Kenji Lee

Hypothetically, if one were to submit their Cosyne abstract 4 mins before the deadline, they would’ve been assigned abstract number 1161.

*Subcortical regions and consciousness*

Looks like an amazing use of 7T scanners
(and generator of 7T envy)
By Morgan Cambareri, Andreas Horn, Laura Lewis, Jian Li, Brian Edlow
doi.org/10.1002/hbm....
#neuroskyence

Working with NHP probes, I've even accidentally touched them and been totally fine! They bend a lot more than you'd think if coming from mouse NPix.

Gestational psychedelic exposure disrupts brain development and offspring behavior in mice Despite increasing non-medical use and clinical investigation of psychedelics, the consequences of prenatal exposure remain unknown. In mice, maternal lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD; 0.3 mg/kg) cross...

🚨 Psychedelics in pregnancy - can a single dose reach the embryo and matter? Yes. In mice they hit embryonic CSF within minutes, activate choroid plexus→CSF axis, & shift cortical development with adult behavioral signatures. @lehtinenlab.bsky.social Preprint:

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

1/13

The neural control & computation lab is recruiting!

If you're interested in using large-scale neural population recordings to study how the brain learns to produce complex and flexible behaviours, please get in touch.

www.ncclab.ca

Drug‐Related Engrams and Their Role in the Persistence and Recurrence of Drug‐Related Behaviors Memory is a cornerstone of human behavior, and addiction offers a compelling model of its persistence and plasticity. The scope of engram research has rapidly expanded to include addiction-related ph....

First lab paper out today! Student authors: Mikayla Cutler and Abhi Thati 🎉🤩

Hippocampus | Neuroscience Journal | Wiley Online Library onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

What does it take to build a thriving lab?

In latest episode of “Think Alike?”, Yosif (Joe) Zaki, PhD, and Zach Pennington, PhD, join mentor Denise Cai, PhD, to share honest reflections on trust, mentorship, and the power of open communication.

🎧Listen now: vist.ly/4939f

YouTube video by Civil Servants Coalition Mark Histed, NIH Scientist *speaking in personal capacity

Federal workers are speaking out on how the Trump regime is harming Americans:

"We stand here today at a moment of the greatest assault of our lifetimes on our freedoms. The US Constitution is being shredded... We are here to call on Congress to stand up and stop it."

youtu.be/uw1KwIBgrCw?...

Come join our exciting new computational neuroscience groups! Fantastic people, cool mountains, and exciting science!

Repeated head trauma causes neuron loss and inflammation in young athletes - Nature Repetitive head impacts from contact sports are associated with brain inflammation, vascular damage and neuron loss that are independent of hyperphosphorylated tau pathology.

Nature research paper: Repeated head trauma causes neuron loss and inflammation in young athletes

go.nature.com/46oZgeT

a man wearing a white shirt and tie smiles in front of a window ALT: a man wearing a white shirt and tie smiles in front of a window

I've been waiting some years to make this joke and now it’s real:

I conned somebody into giving me a faculty job!

I’m starting as a W1 Tenure-Track Professor at Goethe University Frankfurt in a week (lol), in the Faculty of CS and Math

and I'm recruiting PhD students 🤗

Repeated head trauma causes neuron loss and inflammation in young athletes - Nature Repetitive head impacts from contact sports are associated with brain inflammation, vascular damage and neuron loss that are independent of hyperphosphorylated tau pathology.

So happy to see Morgane Butler, a former and brilliant undergrad student in the lab, publishing her PhD work. Looks super interesting.

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

Transcriptomic diversity of amygdalar subdivisions across humans and nonhuman primates Specialized cell types and links to psychiatric disorders are revealed by genetic mapping of primate amygdala neurons.

Very excited to share my second postdoc, now out in Science Advances! We used targeted snRNA-seq to profile four major subnuclei of the primate across three species (including humans). 1/13 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

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

New work from Yoshi Kajikawa and myself! 🐒 🦻

We measured sound envelope encoding in different cortical layers across the nonhuman primate auditory cortical hierarchy for the first time. Thread below.

#Cosyne2026 is now open for business!

Show us what you got both for the main meeting & workshop proposals 🧠🥳🧠🥳🧠

Motor cortex flexibly deploys a high-dimensional repertoire of subskills Skilled movement often requires flexibly combining multiple subskills, each requiring dedicated control strategies and underlying computations. How the motor system achieves such versatility remains u...

Of potential interest to those keen on motor control and/or multi-task networks. Congrats to Elom and Eric.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Oh for sure! Didn't mean to discount that, I just don't want people thinking every decision making variable is everywhere because of this one!

I think upcoming action choice is privileged. Seems to be everywhere even in primates except for the earliest sensory areas. Almost like the entire brain receives an efference copy of the action. Of course, when action is the only variable in your task, everything looks everywhere.

Arguably, the mice are undertrained relative to most any primate experiment. Some of our monkeys have been doing the same task longer than several mouse lifetimes!

It's hard to argue everything is everywhere once you unconfound your task variables more carefully (posting your fig for others)! Unfortunately, I haven't seen many that do so in mice because presumably it is difficult to train. I think Shin's work is one www.nature.com/articles/s41... of the few

I think your triple dissociation paper is one of those other works that I would point to. Same with others from the value-based decision making literature like www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... where value is strongly but transiently encoded in OFC but evidence for action choice accumulates only in DLPFC

Macaque dorsal premotor cortex exhibits decision-related activity only when specific stimulus–response associations are known - Nature Communications It is not clear to what degree activity in dorsal premotor cortex (PMd) reflects perceptual-deliberation versus action-selection aspects of decision-making. Here, the authors report that monkey PMd ne...

It is highly dependent on the task complexity I would argue. There are certain task variables we see that are highly localized but the complexity of mouse experiments do not elicit them. Here is an example www.nature.com/articles/s41... We've just finished recordings and are writing them up now.

ATTN🚨: I will be looking for PhD students through NYU's Center for Data Science PhD program this year. Applicants should have an interest in either NeuroAI (specifically biological attention or AI interpretability) or ML for Remote Sensing. Visit my lab website for more info: lindsay-lab.github.io

Our new preprint: 𝐅𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐞-𝐬𝐩𝐞𝐜𝐢𝐟𝐢𝐜 𝐭𝐡𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐭 𝐜𝐨𝐝𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐢𝐧 𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐥 𝐬𝐞𝐩𝐭𝐮𝐦 𝐠𝐮𝐢𝐝𝐞𝐬 𝐝𝐞𝐟𝐞𝐧𝐬𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧.

We describe how the LS guides defensive responses by forming critical computations built from functionally and molecularly distinct cells and their afferent inputs.

www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-6...

Addendum: it feels wrong to self-promote in this moment when there are so many other issues more deserving of your attention but I appreciate you reading this. I'm so grateful to be able to continue to do science. I'll be at SfN! (I'm also supposedly looking for a postdoc, if those still exist).

🚨New paper🚨

Neural manifolds went from a niche-y word to an ubiquitous term in systems neuro thanks to many interesting findings across fields. But like with any emerging term, people use it very differently.

Here, we clarify our take on the term, and review key findings & challenges rdcu.be/ex8hW

And of course, big thanks to Chand as well for help with every part of the process! Happy to answer any questions and hopefully the code will be cleaned up soon so you can try it out on your own data! (unfortunately, I am once again neck deep in monkey ephys 🙈)

Thank you SO MUCH to our co-authors (new and old): Han & Cole for endless discussions; Gregg for his help with the Allen data; Asim for analysis help; Andrew, Shawn, and Nick for the Ultras data; Anna and Santiago for their A1 data; Pawel for omics expertise (that field's a decade ahead of us).

Limitations: We are always constrained by the quantity and quality of ground truth. So far, mouse V1 is the only thoroughly quantified area but hopefully this changes soon. Also, batch effects (and how to correct/control for them) are almost completely unexplored in sys. neuro.