Ryan Senne (he/him)

Huge thanks to my advisors and collaborators @briandepasquale.bsky.social , @okaysteve.bsky.social, and the bluesky-less Ben Scott and Cristina Delgado-Sallent

Using a state-dependent framework via an HMM, we extend the vanilla Drift-Diffusion Model (DDM) to capture trial-by-trial changes in decisions strategy. With this model we find mice actively explore the speed-accuracy tradeoff, and they can achieve accuracy as high as ~85% in a TAFC task.

A State-Dependent Drift Diffusion Model Reveals Mice Actively Explore A Speed–Accuracy Continuum During Decision-Making Understanding how animals shift between different decision-making strategies is critical for bridging normative models with naturalistic behavior. While drift diffusion models (DDMs) provide a powerfu...

🚨PREPRINT ALERT🚨

"A State–Dependent Drift Diffusion Model Reveals Mice Actively Explore A Speed–Accuracy Continuum During Decision-Making" is now available on biorxiv! Check it out below 👇

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

In this work we find that mice are not just static mindless decision makers.

They would've found something to weaponize regardless. One of the most admirable things about science is its commitment to self-criticism. The fact that bad actors may capitalize on our legitimate concerns should never stop us from being honest and reflective about what we do.

This paper changed my life: Shane Liddelow on two papers that upended astrocyte research A game-changing cell culture method developed in Ben Barres’ lab completely transformed the way we study astrocytes and helped me build a career studying their reactive substates.

In our latest edition of “This paper changed my life,” @liddelowsa.bsky.social explains how two papers from Ben Barres’ lab completely changed the way the field studies astrocytes and enabled everything discovered in glia research since.

#neuroskyence

www.thetransmitter.org/this-paper-c...

DOGE/Musk preferentially cancelled grants and contracts to recipients in counties that voted for Harris in 2024.

Among cancellations with election data available, 92.9% and 86.1% cancelled grants and contracts went to Harris counties, representing 96.6% and 92.4% of total dollar amounts.

our "untangling the mind" tour has begun! #NationalGeographic

come explore the foundations of thoughts, emotions, and memories - all the things that make you, you - through the lens of modern neuroscience 🧠

by learning and working together, we have the power to make an era of discovery flourish🔬

Excited to share our latest story! We found disentangled memory representations in the hippocampus that generalized across time and environments, despite the seemingly random drift and remapping of single cells. This code enabled the transfer of prior knowledge to solve new tasks

in our new lab work, we find that:

natural forgetting & induced amnesia share common impaired neural dynamics

this work was funded by multiple #NIH grants that supported students, postdocs, & the science, all with the goal of healing disorders of memory & the brain

www.cell.com/cell-reports...

Scientists crack the code for why locusts swarm – DW – 02/27/2025 Virtual reality platform uncovers the collective behavior of swarming locusts. Their research could help secure agricultural lands and food supply.

Coverage of our recent locust paper in @science.org by DW www.dw.com/en/scientist...

Get in dorks, we're going protesting!

STAND UP FOR SCIENCE WITH US ON MARCH 7TH, 2025
WASHINGTON DC AND EVERY STATE CAPITOL

Because science is for everyone!

Find us at www.standupforscience2025.org

#standupforscience2025 #scienceforall #sciencenotsilence

BREAKING: 22 states sue NIH over Trump administration's new 15% cap on overhead for federal research grants. Suit filed federal court in Boston contends lifesaving research 'will grind to a halt' under the policy. Doc: storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

A Black history month flyer with a black background and brown fists in the air. Behind the fists are red, yellow, and green stripes with the Black In Neuro logo at the top center.

Happy #BlackHistoryMonth! ✨

They’ll never be able to take away the impact and contributions of Black scientists, no matter how hard they try.

So each week this month, I’ll be highlighting a few #BlackInNeuro scientists for you to learn about, celebrate their work, & follow 👩🏾‍🔬👨🏽‍🔬

Boy, it’s a good thing science isn’t political

If you’ve been directly impacted by a pause or cancellation of an NIH study session, we @forbes.com would like to talk to you

My NIH study section that was to meet tomorrow was one of those canceled. This represents many months of work by the applicants and by the NIH staff and reviewers. Devastating is the correct word.

It’s such a weird coincidence that Trump’s executive orders are mapping so closely onto Project 2025, something that Trump said he had nothing to do with & the media dutifully accepted as fact.

Trump hits NIH with ‘devastating’ freezes on meetings, travel, communications, and hiring Researchers facing

Wadman and Kaiser are on it, over at ScienceInsider at the glam mag

Trump hits NIH with ‘devastating’ freezes on meetings, travel, communications, and hiring | Science | AAAS www.science.org/content/arti...

All NIH study sections canceled indefinitely. This will halt science and devastate research budgets in universities.

lots of folks saying things like, "the government won't be able to revoke your passport for no reason, that's against the law!"

I help people fight unlawful government decisions for a living. please believe me when I say that the government routinely breaks the law and they mostly get away with it.

All I'm saying, @royalsociety.org, is that your one of your Fellows giving Nazi salutes is never going to be a good look for you.

Wow—what virus is that?

Posting this nice two-photon imagine of GCaMP8f in astrocytes for #fluoresencefriday 🧪

Credit - @astroantho.bsky.social

Episodic and associative memory from spatial scaffolds in the hippocampus - Nature A neocortical–entorhinal–hippocampal network model based on grid cell states recapitulates experimental results and reconciles the spatial, associative and episodic memory roles of the hippocampus.

New modelling of how episodic memory can arise from spatial mapping, just out in Nature:

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

Memory engram synapse 3D molecular architecture visualized by cryoCLEM-guided cryoET https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.01.09.632151v1

schematic of neural recordings from mouse V1, whole-brain, and hippocampus; neural activity traces from the population, showing more correlated activity in V1 and whole-brain recordings versus more decorrelated activity in hippocampus

What if… spontaneous neural activity 🧠 reflects the baseline rumblings of a brainwide dynamical system initialized for learning? We find that the rumblings have macroscopic properties like those emerging from linear symmetric, critical systems 🧵 #neuroscience #neuroAI www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Biologically informed cortical models predict optogenetic perturbations A recurrent neural network fitted to large electrophysiological datasets should reveal the chain of cortical information transmission. In particular, successful network reconstruction methods should e...

Congrats to @christossourmpis.bsky.social, who finishes his PhD with this. He worked hard and I think he is brilliant 🏆

Many thanks to Wulfram Gerstner and Carl Petersen for the guidance and the support. Thanks to Fahid Esmailli for collecting the in-vivo data.

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
8/8

So we're just ignoring glia? 👍

Ventral hippocampus interacts with prelimbic cortex during inhibition of threat response via learned safety in both mice and humans Although fear can contribute to survival, difficulty regulating threat responses can interfere with goal-directed activities and is the hallmark of anxiety disorders. These disorders are the most comm...

Ventral hippocampus:

pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

In your New Year’s resolutions for 2025, consider public outreach If every person in the neuroscience community committed to doing one thing, imagine the cumulative difference it would make.

In the era of Trump 2.0, we're calling on all scientists+ to unpack science for the public. This is much bigger than anyone of us. But if we all do one thing, imagine the cumulative impact!

It need not be a burden. More here, in @thetransmitter.bsky.social.

www.thetransmitter.org/craft-and-ca...