Nathan Insel

"Emotion" vs "affective state" sounds like a fun example of how psychological constructs are clustered hierarchically. Would be interested if anyone takes this up in an articulate and compelling way.

Not an expert, but I take this issue up in my intro neuro course. We walk through ~8 definitions and examine where they fail. We then put these together into our own, including "usual" causes (perceived valence) and "typical" consequences (visceral, also facial/vocal expressions).

New strategy for grant and paper rejections

Lemborexant ameliorates tau-mediated sleep loss and neurodegeneration in males in a mouse model of tauopathy - Nature Neuroscience Parhizkar et al. show that lemborexant, an orexin receptor antagonist, protects against neurodegeneration in male tau transgenic mice by preventing tau protein build-up and inflammation, highlighting ...

Notable paper on sleep aid lemborexant (putting aside caveats of mouse models of Alzheimer's). I have collected 2 1/2 years of data on myself and can confirm even small (2 mg) doses add sleep hours.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Thanks for this!
On writing: I remember Tulving saying that he admired and was inspired by Hartline's paper on lateral inhibition for its writing. From all the written history about Tulving and his influences, this isn't something one might easily guess.

Oh so now we are in a parasocial friendship?

Cool!

Didn't catch that, thank you.

Will add "toothpaste related crime" to the landscape of imagined futures

Earnest question: can't kids get their fluoride by regularly eating a small amount of their toothpaste?

To borrow from Alan Moore "Uglier than death backin' outta the outhouse readin' mad magazine and crazy as a football bat."

Differential Activation of Fast-Spiking and Regular-Firing Neuron Populations During Movement and Reward in the Dorsal Medial Frontal Cortex The medial prefrontal cortex is thought to be important for guiding behavior according to an animal's expectations. Efforts to decode the region have focused not only on the question of what informati...

Awesome!!
(Incidentally, one of my favorite topics!
journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...
pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...
)

My university is accepting applications for the Visiting Researcher - Scholars at Risk Program, established to support scholars who are facing threats to their life, liberty or academic career, &/or have been forced to leave their academic position because of such threats. www.wlu.ca/academics/re...

I did that. Cured the boredom. Aged twice as fast but tripled life meaning--overall win.

I appreciate the debates about machine intelligence, and how LLMs are forcing us to review our constructs. But I also think it's fun to think of LLMs as a mirror we've put in front of animals that don't have a concept of mirrors (image from @theonion.com)

My 12 yo after I told him that "datum" is singular for data: "Once my generation gets into the Miriam-Webster office, there are going to be a lot of changes"

Norepinephrine-mediated slow vasomotion drives glymphatic clearance during sleep Norepinephrine oscillations during NREM sleep drive synchronized changes in cerebral blood volume and cerebrospinal fluid, promoting glymphatic clearance. Optogenetic and pharmacological manipulations confirm that vasomotion, regulated by norepinephrine, acts as a pump for brain fluid transport.

www.cell.com/cell/abstrac...

Linking neural population formatting to function Animals capable of complex behaviors tend to have more distinct brain areas than simpler organisms, and artificial networks that perform many tasks tend to self-organize into modules (1-3). This sugge...

New results for a new year! “Linking neural population formatting to function” describes our modern take on an old question: how can we understand the contribution of a brain area to behavior?
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
🧠👩🏻‍🔬🧪🧵
#neuroskyence
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I enjoyed this, thank you!

Also speaks to Bluesky's "love-to-hate Musk" audience:
"Instead of the bundle of Neuralink electrodes, Musk could just use a telephone, whose data rate has been designed to match human language, which in turn is matched to the speed of perception and cognition."

An indubitably indelible individual

You got me to read this 23(?) years ago. The part I remember, and cite with some regularity, is how the character deals with freezing-up in public bathrooms. A well articulated "animal social cognition" phenomenon.

I think this is it! Or some minor twists on it. Thank you so much for the link--and thinking about/publishing this in the first place! It captures a very deep question of how mind/subjective state depends on the specific casual interactions within the mechanisms.

@jaanaru.bsky.social : maybe you know where I can find this?

@neuroai.bsky.social : years ago you tweeted about a thought expmnt that toyed with whether a conscious system depends on connections (like "lab records brain, also stimulates unconnected cells in synchrony w/recording--is the collection of cells conscious?") Do you know where this is published?

Authors should initially be in randomized order, with some "false authors" included. Then at the end of the paper we find out who the fake authors were ("I never would have guessed!") and who were the first and senior/corresponding authors ("wow, I thought he was dead").

To encourage readers beyond the abstract, it should also end with exciting leads, e.g., "You won't believe what the mice did next" or "Stay tuned for the big reveal in Discussion"

Journal article abstracts should include "<SPOILER ALERT>" immediately before the results of the study are revealed.

This hurts my brain.
But I've also had a long term dependence on ATP

Cool paper digging into circuitry of the median raphe

Fans are often surprised to learn that the most deadly species in the Star Trek universe is the hippopotamus.

www.cell.com/current-biol...