Eric Garr

NIH Director Bhattacharya signals an end to the affirmative action program for ESI Well, this is fascinating. Director Jayanta Bhattacharya went on the Why Should I Trust You podcast in an episode dated Feb 26, 2026 [h/t]. Around 59:00 he is answering the podcast host after she p…

NIH Director Bhattacharya signals an end to the affirmative action program for ESI drugmonkey.wordpress.com/2026/02/26/n...

Double congrats on the cool work and for making this the first APA paper I’ve ever been able to access without throwing something across the room.

Here's a quick analysis I did on data I've been collecting on psych/neuro faculty applicants. I don't have data on unsuccessful applicants, but my inference is that women mentored by women have to rely more on bringing in $ to get a faculty job than men mentored by men.

Duration between rewards controls the rate of behavioral and dopaminergic learning - Nature Neuroscience Cue–reward learning rate scales proportionally with the time between rewards. Consequently, learning over a fixed duration is independent of the number of trials. This challenges trial-based dopamine ...

Very excited to post our paper led by @daburke.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41... where we uncover a simple mathematical rule underlying how brains learn that a cue predicts a reward. 1/26

Sheep be damned, congrats Ben!

Now published in Neuropharmacology! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

U.S. government has lost more than 10,000 STEM Ph.D.s since Trump took office A Science analysis reveals how many were fired, retired, or quit across 14 agencies

Science: U.S. government has lost more than 10,000 STEM Ph.D.s since Trump took office

By Jeffrey Mervis, Monica Hersher @science.org @policyhound.bsky.social @mghersher.bsky.social

bit.ly/3M8yf9B

Thanks!

No I meant your cocaine paper

The link seems to be broken. Can you provide the title of the paper?

Since the Namboodiri lab isn’t on Bluesky (I think?), I’d like to amplify this cool paper which I and others in the Janak lab made a small contribution to.

Committee Releases Conferenced Defense, Homeland Security, Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies, and Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and Related Agencies Bi... United States Senate Committee on Appropriations

The conference (agreement between House and Senate) appropriations bill that includes HHS and NIH was released this morning.

www.appropriations.senate.gov/news/majorit...

1/5

AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage | Cory Doctorow AI is asbestos in the walls of our tech society, stuffed there by monopolists run amok. A serious fight against it must strike at its roots

A long, absolutely must-read article from Cory Doctorow: www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-i...

Tolman's Sunburst Maze 80 Years on: A Meta‐Analysis Reveals Poor Replicability and Little Evidence for Shortcutting In 1946, Tolman et al. reported that rats could take a novel shortcut to a goal after training on an indirect route, supporting the Cognitive Map theory. However, a review of subsequent Sunburst maze...

Can humans & animals really use internal maps to take shortcuts?

Tolman famously said yes - based largely on his Sunburst maze.

Our new review & meta-analysis suggests evidence is far weaker than you might think.
🧵👇 doi.org/10.1111/ejn....

@uofgpsychneuro.bsky.social @ejneuroscience.bsky.social

I don't think you non-science people realize what it takes to get a grant funded by NIH. Started experiments in Sept 2021 to generate 3 new mouse mutants to model human disease. Prelim dara shows they have relevant disease phenotypes worthy of study. Need a small grant first to characterize /1

Dual cholinergic mechanisms for sculpting striatal dopamine in vivo Striatal dopamine (DA) and acetylcholine constitute a computationally powerful neuromodulatory dyad that orchestrates action selection, motivational vigor, and reward learning. Striatal cholinergic in...

Excited to share latest study from the lab by an amazing RA, Dylan Flink.

We solved a small (important) puzzle while in the trenches of a larger (wavy 🌊) puzzle.

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
🧵...

This is my first time hearing of Sacks’ fabrications. Say it ain’t so.

Sleep dependent consolidation and replay that doesn’t require the hippocampus?

Very beautiful work by Marcus Stephenson-Jones’ lab on sleep driven sequential skill consolidation in the striatum.

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

Congrats!

Idk how I remember this but @odedrechavi.bsky.social anticipated you by several years x.com/OdedRechavi/...

Dorsolateral striatal acetylcholine reorganizes neural ensembles to anticipate threat Adaptive behavior requires flexible encoding of emotional valence. Although striatal acetylcholine (ACh) signaling is critical for reinforcement learning, its contribution to aversive learning has rem...

🚨New Kutlu Lab preprint! Excited to share our latest work led by Oyku Dinckol and Noah Wenger.
🔗 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

We find that ACh shapes DLS neural ensembles for outcome learning but is biased toward signaling threats over rewards 👇

22% fewer NIH grants

Two posts from Bluesky. The first one shows a figure from a paper published in Nature Scientific Reports full of totally incoherent AI fabricated gibberish words. The other a comment on a recently published paper by eLife discussing the paper and its peer reviews which were published along with the paper.

Nature Sci Rep publishes incoherent AI slop. eLife publishes a paper which the reviewers didn't agree with, making all the comments and responses public with thoughtful commentary. One of these journals got delisted by Web of Science for quality concerns from not doing peer review. Guess which one?

Ventral tegmental area GABA neurons integrate positive and negative valence - Nature Communications The role of ventral tegmental area GABA neurons in behavior is unclear. Here, authors show that VTA GABA but not dopamine neurons integrate positive and negative valence to encode motivational conflic...

So excited to see our latest paper out today in @natcomms.nature.com! Studies led by the amazing @margestelzner.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41.... VTA GABA neurons have a unique role in economic decision making - they integrate reward seeking motivation and the current cost of seeking

Good morning everyone! Suitably following the #dopamine dinner, we have our #dopamine symposium at 9:30am in SDCC room 6B!

‘Beyond Value: Non-canonical roles for dopamine in aversion and reward’

Come join us! 🧠 🧪

If you're at SfN on Monday, come by poster board II10 to see how fentanyl changes cell type-specific encoding of choice outcomes in the striatum to influence decision-making phenotypes. Looking forward to seeing some cool science and supporting SfN during these difficult times!

If you're at SfN on Monday, come by poster board II10 to see how fentanyl changes cell type-specific encoding of choice outcomes in the striatum to influence decision-making phenotypes. Looking forward to seeing some cool science and supporting SfN during these difficult times!

Congrats Raaj!

I just started looking through the meeting planner today and noticed a sizable (~20%) portion of PIs whose names turned up blank.

Subsecond dopamine fluctuations do not specify the vigor of ongoing actions Nature Neuroscience - Liu and colleagues show that the vigor (that is, speed and amplitude) of dexterous movements is not controlled by ongoing fluctuations in extracellular dopamine within the...

Delighted to see this finally out: rdcu.be/eO9oW
We tested whether brief striatal dopamine release events influence the vigor of skilled movements. Despite popular belief, we did not find any evidence linking rapid dopamine dynamics to motor vigor on a moment-by-moment basis.