Brendon Watson

HAPPENING NOW: A sea of protesters have gathered in Ann Arbor, Michigan for a “No Kings Day” rally against Donald Trump (Video: WXYZ-TV)

Excited to share my PhD paper! In it, we use targeted 2-photon optogenetic stimulation to determine how V1 activity is read-out in a detection task. We found that network influence, not visual coding properties, predicted the impact of ensembles on behavior - contradicting our expectations (1/5).

@qlu.bsky.social is starting his lab at City U of Hong Kong! This is a truly amazing opportunity for trainees interested in computational cognitive neuroscience and neuroAI

The NIH budget is on a fast track to disaster An NIH insider explains what Republicans are likely to do next, and what we can do

🚨 This MUST READ essay and call to action spells out, in very clear terms, how the Trump administration could get away with slashing the NIH budget. NIH scientists and Dems in congress need to read and understand it. This is where we win or lose the battle to save the NIH and US science. 🧪 🧠 🧬 🔊

Re-posting is appreciated: We have a fully funded PhD position in CMC lab @cmc-lab.bsky.social (at @tudresden_de). You can use forms.gle/qiAv5NZ871kv... to send your application and find more information. Deadline is April 30. Find more about CMC lab: cmclab.org and email me if you have questions.

My lab is looking for postdocs interested in brain electrophysiology and circadian rhythms. Message me if interested!

Does your research involve comparing experimental conditions? Then our latest publication is for you: We developed generalized contrastive PCA (gcPCA), a tool for comparing high-dimensional datasets. 🧠📊 doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1012747
This tool was born out of necessity, here is the story. 🧵
1/

Thank you for sharing news of our initiative... we are an interdisciplinary team of researchers from U of Maryland, UPenn, and Georgia Tech + more whose aim is to communicate the impacts of federal cuts on science and health research nationwide. Full explainer thread here:

bsky.app/profile/josh...

Sequence anticipation and spike-timing-dependent plasticity emerge from a predictive learning rule - Nature Communications Prediction of future inputs is a key computational task for the brain. Here, the authors proposed a predictive learning rule in neurons that leads to anticipation and recall of inputs, and that reprod...

fantastic post, and tasty food for thoughts.

shamelessly adding here that many different types of STDP come about from minimizing a prediction of the future loss function with spikes :)

hopefully another case of successful predictions.

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

Desynchronization Increased in the Synchronized State: Subsets of Neocortical Neurons Become Strongly Anticorrelated during NonREM Sleep We aimed to better understand the dynamics of cortical neurons during nonREM sleep—a state in which neuronal populations are silenced for ∼100 ms of every second due to delta wave fluctuations. This a...

Proud of our new paper, such an interesting story! NonREM sleep is typically considered a "synchronized state", but we find many pairs of neurons are actively de-synchronized in nonREM and even more so with more delta activity. Great work Tangyu Liu and Jeremy Hartner: www.eneuro.org/content/12/3...

#standupforscience

As my grants are stripped away, I will say thank you so much for protecting me from antisemitism!

www.hhs.gov/about/news/2...

NIH cuts billions of dollars in biomedical funding, effective immediately The move halts a large slice of money for most universities and research institutions virtually overnight, imperiling vital research in everything from cancer to heart disease.

NIH has cut billions of dollars in biomedical funding, effective immediately
The move halts a large slice of money for most universities and research institutions virtually overnight, imperiling vital research in everything from cancer to heart disease.

www.washingtonpost.com/health/2025/...

Tesla paid $0 in federal income tax last year.

2022: $0
2021: $0
2020: $0
2019: $0
2018: $0

Tesla reported $6.7 billion in profit in those years.

I stand with the trans community. Pass it along.

a man wearing sunglasses and a green jacket is standing in a crowd and says `` do it '' . ALT: a man wearing sunglasses and a green jacket is standing in a crowd and says `` do it '' .

Canada is considering 100% tariffs on Teslas.

🔗: www.businesstoday.in/world/canada...

Sleep microstructure organizes memory replay - Nature The temporal microstructure of the brain can multiplex distinct cognitive processes during sleep to support continuous learning.

Two cool papers on the HPC out today in @nature.com:

1. Replay during non-REM sleep switches between prioritizing recent versus remote memories:

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

2. All optical obs. of synaptic plasticity rules during place field formation:

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

🧠📈 🧪

Dendrites endow artificial neural networks with accurate, robust and parameter-efficient learning - Nature Communications Artificial neural networks, central to deep learning, are powerful but energy-consuming and prone to overfitting. The authors propose a network design inspired by biological dendrites, which offe...

Dendrites doing AI problems, so great to see the increased activity! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The nature of grief: implications for the neurobiology of emotion Abstract. This paper explores the limitations of neurobiological approaches to human emotional experience, focusing on the case of grief. We propose that g

I will try to post the new articles published in Neuroscience of Consciousness here!

Let's start with a paper on grief, which challenges neuroscience's ability to investigate affective states.

**The nature of grief: implications for the neurobiology of emotion**
academic.oup.com/nc/article/2...

I think most wish it was more about science. Tough balance

Omg so yummy. Have fun!

Daily rhythms drive dynamism in sleep, oscillations and interneuron firing, while excitatory firing remains stable across 24 h Electrical patterns in the mouse hippocampus are dynamic across the 24-h (12:12 light:dark) day. Inhibitory neurons show rhythmicity in firing across the day, peaking around light transitions; meanwh...

Our new paper is out!: While hippocampal inhibitory neurons fluctuate around the 24 hour clock, excitatory neuron overall activity remains stable all day long.

Congrats to Nicolette Ognjanovski and team!
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Review article on neural plasticity and antidepressant interventions

There are many nuances regarding the structural neural plasticity associated with antidepressant drugs. 💊🧠

We share our thoughts here in a Nature Reviews Neuroscience article, led by Clara Liao with co-authors from Conor Liston’s lab at Weill Cornell.

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

Sadly someone took just straightup brendonwatson. And I didn't wanna get to committed with naming using words or numbers. So I used the jersey number of my favorite athlete ever: Barry Sanders 😆

Omg perfect for starting thanks!!!

Excited to see so many neuroscientists here on BlueSky!