Thomas Luo

When a rat makes up its mind, these neuroscientists know Scientists can now freeze-frame the exact moment an animal makes up their mind and commits to a choice — simply by looking at their brain activity

With the help of AI, Princeton’s @thomas-zhihao-luo.bsky.social and @carlosbrody.bsky.social can now pinpoint the exact moment a rat makes up its mind — just by reading its brain activity 🧠🐀
pni.princeton.edu/news/2025/wh...

FixGrower: An efficient and robust curriculum for shaping fixation behavior in rodents Center-port fixation is a common prerequisite for many freely-moving rodent tasks in neuroscience and psychology. However, typical protocols for shaping this behavior are non-standardized and ineffici...

🛑 Attention researchers who train freely-moving rodents!

Jess Breda and I developed a protocol for training center-port nose fixation 61% faster than a previous curriculum while keeping violation rates low.

Preprint here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Thank you @nancyrmack.bsky.social and @princetonneuro.bsky.social for a great explainer about our paper!

pni.princeton.edu/news/2025/wh...

Brain-wide coordination of decision formation and commitment Neural correlates of a subject’s upcoming choice in decision making tasks are remarkably widespread throughout the brain, but how these brain-wide signals are coordinated remains unknown. Do brain reg...

Friday’s AIND JC lead by Shawn Olsen and I on the Brody lab preprint ran 90+ min, unusual. Nice paper, spirited discussion. Make a clear argument that to grasp behavior we need multiregional, multi-neuron, simultaneous single-trial data. Below quotes from the paper.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Thanks, Maxime!

This is a great point! The sensory stimulus is an obvious driver, but even after we account for that, there’s still a lot of variability left over. Going forward, we might dig into the animals’ past choices or their video recordings to get a handle on those extra factors.

Thank you!

Thanks, Chris!

Thanks, Jen!

What happens in your brain when you make up your mind?

Postdoc (soon faculty at U. of Utah) @thomas-zhihao-luo.bsky.social and ex-grad student (now Shanahan Fellow at Allen Institute) @timkimd.bsky.social have some answers in this new paper out in Nature!

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

🧵 1/6

This is a great question! In future studies, it might be interesting to ask whether nTc timing depends on over-stimulation or on environmental change.

Thanks, Gabe!

Thanks, Nicole!

This would not have been possible without the support from the NIH, @hhmi.org, @simonsfoundation.org, and @princetonneuro.bsky.social.

Many thanks to my co-first author @timkimd.bsky.social, our PI and mentor @carlosbrody.bsky.social, and other co-authors @dikshagup.bsky.social, @abondy.bsky.social, Charles Kopec, Verity Elliott, and @briandepasquale.bsky.social who contributed to this project.

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

Out today in @nature.com: we show that individual neurons have diverse tuning to a decision variable computed by the entire population, revealing a unifying geometric principle for the encoding of sensory and dynamic cognitive variables.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Large-scale high-density brain-wide neural recording in nonhuman primates - Nature Neuroscience Neuropixels 1.0 NHP is a 45-mm, high-density silicon probe capable of recording large numbers of neurons with single-neuron resolution from most areas in a macaque’s brain.

Our paper on NHP neuropixels is finally out in Nat Neuro! These probes have already been transformative and will usher in a new era of primate neuroscience. I am extremely proud to have played a very small role in this project. I can't wait to see what our community discovers. tinyurl.com/54u3hrj8

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/...

My latest Aronov lab paper is now published @Nature!

When a chickadee looks at a distant location, the same place cells activate as if it were actually there 👁️

The hippocampus encodes where the bird is looking, AND what it expects to see next -- enabling spatial reasoning from afar

bit.ly/3HvWSum

Molecular hydrogen in the extremely metal- and dust-poor galaxy Leo P - Nature Observations from the JWST MIRI-MRS instrument reveal the detection of rotational emission from molecular hydrogen near the only O-type star in the 3% solar metallicity galaxy Leo P, providing confirm...

Delighted that the first paper from our Cy2 JWST program was published today, reporting the discovery of molecular hydrogen in the 3% Solar metallicity galaxy Leo P. This was a very fun project with @karinsandstrom.bsky.social strom.bsky.social and fabulous co-authors! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Tired of your boring old DDM? Check out recent work by grad student @ryguy.io that introduces a *state-dependent* DDM using an underlying HMM. We find mice change their speed-accuracy strategy from trial to trial! Code provided! (in Julia of course!)

we're crowd-sourcing a searchable repository of tangible benefits stemming from federally-funded research. Come enjoy the great stories; or send in an idea; or volunteer to join the team.

publicusaresearchbenefits.com

please share and re-share so we get more great stories in there!

Calling all science advocates!! Carlos Brody+ are creating a searchable database of tangible science benefits, and they need you.

publicusaresearchbenefits.com

They are asking for suggestions - from brief to lengthy. The database is state-searchable, so all 50 states.

Please spread the word!

Federal Funding Freeze: Share Your Story Trump's funding freeze is causing chaos and harming Americans. Share your story to build the movement.

(2/3)
MAKE NOISE:
1. Share your story. Post how NSF funding has impacted your research or your life. Use #WithoutNSF to raise your voice.

2. Share your story on the Federal Freeze Tracker to help lawmakers and the public understand what’s at stake:
docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

So impressed by this amazing new paper answering a fundamental question about the brain:

I'll be at the Philadelphia event!

A neural mechanism for learning from delayed postingestive feedback - Nature Illness signals from the gut reactivate and strengthen flavour representations in the amygdala to support learning from delayed postingestive feedback.

How do we associate the flavors we experience during a meal 🍽️😋 with postingestive effects like food poisoning 🤢🤮 that arise much later?

Our answer in @nature.com this week: Illness signals from the gut reactivate and strengthen flavor representations in the amygdala.

📄: nature.com/articles/s41...

Trump administration advances immigration crackdown on foreign student protesters Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that his department has revoked the student visas of hundreds of students so far, with plans to cancel more.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that his department has revoked the student visas of hundreds of students so far, with plans to cancel more.

Bayesian inference by visuomotor neurons in the prefrontal cortex | PNAS Perceptual judgments of the environment emerge from the concerted activity of neural populations in decision-making areas downstream of the sensory...

Out today in PNAS! We asked how Bayesian inference is implemented in macaque prefrontal cortex www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...