How do the basal ganglia turn what you see into what you do?
New preprint w/ @kenneth-harris.bsky.social, @flickerfusion.bsky.social & @carandinilab.net: we recorded across striatum, GPe & SNr in a Go/NoGo task. Striatum encodes which stimulus, GPe & SNr encode action. 🧵
biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

1/7 🧠 My journey into development begins with this work and question: how does the brain's spatial navigation system develop? We found that the neural networks for spatial navigation (tori and rings) are preconfigured and only later anchor gradually to the world with experience! 🧵

Basal ganglia–brainstem interactions Our body executes many different movements with precision. Falasconi and Arber describe how basal ganglia interact with brainstem circuits controlling body movements and propose a movement-specific li...

Happy to share our primer on Basal Ganglia - Brainstem interactions!
From how the basal ganglia communicate with Brainstem motor circuits to how these activity patterns might come about! With Silvia Arber, now out in Current Biology www.cell.com/current-biol...

Mind over matter, matter over mind?

Check out our fine mini-special (mini by our standards) special issue on how #brain and #body interact.

🧠🕺

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

Basal ganglia–brainstem interactions Our body executes many different movements with precision. Falasconi and Arber describe how basal ganglia interact with brainstem circuits controlling body movements and propose a movement-specific li...

Happy to share our primer on Basal Ganglia - Brainstem interactions!
From how the basal ganglia communicate with Brainstem motor circuits to how these activity patterns might come about! With Silvia Arber, now out in Current Biology www.cell.com/current-biol...

EPFL-Smart-Kitchen-30: Densely annotated cooking dataset with 3D kinematics to challenge video and language models Understanding behavior requires datasets that capture humans while carrying out complex tasks. The kitchen is an excellent environment for assessing human motor and cognitive function, as many complex...

Understanding behavior requires datasets that capture humans while carrying out complex tasks. The kitchen is an excellent environment for assessing human motor and cognitive function, as many complex actions are naturally exhibited in kitchens from chopping to 🧽!

arxiv.org/abs/2506.01608

Something exciting just left the gym -- meet Arnold the first generalist musculoskeletal control policy!

The human body has 600+ muscles, yet we seamlessly coordinate them for everything from whispering a syllable to felling a forrest. How? www.arxiv.org/abs/2508.18066

ez-zarr: A Python package for easy access and visualisation of OME-Zarr filesets Barbiero et al., (2025). ez-zarr: A Python package for easy access and visualisation of OME-Zarr filesets. Journal of Open Source Software, 10(109), 7882, https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.07882

We’re excited to share that ez_zarr now supports Zarr v3! 🚀 Huge thanks to @mbstadler.bsky.social & @csoneson.bsky.social who took on the challenge of creating this open-source tool for fast, programmatic access to OME-Zarr file sets + easy plotting 📊
📄 joss.theoj.org/papers/10.2110… (1/3)

Dynamic basal ganglia output signals license and suppress forelimb movements - Nature Basal ganglia output neurons fire dynamically in bidirectional and movement-specific patterns to license forelimb movements. 

Forelimb movement control at the basal ganglia - brainstem interface!

Happy to finally share this work from me and @harsh-kanodia.bsky.social with Silvia Arber!

@biozentrum.unibas.ch @fmiscience.bsky.social

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

Too often, reviewers forget that it’s not their paper. The focus should be on what’s necessary for the paper to be suitable for publication, not on how they would have approached it. Suggestions are helpful, but they should always be framed as optional.
Let me tell you a story 1/7

It was great to share our work with @markolas.bsky.social and Eric Yittri's lab @cmu-neuroscience.bsky.social!