Ben Kanter

A cellular basis for the mammalian nocturnal-diurnal switch Early mammals were nocturnal while dinosaurs dominated the daytime. Mammalian transition to daytime activity accelerated after the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction, but the underlying mechanisms remain...

Since I moved to @mrclmb.bsky.social I’ve been trying to answer this: Why are some mammals active at night and others in the day? Today our answer is out @science.org www.science.org/doi/10.1126/....
If you’re interested in circadian biology, evolution or how timing shapes physiology, take a look

SensingTime2026 The Shaping a World-class University program of University of Padova and TRF collaborated in the organization of the 2nd TRF training school that took place during the 6th and 10th of July 2026 in Pad...

Sensing Time
Padova, Italy
6-10 July 2026

Ever wondered how humans experience the passage of time? Join the Summer School Sensing Time: How We Process Time Across Real and Extended Realities and immerse yourself in one of the mind’s most intriguing mysteries.

Registration deadline: 15 March 2026

Finally getting on top of new papers and god there are so many good ones. This from Lykken, Kanter, @edvardmoser.bsky.social & @m-bmoser.bsky.social is brilliant. Neuropixels showing differential phase shifts across grid modules drive place cell remapping. Elegant grid-to-place transformation story.

11/10 recommend. Exciting projects in an awesome country with one of my favorite people. Apply!

Cognitive Neurophysiology (CNP) - Institute of Basic Medical Sciences We are now hiring two PhDs and a Post Doc:Deadline 1st of March:https://www.jobbnorge.no/en/available-jobs/job/294553/phd-research-fellow-in-machine-learning-for-cognitive-neuroscienceDeadline 4th of ...

We have PhD positions and Post Doc positions available! www.med.uio.no/imb/english/... Please apply if you are interested in human invasive intracranial recordings or applied machine learning in a neuroscientific context.

Deadlines 1st of March (Sunday!) and 4th of March.

Please RT!

How and why does cognition vary so greatly between individuals and species? In @natrevbiodiv.nature.com, we propose the "Predatory Intelligence Hypothesis" which posits that the cognitive challenges associated with predator–prey interactions drive a cognitive co-evolutionary arms race

rdcu.be/e5KIj

Approximately 20 million vertebrate animals, moslty mice, are used in research each year. Some comparisons on agricultural use.

How can we build better experiment-theory collaborations in neuroscience?

We're hosting a series of 6 in-person, interactive workshops to discuss this.

Come along!

www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/understand...

Next-generation multicolor indicators for in vivo imaging of norepinephrine - Nature Methods Improved red and green indicators for norepinephrine and their characterization are reported. These indicators allow detection of norepinephrine release in awake behaving mice in dual-color fiber phot...

The most sensitive green and red #norepinephrine #sensors engineered to date are out in #naturemethods! Deeply grateful to all our funders and contributors who made this work possible. A true team effort. @erc.europa.eu @snsf.ch doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Also since you ask for complaints I have a minor one :)

The idea that CA1 is just a stable spatial map feels like a strawman. Loads of papers arguing for more general sequence coding, relational memory, statistical learning, etc and I didn't see much of that work cited or discussed here.

Thanks for the thread and congrats on the paper!

Curious about the framing of this as "task versus no task". One could argue foraging or exploring is a task. One could also argue the conditioned responding here is not much of a task. Is "task" the difference that matters here?

Can lizards learn #spatial tasks? 🦎
A new study in Biology Letters examines spatial learning and the role of #lateralization in maze navigation.

Read more: royalsocietypublishing.org/rsbl/article...

@royalsocietypublishing.org

Impressive analysis of human data led by David Durpret's team in Oxford:

A learning-evoked slow-oscillatory architecture paces population activity for offline reactivation across the human medial temporal lobe

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Place cells in CA1 lack topographical organization of firing locations | PNAS Topography is a well-described and well-known concept for cortical organization in primary sensory and motor cortices of mammalian brains. Similar ...

A half-century old question may have its final answer. Using high-resolution #Mini2P microscopes, we find no evidence of local topography in #PlaceCells. Place fields of neighbouring cells are no more similar than those of randomly selected cells. 🧠🗺️ Out now in @pnas.org www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Neuronal spiking in the mammalian forebrain is dominated by a heterogeneous ground state Neuronal firing patterns have significant spatiotemporal variability with no agreed-upon theoretical framework. Using a combined experimental and mode…

With this one in print, I think I finally earned that PhD... 😅
Presented for the first time at the cosyne when the world ended (March 2020). I'll bring over a summary thread from twitter when it was still twitter...

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Agouti integrates environmental cues to regulate paternal behaviour - Nature Expression of agouti signalling protein in neurons in the medial preoptic area is increased by group housing and negatively associated with care, and overexpression of Agouti reduces care and enhances...

Why are some males caring toward infants while others are neglectful or abusive? I'm so pleased to share work that my colleagues and I @princeton.edu have just published @nature.com (an explanatory thread to follow!) (1/8)

I am so proud to share @forrestdrogers.bsky.social’s postdoctoral magnum opus, now out in @nature.com! Forrest discovered a novel role for Agouti in the MPOA of the hypothalamus to integrate socio-environmental information to flexibly tune paternal behavior
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Thread! 👇🏻

Active pursuit gates egocentric coding in Retrosplenial Cortex https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02.14.705560v1

Mathematical Methods in Computational Neuroscience Summer school in Eresfjord, Norway (July 8th - 26th, 2024)

Applications are now open for the summer school: 𝐌𝐚𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐦𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐥 𝐌𝐞𝐭𝐡𝐨𝐝𝐬 𝐢𝐧 𝐂𝐨𝐦𝐩𝐮𝐭𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐥 𝐍𝐞𝐮𝐫𝐨𝐬𝐜𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐞

🧠 Apply before March 15: www.compneuronrsn.org

📍 Located in beautiful Eresfjord 🇳🇴
🗓️ Between July 6-24

Supported by the @kavlifoundation.org
In collaboration with @kavlintnu.bsky.social

Every time we catch wind of a potential delay we panic buy like toilet paper in the pandemic 😅 I hope you get what you need!

The only limitation I'm aware of is the number of ports. I think you can record up to 4 Npx 2.0 with OneBox (2 ports), whereas a PXIe card handles twice as many (4 ports). So for acute preps with tons of probes a PXI is needed, I think. The new 4base probes also hog a whole port each.

Pavlov would have been shocked and stoked by this study!

It meticulously shows that what matters most for cue-reward learning is the duration between rewards: the longer this duration, the fewer the number of trials needed for behavioral and DA learning

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

Marseille folks: I’m organizing a one-day workshop on Distributed Computations for Flexible Behavior (Apr 16, Timone Campus) with a great line-up of speakers bridging theory, circuits & whole-brain dynamics! 🧠

Free registration (mandatory, incl. lunch): fannycazettes.limesurvey.net/172448?lang=...

We have mostly PXI setups and a couple with OneBox. So far used OneBox for acute / recording during surgery due to ease of setup with a laptop. The PXI is our workhorse (mostly cause OneBox didn't exist).

I agree. This is a cool paper. Nice work Kentros lab!

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Learning sculpts orthogonal task manifolds for continual skill learning in recurrent networks https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02.15.705283v1

Thanks Caswell!

Really nice work from the Kentros lab — repeating chemogenetic manipulation of grid cells produces the same place cell remapping each time. Direct evidence that grid subfield rate changes predictably drive place field reorganisation. Love it https://doi.org/10.64898/2026.02.10.705142

Thrilled to finally share this work! 🧠🔊

Using a new reinforcement-free task we show mice (like humans) extract abstract structure from sound (unsupervised) & dCA1 is causally required by building factorised, orthogonal subspaces of abstract rules.

Led by Dammy Onih!
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

👀👇