Josh Johansen

Distinct circuit motifs evaluate opposing innate values of odors Evaluating the innate value of objects is critical for expressing adaptive behaviors. However, where and how this computation takes place in the brain…

A fascinating paper from Hokto Kazama's lab draws upon the fly connectome and large scale recordings to show how olfactory valence is encoded in distinct neurons in the lateral horn (drosophila amygdala) through labeled lines and biased feedforward inhibition www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Excited to announce that I'll be moving to the Univ of California Irvine @ucirvine.bsky.social next Spring!🌴

Happily, this is not goodbye to Japan as I'll continue my lab @RIKEN_CBS for some time.

Help spread the word: the new UCI lab will be hiring, DM or email (johaono@gmail.com) if interested!

Excited to share that I landed my dream job!🎉🎉🎉 The Pennington Lab will be opening at the University of British Columbia in January 2026!
@ubcpsych.bsky.social @dmcbrainhealth.bsky.social

Transcriptomic diversity of amygdalar subdivisions across humans and nonhuman primates Specialized cell types and links to psychiatric disorders are revealed by genetic mapping of primate amygdala neurons.

A spatially resolved transcriptomic atlas of the primate amygdala (human, macaque, and baboon) now out in Science Advances (www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...). The amygdala contains 32 types of neurons with many neuron types specific to particular subdivisions.

Lots of updates from the preprint!

Excited to share our latest paper - now out in @science.org - we showed how oxytocin modulates maternally-directed behavior in young mice (P15).

Emotion research has a communication conundrum In 2025, the words we use to describe emotions matter, but their definitions are controversial. Here, I unpack the different positions in this space and the rationales behind them—and I invite 13…

My new essay for @thetransmitter.bsky.social. Why is understanding emotion so challenging? The debates around what counts as an "emotion" shed insight.

These disputes are multidimensional, principled and fascinating. Here, I unpack them.

www.thetransmitter.org/the-big-pict...

Please RP.
We are thrilled to announce that our lab’s first preprint is out!
”Whole-genome single-cell multimodal history tracing to reveal cell identity transition”

We report HisTrac-seq, a multiomic single-cell molecular recording platform.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

The neural basis of species-specific defensive behaviour in Peromyscus mice - Nature Visual threat triggers contrasting freeze and escape defensive responses in two species of deer mice as a result of different activation thresholds downstream of the superior colliculus in the do...

Finally it's out! www.nature.com/articles/s41... How flexible are essential innate behaviours and their underlying neural circuits? @felixbaier.bsky.social & I, with Hopi Hoekstra and @farrowlab.bsky.social, addressed this by studying the #evolution of threat avoidance in Peromyscus mice.

Great, the meeting is in good hands!

Jobs We are working to solve the biggest mysteries in bioscience.

We have an open position for a Scientist I at the Allen Institute for Neural Dynamics. Come join our exciting research environment @alleninstitute.org. Please share!

alleninstitute.org/careers/jobs...

Context-invariant socioemotional encoding by prefrontal ensembles - Nature Communications How the ensemble encoding of social and anxiety-related behaviors interacts with encoding of context in the prefrontal cortex of mice is not fully understood. Here authors examine how prefrontal neurons encode socioemotional behaviors in different contexts and reveal that the prefrontal cortex encodes context-invariant representations of these behaviors in parallel with representations of context.

(more news) New paper just published! Prefrontal representations of social and emotional information generalize across contexts (even though ensembles for socioemotional + contextual information are highly overlapping): www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Noradrenaline and microglia maintain plasticity-rigidity balance to safeguard rapid emotional learning in the prefrontal cortex https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.06.16.659241v1

Multi-timescale reinforcement learning in the brain - Nature Individual dopaminergic neurons encode future rewards over distinct temporal horizons.

Our work with Pablo Tano, @hyunggoo-kim.bsky.social Athar Malik, Alexandre Pouget and @naoshigeuchida.bsky.social exploring how dopamine neurons could enable multi-timescale reinforcement learning in the brain is out in @nature.com
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Congratulations to our Human Neural Circuitry team; bit.ly/4dEyX7Z publishes today in Science! This was the hardest challenge of my career, but one of the most rewarding, after years of rebuilding– & expanding my inpatient neuropsychiatry in the service of basic discovery bsky.app/profile/deis...

📣 #SfN25 abstract submission is now open!

Share your research with the global neuroscience community.

Start now to avoid the last-minute rush!

🔗 bit.ly/3G5vEde

#NeuroSky #AcademicChatter

Thanks!

Thanks!

Thanks Francesco! Yes, there is definitely synergy of ideas here. I'd love to talk more about it.

Thanks Alicia! Would love to hear what you think

Thanks David!

Thanks Tim! The good old days are now:)

Thanks Tom!

Thanks Keri!

Thanks Andrew!

Thanks Vinny!

🙏

🙏

Great study, congrats! And perfect timing 😉

Systems consolidation reorganizes hippocampal engram circuitry Nature - A study shows that loss of memory precision associated with systems consolidation can be explained by neurogenesis-dependent reorganization of engram circuitry within the hippocampus over...

Sharing a new paper from the lab. This paper, led by Sangyoon Ko, represents a merging of two longstanding research themes in the lab-- adult neurogenesis and systems consolidation.

rdcu.be/el18q

A short thread follows for those interested.

1/n

These findings reveal a neural coding and circuit-based mechanism for model-based emotional processing in dmPFC, opening a new path for emotion research and establishing a conceptual framework for studying the brain mechanisms of higher order emotions in health and disease. (8/8)