Julio Hechavarria

Have you ever asked yourself, how insect brains represent places? And whether insects do have place cells? Then move to Germany this summer and start your PhD in my lab. We conduct tetrode recordings from bumblebees that freely forage laboratory mazes. 🧠🐝#BeeSpace @erc.europa.eu @neuroethology.org

⏰ Deadline extended!

Submit to @natureportfolio.nature.com’s Loops Collection on circuits, feedback & cortical-subcortical loops, guest-edited by @talking-bat.bsky.social, Markus Rothermel & @stefanieliebe.bsky.social

📅 New deadline: May 19, 2026
🔗 www.nature.com/collections/...

Submit now! 🧠🔁

I just finished reading M. Coe’s book on the decipherment of Maya hieroglyphics which was stymied for ~100 yrs by an academic culture that spurned comparative work

In the 1960s they embraced such an approach and 30yrs later the script was essentially solved

I hope we follow Nanthia’s wise advice

Screenshot of the ISN account

Today is Friday, 13th, and we are missing 13 followers until we reach 1000 😱

Challenge for the end of the week: Can we reach a bluesky community of 1000 neuroethologists!?
#Neuroethology 🧠🧪

Please share widely 🫶

Submit to our collection :) This is a fantastic opportunity to publish your work on cortico-subcortical loops

Amazing work by star postdoc Francisco Garcia Rosales in collaboration with @davidpoeppel.bsky.social . Happy reading :)

New preprint! We used neuropixels 2.0 in a small microbat (first time as far as I know) to show that: 1) slow and fast spiking neurons in auditory cortex respond differently when bats vocalize. 2) networks of (mostly) fast spiking neurons form right around the time of vocalization.

Ultrafast Frame-Free Imaging of Neural Activity with Event Cameras Frame-based fluorescence imaging has long defined how neural activity is optically measured. This approach requires acquiring all pixels within an image, regardless of whether they carry meaningful ne...

For decades, imaging has forced the same trade-off:
Set a frame rate → sacrifice resolution or field of view to go fast.

We break that rule

Using an EVENT-BASED CAMERA, we record neural activity without frames. Signals are captured only where and when they occur:

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

🎉 New Year New LOOPs webinar

Join us for our January webinar with Shizuko Hiryu from @doshishauniversity.bsky.social and see how bats “see” with sound and how their biological sonar inspires both biology and engineering. 🦇🧠

🗓️ January 21st
⏰ 10:30 AM CET
📍 Register: www.crowdcast.io/c/loops-semi...

Dispute erupts over universal cortical brain-wave claim The debate highlights opposing views on how the cortex transmits information.

A “universal” pattern of cortical brain oscillations may be less ubiquitous than previously proposed.

By @claudia-lopez.bsky.social

#neuroskyence

www.thetransmitter.org/brain-waves/...

Tetrapod vocal evolution reveals faster rates and higher-pitched sounds for mammals Abstract. Using the voice to produce sound is a widespread form of communication and plays an important role across diverse species and contexts. Variation

Now out in Evolution @journal-evo.bsky.social

Tetrapod vocal evolution reveals faster rates and higher-pitched sounds for mammals 🐘🦉🐸.

Mammalian hearing likely allowed the rapid diversification of their vocalizations.

Open access here:
doi.org/10.1093/evol...

#bioacoustics #animalcommunication

**When are brain waves causal???**
#neuroskyence
arxiv.org/html/2511.06...

🧠📢 New preprint alert

Large-scale ephys is exploding but spike sorting remains the computational bottleneck. A 2-hr, 6-probe Neuropixels 2.0 Quad Base session can take over a week to sort on a single machine. Here's a better solution. 🧵

#neuroskyence #compneurosky

📣Join our last 2025 edition of the LOOPs Webinar 🧠➰ This month @agreco.bsky.social will explore how predictive processing shapes vision in both brains and AI - what models like PredNet reveal (and miss), and how new recurrent architectures combine feedback and variability for more robust perception.

Ok (replying to my own comment) in case anyone is interested it seems astrocytes can change external K concentration which could modulate spiking by changing gradients etc. Interesting stuff to think about that goes beyond classic communication through Gap junctions and gliotransmitters

True, astrocytes are interesting but hard to imagine how their Ca wave adds to oscillations is hard to imagine. I mean there is a (slow?) Ca wave that runs internally through the endop.reticulum but no transmembrane current as far as I know, right?

This is so cool

Really cool. I wonder how many of these non-spiking neurons exist in the vertebrate brain, although they seem to be more prominent in invertebrates.

@earlkmiller.bsky.social maybe these neurons could help understand what oscillations are/aren't doing? (I've been quietly following the discussions)

Subcellular Information Processing in Mechanosensory Non‐Spiking Interneurons We measured membrane potential and Ca2+ responses to airflow from different angles in cricket mechanosensory local non-spiking interneurons (LNIs). LNIs exhibited spatially heterogeneous patterns of ...

Textbook neurons are usually spiking. However, there exist plenty of non-spiking neurons whose information transmission is less understood. Shirahata et al. studied Ca-dynamics of non-spiking mechanosensory neurons in crickets that are sensitive to air flow.
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Vocal convergence during formation of social relationships in vampire bats | Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences In many group-living birds and mammals, the formation of affiliative relationships is hypothesized to cause vocal convergence (an increase in call similarity between individuals). However, testing thi...

Housing non-kin vampire bats evokes vocal convergence, i.e., calls become more similar than before housing the same individuals together. Food-sharing is linked to vocal convergence. royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

@royalsocietypublishing.org

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences: Vol 380, No 1939

Our special issue on Evolutionary Functions of Consciousness, coedited with Tecumseh Fitch and Adina Roskies, now online royalsocietypublishing.org/toc/rstb/202...

Contributions by (1) Irina Mikhalevich; (2) Eva Jablonka and Simona Ginsburg; (3) Nicholas Humphrey; (cont'd)

I’m sorry you’ve been caught in the middle of this bizarre discussion. I just find it a bit surprising that there hasn’t been more focus on the substance of the issue, which I had hoped would be the most interesting part. In any case, thank you for putting this special issue together.

Thanks for sharing :) was really fun today. I'm really thankful to all who attended my inaugural lecture

As a longtime fan of cool papers in @currentbiology.bsky.social, I am really thrilled to see this out!

This study sets the stage for understanding the origins of novel (vocal) behaviors.

Big shout out to the main architects of this work @xmikezheng20.bsky.social and @cliffscience.bsky.social

fantastic paper! May I recommend what the bat's voice tells the bat brain, as a follow up? www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Really glad I could contribute to this excellent perspective paper. #Consciousness + #neuroethology + #animal-behavior An interesting mixture for a fun read :)

How to design your academic website - Nature Human Behaviour An academic website serves as both a public-facing window on the world wide web and an important internal laboratory resource. In this ‘How to’ piece, I outline how to build your academic website, inc...

more orientated towards postdocs & PIs, but some suggestions in this article for starting a academic website: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Chimpanzees rationally revise their beliefs The selective revision of beliefs in light of new evidence has been considered one of the hallmarks of human-level rationality. However, tests of this ability in other species are lacking. We examined...

Humans are able to revise their beliefs, but can other animals do it? Authors showed that 🐵s looking for a reward remained committed to their initial belief when the evidence supporting the alternative was weaker, but they reconsidered when the new info was stronger! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Two weeks left to apply for our graduate school IMPRS-BI and join us as a PhD student! Find out more: imprs-bi.mpg.de

OPEN PHD POSITION - Come join our group! The IMPRS at @mpi-nl.bsky.social is offering an PhD position on modelling structured meaning in the brain, supervised by me and Helen De Hoop at the Centre for Language Studies in the @dondersinst.bsky.social -
www.mpi.nl/imprs-phd-fe... #NeuroJobs #cogsci