Tim Spellman

They must be very old

It’s a real shame that folks with mental illness have to fight not only their symptoms but also concerted efforts to undermine their treatment. 😢

The @nytimes.com mag published a long piece entitled “rethinking adhd”. Here is a 🧵 highlighting its factual & logical errors
1/n

A multi-institutional investigation of psilocybin's effects on mouse behavior Studies reporting novel therapeutic effects of psychedelic drugs are rapidly emerging. However, the reproducibility and reliability of these findings could remain uncertain for years. Here, we impleme...

A much-needed joint effort from five labs to see which behavioral effects of psilocybin in mice are reliable, and which may be spurious 🐁🍄

@theborislab.bsky.social @mazenkheirbek.bsky.social @indigenerd.bsky.social Vikaas Sohal and Stephan Lammel 👏

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

My friends in finance are surprised, thought it was all bluff. It’s infuriating.

MyVivarium is an #opensource tool for animal colony management. It uses QR codes, IoT sensors, & allows for cloud-based tracking. Read about it in this week's post on OpenBehavior:

edspace.american.edu/openbehavior...

One of the NIMH PIs whose name is the termination list: Sooyhun Lee, whose lab just published this beautiful @nature.com paper (that has received too little press because comms at NIH are down). Read! Cite!

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

There is a very special Grey’s Anatomy episode about this

FlexRig Visit the post for more.

Check out FlexRig, an open-source platform for decision-making & cognitive flexibility studies. 🐁🧠 Olfactory, auditory, somatosensory cues, & more! Low-cost, fully customizable. #OpenSource #Neuroscience #ResearchTools @tspell.bsky.social

edspace.american.edu/openbehavior...

Special shout out this AM to NIH 🧪 grant mgmt specialists, POs, and SROs during this chaotic time - THANK YOU for caring for our grants and uploading scores/summary statements despite the unprecedented challenges you may be facing. You are science warriors and we APPRECIATE & SUPPORT YOU 🫶

Classification of psychedelics and psychoactive drugs based on brain-wide imaging of cellular c-Fos expression - Nature Communications A challenge in psychiatric drug discovery is to predict the therapeutic potential of a novel compound. Here, the authors show that brain-wide imaging of immediate early gene expression can be used to ...

Can whole-brain imaging of cellular c-Fos signals be used to classify #psychedelics? 🧠🔬💊

Our study by @aboharbf.bsky.social and @pashadavoudian.bsky.social, developing an imaging and machine learning pipeline to test a panel of psychoactive drugs.

Paper here 👇
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

This is excellent

The War on Science (Feb 2025 teach-in draft) The War on Science What’s happening? What can we do about it? An interactive teach-in for biomedical researchers Please share, modify, and repurpose this template presentation (with credit). Good luck...

Made some slides for scientists to talk about what's been happening & what we should do next. There are probably many people better qualified than me to talk about these issues. If that's you, please, please, please consider holding some virtual advocacy training sessions for researchers this week.

If you have been affected by the fires in LA, or are concerned about your ability to keep precious Drosophila strains going during the latest funding crisis, we will host your strains as a backup. Please email me.

Please amplify. If you are also able to host fly strains, add your name as well.

The author’s resolution is both obvious and endogenous

Congratulations!

The Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, led by Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA) - a gastroenterologist with an MD from LSU, just released a report entitled NIH IN THE 21st CENTURY: ENSURING TRANSPARENCY AND AMERICAN BIOMEDICAL LEADERSHIP. Since he is the ranking Republican,

1/n

It does matter to continue to try to elicit shame to prevent the 'rhinoceros stampede' from 'destroying the habitat for democracy.'
_________________________________________
¹ Rhinocerization is Hungarian playwright Eugène Ionesco's term for losing your empathy and becoming a nationalist minion.

Encoding innate ability through a genomic bottleneck | PNAS Animals are born with extensive innate behavioral capabilities, which arise from neural circuits encoded in the genome. However, the information ca...

A wonderful paper from @tonyzador.bsky.social and colleagues: Encoding innate ability through a genomic bottleneck www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Congrats Nancy!

Incredible work, congrats!

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...

This kind of scapegoating of science by politicians happens fairly regularly, but this time I think is different.

Musk’s America PAC just posted this list of “government waste” which includes sensationalized descriptions of NIH grants. They are absolutely coming for our budgets.

Drafting my soon-to-be-mandatory Ivermectin statement

What is the tenure process like at the nytimes, I wonder

Primate superior colliculus is causally engaged in abstract higher-order cognition - Nature Neuroscience Neuronal recordings show that primate superior colliculus encodes learned abstract visual categories. The authors demonstrate that it plays a causal role in categorization behavior, independent of its...

Did you see this coming? Abstract categorization in a so-called sensorimotor midbrain area.
Primate superior colliculus is causally engaged in abstract higher-order cognition
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
#neuroscience

Elon Musk's X Is Suspending Accounts That Reveal a Neo-Nazi Cartoonist's Alleged Identity Researchers and journalists have been blocked on X from sharing the alleged identity of the neo-Nazi cartoonist Stonetoss.

“The posts that were removed were all actioned correctly,” says Joe Benarroch, head of business operations at X, adding that the posts violated the company’s “posting private information policy” for “outing the identity of an anonymous user.”

www.wired.com/story/elon-m...

Highlights • Neural systems have a variety of features that make them difficult to study. • To make progress in understanding biological and artificial neural systems, an explicit test of the analysis tools according to a clear measure of success should be carried out. • We purpose ‘experimentally-validated understanding’ as a testable goal and argue methods should be tested on artificial neural networks. • We summarize methods from neuroscience and interpretable AI that can be explored.

New Paper Alert! 🚨
"Testing methods of neural systems understanding" by me & David Bau is online now: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1389041723000906
We argue for an explicit test of the tools used to understand 'neural systems', i.e. brains and artificial neural networks.

New wave research?
We’ve got some ‘splining to do!

〰 These oscillations are high-frequency: 130-160 Hz, at the peaks of theta rhythms in the retrosplenial cortex (part of the brain essential for successful navigation).
https://www.cell.com/cell-reports/fulltext/S2211-1247(22)00822-1
🧪
#neuroscience