 👀👇

Top-down and bottom-up neuroscience: overcoming the clash of research cultures - Nature Reviews Neuroscience As scientists, we want solid answers, but we also want to answer questions that matter. Yet, the brain’s complexity forces trade-offs between these desiderata, bringing about two distinct research app...

The two subcultures of neuroscience

Are you a bottom-up or a top-down neuroscientist? Whatever your subculture, how would you design a system to educate the next generation without trapping them into your specific subculture?

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Largest genetic study of cocaine self-administration

The results replicate previous loci associated with human cocaine use disorder and provide novel biological insights, including the potential of pharmacological treatment strategies targeting carboxylesterases

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