“Feeding-state dependent modulation of reciprocally interconnected inhibitory neurons biases sensorimotor decisions in Drosophila”, by Eloise de Tredern et al. 2024 (Tihana Jovanic’s lab) https://doi.org/10.1101/2023.12.26.573306
“the competition between different aversive responses to mechanical cues is biased by feeding state changes. We found that this is achieved by differential modulation of two different types of reciprocally connected inhibitory neurons promoting opposing actions” … and via homologues of the vertebrates’ neuropeptide Y.
[1/2] Surprising findings in brain research 🧠: As a team from #CharitéBerlin shows in #Science, thoughts in the human neocortex flow in one direction ⬆️, as opposed to the loops seen in mice 🔄. That makes processing information extra efficient. These discoveries could further the development of artificial neural networks.
the last thing i would do is blame neuroscientists for the disfunctional US federal budgeting process that funds basic research at pennies on the dollar compared to war and subsidizing the rich. at the same time I also think we would probably have an easier time communicating to the public at large and building a political case for funding neuroscience if we focused less on publishing discrete papers and more on making our work into larger, cumulative projects that we could point to as a direct consequence of our funding. We should be able to say "here are all the things the BRAIN initiative funds and how they relate to one another" instead of having NIH Reporter and a handful of summary PDFs as the best resource at hand.
the Brain Initiative Cell Atlas Network, which is pioneering single-cell atlases for the human brain and the mouse brain, and the FlyWire Connectome project, which mapped every neuron in the fruit fly brain and spinal cord.
BICAN, which has a ton of work that you can point to, is great, eg the "knowledge explorer" but even then it suffers from public intelligibility even though i know there's a lot more there - eg. the "tools" link from the homepage - https://www.portal.brain-bican.org/ - goes to some unintelligible RRID page. FlyWire is great ( https://codex.flywire.ai/ ) but the dependence on google infra and identity is just a pointless footgun.
point being, scientific infrastructure isn't just a matter of 'nice to have,' but is probably increasingly important to the survival of the discipline. If we can't point to what we've done as a coherent picture, it's very easy to cut funding and have it fly under the radar.
Call for paper contributions! Donate your preprint/ paper/ repository to the Neuroscience Reprohack on 7 and 8 May in Amsterdam.
Authors will get a free reproducibility check and feedback on their efforts. Participants will get to learn from your work and hands-on experience with reviewing other peoples' code.
Check https://www.reprohack.org/event/29/ for more event details and how to submit your work
I've been working on a way to annotate in multiple views, with feedback for inconsistencies across views. There's still some way to go, but already it feels so cool after years of labeling only 2D views! #neuroscience#annotation#PoseEstimation
By insisting that every brain-behavior association study include hundreds or even thousands of participants, we risk stifling innovation. Smaller studies are essential to test new scanning paradigms.
Mutatis mutandis, if we had to start off with "hundreds" of connectomes to e.g., measure natural variability in synaptic connectivity among identified neurons, we would have never mapped the first one.
Pilot studies are necessary. Issues arise when, because of the pressure to get grants and splashy papers, one claims too much from that initial study, forgetting about the 'pilot' part.
Incidentally, now, I've put in a grant to request funds for mapping multiple connectomes of the same animal to precisely measure the natural variability. Whether reviewers will dismiss it as "unnecessary" and "uninteresting", now that the first connectome was mapped and published, or as "essential", remains to be seen. I wouldn't have submitted the grant in the first place if I didn't think it was essential.
An interesting and unexpected result: "Moderate ChR2 [channelrhodopsin] expression is associated with subtle reductions in CF [climbing fibre] signaling and abolishes learning to a sensory US [unconditioned stimulus]."
One of my favorite things in #neuroanatomy is the number of structures with names like "nucleus ambiguus" (ambiguous nucleus), "substantia innominata" (unnamed stuff), and "zona incerta" (uncertain zone).
If I were making a neuroanatomical atlas in the 19th century, I definitely would have called something "locus draconum," as in the old navigational charts' "here be dragons".
Our brain waves can align when we work and play closely together. The phenomenon, known as interbrain synchrony, suggests that collaboration is biological.
"...Dozens of recent experiments studying the brain activity of people performing and working together — duetting pianists, card players, teachers and students, jigsaw puzzlers and others — show that their brain waves can align in a phenomenon known as interpersonal neural synchronization, also known as interbrain synchrony..."
Ah, studies in labs. Nowhere does this article mention a mob mentality leading to persecution and violence, or the mass psychosis of things like Jan 6th, trump speeches, and paranoid QAnon meetups.
Yes, total submersion is great when a good team works together on a cool project. But that's rare.
It's terrible when bad groups work together to implement their deranged fantasies or delusions of superiority.
I was reminded of some old studies by Toukhsati and Rickard on how rhythms can facilitate learning in young chickens, which have been mostly ignored over the years, probably because they were ahead of their time.
But they seem especially relevant to those of us in music cognition who are increasingly interested in the neural mechanism of rhythm, beat, meter, and groove in both humans and non-human animals. Not to mention the health and education applications of music!
And we also have another PostDoc position available - this time on transcranial magnetic stimulation as a therapeutic approach in Parkinson's disease.
Application deadline already April 14th!
You will become part of the collaborative "ADAptive and Precise Targeting of cortex-basal ganglia circuits in Parkinson´s Disease” (ADAPT-PD) research alliance. ADAPT-PD is a multidisciplinary project at the @DRCMR in Copenhagen and involves collaboration with Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin (Co-PI: Andrea Kuehn) and Lund University (Co-PI: Angela Cenci).