Jon Rueckemann

And a capitulation to animal research abolitionists — not animal welfare advocates. There is no daylight for reason

We’re hiring! The Suthana Lab @ Duke is looking for a Research Assistant to join our team studying human memory & real-world 🧠 dynamics using wearable tech & intracranial recordings.

Apply: careers.duke.edu/job/Durham-C...

You can also email suthanalab@duke.edu with CV/questions. Please share!

Thanks for assembling a one-shot citation.

The Force is strong with the cognitive graph.

Impressive deep dive. What motivated you to take a hatchet to everyone’s favorite intro slide?

It’s spicy, but also measured. It would be great to hear what inspired the effort — because it seems like something was grinding your gears

Tolman's Sunburst Maze 80 Years on: A Meta‐Analysis Reveals Poor Replicability and Little Evidence for Shortcutting In 1946, Tolman et al. reported that rats could take a novel shortcut to a goal after training on an indirect route, supporting the Cognitive Map theory. However, a review of subsequent Sunburst maze...

Can humans & animals really use internal maps to take shortcuts?

Tolman famously said yes - based largely on his Sunburst maze.

Our new review & meta-analysis suggests evidence is far weaker than you might think.
🧵👇 doi.org/10.1111/ejn....

@uofgpsychneuro.bsky.social @ejneuroscience.bsky.social

I’m also on the job market this year — happy to connect with anyone interested in hippocampal computation, comparative neurophysiology, or collaborative directions

Our new preprint: The primate hippocampus parses experience into event-aligned neural states, creating a temporal scaffold for organizing behavior.

At #SfN25 ? Come chat at my poster — Wednesday AM (PP14; 414.03).

This also goes beyond cognitive capacity: Primate neurophysiology is just not the same as rodents. Studying monkeys is necessary to understand the physiology that is uniquely primate

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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

Yup, this happened to me: grant submitted in September, study section that should have discussed it in February was delayed until late March, then grant was withdrawn by NIH 3 days before the study section met because of lack of this document. I lost almost a year. Don't let this happen to you!

If you work with faculty whose ESI eligibility (NIH applications) ended/ends Oct 2024 to June 2025, they're getting an extension to Oct 2025.
grants.nih.gov/grants/guide...
h/t NORDP list

There’s no doubt you’ll run a stellar lab. Any trainee would be lucky to have you

Exciting news!! I’m joining the tenure-track faculty at University of Colorado Boulder this fall as an Assistant Professor of Psychology & Neuroscience!

The Sosa Lab will study how memory is shaped by cognitive and physiological demands, including during pregnancy and the postpartum period. 🧵

Hippocampal neuronal activity is aligned with action plans - Nature Using high-density electrophysiological recordings, how internally generated cell assemblies are updated by action plans to meet external goals is explored.

It’s an incredible feeling to see something you’ve poured your heart into come to life. This work was born from my curiosity about hippocampal “cognitive tuning.”
Our interpretation of the environment depends on our actions, constantly evolving as we pursue our goals

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

The inevitability and superfluousness of cell types in spatial cognition bioRxiv - the preprint server for biology, operated by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, a research and educational institution

"The inevitability and superfluousness of cell types in spatial cognition" w Ken Luo @robmok.bsky.social Whether place, border, head direction, Jennifer Aniston, or whatever cells, are we fooling ourselves? Are these intuitive findings scientific discoveries? 1/6 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

"exhaust fumes" made it into the official abstract!

hence completing the journey from an epiphenomenal shitpost blog to a full-blown review paper.

all thanks to this cast of co-authors (esp. Sander), our TICS editor Lindsey Drayton, and two very engaged reviewers (@danielemarinazzo.bsky.social)

Congratulations!

Your trainees will be lucky

🙋‍♂️🙏

What do you get if you ask a recurrent network (like the PFC or Entorhinal cortex) to generalise a transition structure?
Turns out different things depending on how intimate they are with an external memory (like Hippocampus).

Elegant theory led by @jcrwhittington.bsky.social

🙋‍♂️

The reductionist way of thinking about place cells overwhelms the field. Many take it as axiomatically true that hippocampus’s job is navigation (because why else would it have place cells?). If space is only correlated to the true drivers, then we undercut understanding the generalized function

This list has doubled. Who haven’t I found?

I would love to be added. Thanks!

go.bsky.app/LdtUYZS

I created a starter pack for the growing community of hippocampus physiologists that have joined the great migration. Also included the physiology-adjacent.

Tell me who I haven’t found yet

I’d like to be added. Thanks for putting this together

Thanks for putting this together. Sign me up

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Ultimately, someone has to think through all this data! And much of it is shared - it’s just begging for us to.

Brain-wide topographic coordination of traveling spiral waves bioRxiv - the preprint server for biology, operated by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, a research and educational institution

Have you wondered whether fast spatiotemporal brain dynamics like traveling waves are local, confined to just one region, or whether they are shared across many regions simultaneously? The latest work from Zhiwen Ye in my lab has the answer! Thread-
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

One more reminder that I am recruiting a PhD student(s) this cycle! You can apply through UCSB Psych or the Dynamical Neuroscience Graduate Program. Both deadlines are 12/1. Please feel free to reach out with any questions.

psych.ucsb.edu/prospective-... dyns.ucsb.edu/graduate/apply

#neuroskyence