Mark Nicholas

Excited to share my postdoc work with @yttrilab.bsky.social and @ahmarilab.bsky.social where we show that the striatal indirect pathway mediates hesitation in mice (www.nature.com/articles/s41...).

And I'm honored to have @ahmarilab.bsky.social introduce the findings with a musical abstract!

Interested in how cortex and striatum contribute to trained vs spontaneous behavior??

If you're at #sfn25, check out @braininspired.bsky.social talk Sunday at 1

#neuroskyence

Striatal modulation supports context-specific reinforcement and not action selection Hodge et al. used closed-loop optogenetic stimulation and naturalistic behaviors to determine that striatal activity does not select the action to perform but rather biases performance through reinfor...

I hope this new-ish paper will challenge people to think about the interpretations of our models
STRIATUM SUPPORTS REINFORCEMENT AND NOT ACTION SELECTION (!!!)
tinyurl.com/HodgeAndYttri

@cmuscience.bsky.social
@cmu-neuroscience.bsky.social
#neuroskyence

Basal ganglia–brainstem interactions Our body executes many different movements with precision. Falasconi and Arber describe how basal ganglia interact with brainstem circuits controlling body movements and propose a movement-specific li...

Happy to share our primer on Basal Ganglia - Brainstem interactions!
From how the basal ganglia communicate with Brainstem motor circuits to how these activity patterns might come about! With Silvia Arber, now out in Current Biology www.cell.com/current-biol...

I started studying neuroscience back in 2012.

This week I will be defending my PhD from the
@yttrilab.bsky.social at @cmu.edu @the-cnbc.bsky.social

Date: Friday, September 26th
Time: 2:30 pm eastern
If you are interested in the Zoom option, please reach out.

#neuroskyence

A global dopaminergic learning rate enables adaptive foraging across many options In natural environments, animals must efficiently allocate their choices across multiple concurrently available resources when foraging, a complex decision-making process not fully captured by existin...

Thank you so much to @lauragrima.bsky.social for presenting her recent preprint today at @the-cnbc.bsky.social @cmu-neuroscience.bsky.social
Super cool science and design

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

#neuroskyence

Dissociable effects of curiosity and hedonic valence on reinforcement learning Curiosity and exploration support learning and adaptive decision-making in uncertain environments. While these processes are sensitive to motivational context, it remains unclear how outcome valence s...

Why do we go downstairs when we hear a scary noise at night?

New #preprint by postdoc Kati Rothenhoefer shows how novelty seeking & explore-exploit decision making in #macaques resolves curiosity about whether choices will lead to appetitive or aversive outcomes.

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

Neuroscience peeps!
There is an amazing opportunity opening up at CMU!

www.imsearch.com/open-searche...

@cmu-neuroscience.bsky.social
@cmuscience.bsky.social
@cmu.edu

GitHub - Julie-Fabre/bombcell: Automated quality control, curation and neuron classification of spike-sorted electrophysiology data Automated quality control, curation and neuron classification of spike-sorted electrophysiology data - Julie-Fabre/bombcell

🚀 We are excited to share that bombcell is now available in Python! 🐍 Automatically sort your units into good/MUA/noise/non-somatic using quality metrics and interpretable & adjustable classification thresholds.
pip install and play around with our toy dataset:
🔗 github.com/Julie-Fabre/...

Well whether or not "they have to do it", is still a question, but I would say blinking is a convenient way to break up incoming information.
Next time you give a lecture or a talk, take note of when the audience blinks relative to your speech cadence and information you are sharing

The idea of blinking and editing are linked comes from the first link - "In the Blink of an Eye: A Perspective on Film Editing" by Walter Murch

"...And that blink will occur where a cut could have happened, ... Not a frame earlier or later." (pg 36)

Viewers Change Eye-Blink Rate by Predicting Narrative Content Eye blinks provoke a loss of visual information. However, we are not constantly making conscious decisions about the appropriate moment to blink. The presence or absence of eye blinks also denotes lev...

Cool to see someone has studied this recently!
pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

In a past life I did film production and editing and we knew to make edits around content - we would see blinks in the audience with cut scenes as if they were chunking information

I remember reading this back in the day which helped me a lot with editing

www.craftfilmschool.com/userfiles/fi...

Dynamic basal ganglia output signals license and suppress forelimb movements - Nature Basal ganglia output neurons fire dynamically in bidirectional and movement-specific patterns to license forelimb movements. 

Forelimb movement control at the basal ganglia - brainstem interface!

Happy to finally share this work from me and @harsh-kanodia.bsky.social with Silvia Arber!

@biozentrum.unibas.ch @fmiscience.bsky.social

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

CMU Neuroscientist Has Big Plans for Guggenheim Fellowship - Neuroscience Institute - Carnegie Mellon University Timothy Verstynen has always been fascinated by how organisms explore their environments — from the human quest to map the surfaces of distant planets to the itty-bitty journeys of single-celled bacte...

Tim Verstynen, Interim Director of the NI, has been awarded the 2025 Guggenheim Fellowship! 👏

Awarded annually to "trailblazing artists and scholars," Tim will be inducted into the 100th class of Guggenheim Fellows on June 2.

Read more about his upcoming "exploration of exploration."
🌎 ⬇️

Congrats @tdverstynen.bsky.social !!

🚨New lab preprint alert!🚨

Grab a drink, sit down, and let me walk you through the moment-by-moment process of how information loops through basal ganglia circuits during a decision.

(Link at the end of the thread)

1/9

Having learned from Carl both as an undergraduate and graduate student, I continually go back to my notes and the topics studied in his course to help me think about concepts in cognitive neuroscience.

Thank you, Carl

Super proud of this work and as I finish up my #PhD studies I am actively looking for a #postdoc position.

I am interested in studying learning and value-based decision making and how cortical and subcortical areas contribute to complex behavior

tinyurl.com/LesionsOfM1

#neuroskyence

Dissociable roles of central striatum and anterior lateral motor area in initiating and sustaining naturalistic behavior Corbit et al. studied patterns of activity in corticostriatal circuits during naturally occurring complex behavior in mice. In contrast to models in which cortex leads striatum, these findings suggest...

It's a little surreal that this paper is finally out. My last paper from my PhD and likely my last mouse neuro publication ever!
Ft. @ahmarilab.bsky.social @piantadosisean.bsky.social

If you're into mouse behavior, optogenetics, and calcium imaging, here's this 🐀🔦🔬
www.cell.com/cell-reports...

Thanks to @antofala.bsky.social and @harsh-kanodia.bsky.social of @biozentrum.bsky.social for presenting at our journal club on some really cool SNr/brainstem activity during skilled reaching

#neuroskyence

hello world