‘Overdue’ debate unfurls over neuroimaging method After a January paper questioned the validity of an approach called lesion network mapping, its users are pressure testing their results.

A wave of new papers discuss the merits and limitations of lesion network mapping. #neuroskyence

By @avaskham.bsky.social

www.thetransmitter.org/brain-imagin...

Medial temporal lobe encodes cognitive maps of real-world social networks | PNAS Humans routinely solve social problems by navigating densely interconnected networks—gossiping strategically, brokering across cliques, and coordin...

Now out in PNAS with @jaeyoungson.bsky.social, Alice Xia, @apaxon.bsky.social & @orielf.bsky.social. Medial temporal lobe encodes predictive representations of people's real-world social networks which afford them key advantages in social navigation. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... 🧵

14 things our PhD supervisors got right and why it mattered PhD students reflect on how their supervisors made a meaningful difference — from quiet acts of kindness to career-shaping guidance.

14 things PhD supervisors can do to help their students www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Dopamine D1 and D2 receptors differentially control strength and dynamics of abstract decision codes in the primate prefrontal cortex | PNAS Dopamine critically modulates prefrontal circuits underlying cognitive control, but how D1-type (D1R) and D2-type (D2R) receptors influence abstrac...

Dopamine D1 and D2 receptors differentially control strength and dynamics of abstract decision codes in the primate prefrontal cortex
doi.org/10.1073/pnas...
#neuroscience

Delighted to share our discoveries about one of the brain's neurotransmitter systems:
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Together with colleagues at the @alleninstitute.org, we have learned a lot about a tiny cluster of neurons in the brainstem locus coeruleus (LC) that releases norepinephrine (NE). 1

It’s brutal in academia right now. A lot is out of our control, but it doesn’t cost anything to remember that there are humans behind papers and grants…reviewers, program officials and funders can be more empathetic in the face of unprecedented chaos in the US scientific enterprise.

Interesting new preprint from UK Biobank data on blood biomarkers in psychiatry. In ~47,500 people, plasma NfL was modestly elevated in bipolar and depressive disorders, while GFAP was largely unchanged. www.medrxiv.org/content/10.6...

"Early-career academics, especially those who are conscientious mentors, can end up being punished for doing the kind of work that universities claim to value." This hits home. Luckily I managed to be able to prioritize my own "game" over the years, but it's hard www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Structure-function coupling in the human brainstem www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.04...

An international mega-analysis of psychedelic drug effects on brain circuit function - Nature Medicine Analysis of neuroimaging datasets across five major psychedelics revealed a shared brain signature and provides a comprehensive insight into how these drugs reorganize brain architecture.

This paper has been a long time coming. Instead of reanalyzing the same old resting-state fMRI datasets, we combined nearly all datasets around the world. Note that we didn't exactly find indisputable evidence for "default mode network disintegration."
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Beyond delighted to see this paper -- our first from the SYPRES initiative -- now out at @natmentalhealth.nature.com. Check out Parker's awesome thread below, w/ links to dashboard + all code + data.

🧠 Focused ultrasound changes emotional processing 🔊

In a new study published in Neuron today, we stimulated the human amygdala using transcranial ultrasound stimulation (TUS) and show it plays a causal role in detecting and resolving emotional ambiguity.

Full thread above, but in summary:

When we imagine we re-activate brain regions used during perception, an idea called "sensory reinstatement". However, our results suggest this overlap is actually in transmodal association networks, not sensory areas.

Perception culminates in transmodal networks

The exposome and attention-related brain networks jointly predict attention problems in early adolescence Background: Attention problems are common transdiagnostic symptoms of psychiatric illness. Although environmental exposures and experiences influence attention during adolescent development, the under...

New preprint out! We show that the exposome and attention-related brain networks jointly predict attention problems in early adolescence—highlighting how environment and brain function have shared and unique associations with reported attention problems. medrxiv.org/cgi/content/...

Melvyn Goodale - Linking Past and Present Worlds in the Visual Control of Behaviour YouTube video by MIT Consciousness Club

The recording of Mel Goodale's talk at the MIT Consciousness Club is now available here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=kThw....

Extremely cool.
We haven’t known very much about how localized neuromodulator signaling is.
This data — made possible by new molecular sensor tools — is revealing that it’s quite local, just a few cell-widths in extent.
#neuroscience 🧪

Wait… localized norepinephrine transients in the awake visual cortex?!
Who would have guessed this neuromodulatory signal is that spatially precise, right where visual processing is happening. Brain state control just got a lot more local. @ruedigersarah.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Targeting the medial prefrontal cortex with transcranial temporal interference stimulation (tTIS) alleviates chronic pain Chronic pain involves prefrontal maladaptation, but noninvasive modulation of the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) remains challenging. We investigated whether transcranial temporal interference…

Transcranial temporal interference stimulation effectively modulates prefrontal circuits to alleviate chronic pain.

Convergent transcriptomic and connectomic controllers of information integration and its anaesthetic breakdown across mammalian brains - Nature Human Behaviour Luppi et al. identify transcriptomic and connectomic controllers of information integration and its breakdown induced by anaesthesia in humans, macaques, marmosets and mice.

What makes brains (un)conscious? We provide new answers—and a universal mammalian blueprint for information processing—in a cross-species study of humans, macaques, marmosets & mice. Exploring convergent breakdown of integration in:

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

Led by @loopyluppi.bsky.social

I don't think people fully appreciate how apocalyptic things are for US science. I haven't had any new funding since 2024, but I'm still ok since typical grants are for three years. This means next year I will be completely out of funding and will have to fire everyone in the lab. It's not great.

Do you censor high motion frames in fMRI? In two preprints by @twktan.bsky.social @mandymejia.bsky.social, we find that we may be censoring too much!

doi.org/10.64898/202...
arxiv.org/html/2603.07...

Strict censoring leads to worse personalized TMS targets than no censoring, even with high motion!

Our latest work, on modeling the human brain responses to sight, sound and language at scale:

Functional hierarchy of the human neocortex across the lifespan - Nature fMRI data from individuals of a wide range of ages (from a few days to 100 years old) are used to map the key organizational axes of functional connectivity in the human cortex throughout the lifespan...

Superb resource to study human brain development, out in @nature.com
🧪🧠
An atlas showing how patterns of functional connectivity between brain regions change from birth to old age
“Functional hierarchy of the human neocortex across the lifespan”
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🎉 Excited to share our publication in PNAS! 🎉
What happens when our stream of consciousness turns towards the body? Our fMRI study of 536 individuals finds that 'body-wandering' is associated with patterns of brain connectivity, physiology, affect, and mental health:
www.pnas.org/doi/full/10....

"We are watching two disciplines trade their worst habits. Neuroscience is mistaking benchmarked prediction for understanding, and machine learning is mistaking mechanistic language for mechanism. ..."

Cannabidiol Mitigates Ketamine-Induced Hyperlocomotion via Allosteric Potentiation of Ventral Tegmental GlyRα1 Signaling Ketamine produces rapid antidepressant and antidepressant-like effects in both humans and animal models. However, its therapeutic benefits are tempered by psychoactive side effects, such as…

Cannabidiol blocks ketamine-induced hyperlocomotion by reversing ketamine-mediated dysfunction of glycine receptors in the ventral tegmental area.

Acetylcholine demixes heterogeneous dopamine signals for learning and moving Nature Neuroscience - Jang et al. measured dopamine and acetylcholine release in the striatum of rats performing a decision-making task and found that the relative timing of cholinergic and...

Thrilled to share our new paper, which shows that the relative timing of cholinergic and dopamine release dynamically gates whether dopamine acts as an RPE for in vivo plasticity and reinforcement learning. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Electroencephalography, pupillometry, and behavioral evidence for locus coeruleus-noradrenaline system related tonic hyperactivity in older adults Neuroimaging studies have shown that age-related dysregulation of the locus coeruleus-noradrenaline (LC-NA) system is associated with cognitive declin…

✨ SHINY NEW PAPER ✨

Evidence of locus coeruleus-noradrenaline (LC-NA) hyperactivity in older adults using behavioral, pupil and EEG data

@maramather.bsky.social

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

You have 10 minutes of task fMRI to map functional brain regions in an individual. Three decisions matter:

How do you localize regions?
Which tasks do you include?
How do you arrange tasks in your experiment?

Here, we tackle all three! Preprint👇

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

Very pleased to share that our study “Noradrenaline causes a spread of association in the hippocampal cognitive map” is out in @natcomms.nature.com (my final PhD paper, only 3.5 years post PhD! 🙃)

Find the paper here: www.nature.com/articles/s41...