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
Paper Alert 🚨🚨🚨 Want to analyze your in vivo functionally characterized neurons with RNA-seq, spatial transcriptomics, immunolabeling, or ex vivo patch-clamp? Use our awesome 2P-NucTag approach! Great collab w/ @attila_losonczy & team, congrats to all. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
transformer-circuits.pub/2026/emotion...
This got press hate because of the word "emotions" but it is cool work. "Internal motivational states" serve as a form of working memory that helps animals organize their behavior, so why not ask if similar computational primitives help LLMs to do the same?
Congratulations, that’s so impressive! Any chance of combining with a calcium indicator and being able to separate somatic activity from local NE release under 2P?
1/8 New preprint alert!
How are signals from the heart encoded in the brain?
What could be the functional implications of cardioception?
We found that neurons in the posterior insular cortex are precisely tuned to heartbeats, and that this cardio-insular coupling supports emotion coding in mice.
New preprint!
Follow the thread to find out about the exciting work of an outstanding postdoc in my lab @merylneuro.bsky.social !!!
I really enjoyed the #COSYNE2026 (comp neuro) meeting - amazing talks and fantastic poster sessions! 👏
Still surprised how little mention there was of either evolution or development, though. It's worth keeping in mind that things are the way they are because they got that way! 😉
Excited to co-organize a #COSYNE2026 workshop with Marieke Scholvinck (@zeronoiselab.bsky.social) on March 17 in Cascais 🧠🌊
*Inferring neural latent states from behavior*
Featuring fantastic speakers across experimental & computational #neuroscience (list below 👇)
Hope to see many of you there! 👋
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
🐭🧠 Can fUSI truly map canonical mouse resting-state networks — and how does it compare to fMRI?
I’m excited to share the work of my PhD in our new preprint!👉 doi.org/10.64898/202...
Go check it out — it’s time to expand your neuroimaging toolkit 🧠🚀
Arteries are red, veins are blue,
“Strong coupling” seemed solid and true;
Yet blood runs high when spikes are few—
A troubled bond comes into view.
😬
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
🔬🧠 Releasing the 1.0 version of #Suite2p and THE PAPER w/ @marius10p.bsky.social! Now with GPU acceleration. Want to use Suite2p but don’t have 100,000 neuron recordings? We show you how to get those with a standard 2p microscope #neuroscience #imaging #neuroAI www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Our work with @georgkeller.bsky.social on testing predictive processing (PP) models in cortex is out on biorvix now! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... A short thread on our findings and thoughts on where we should move on from PP below.
Explicit and implicit modularity that emerges in simple neural network models even in the absence of anatomical constraints. Whether modularity emerges or not strongly depends on the geometry of the inputs and other factors. Extensively revised article with many new results. With @wjj.bsky.social
Facial expressions may involve an “everything, everywhere, all at once” type of coding in the brain, a new study suggests.
By @natmesanash.bsky.social
#neuroskyence
www.thetransmitter.org/emotion-proc...
They’ve found the dangerous parts uninteresting. Spending time in the wild likely enhances exploratory drive, and that seems like the more probable explanation for the results that the paper (and article about it) interpret, in my view unjustifiably, as reduced “fear”.
The elevated plus maze captures the compromise between two drives: the desire to stay it out of danger (“anxiety”) and the desire to explore a novel environment. When mice are returned to the EPM and spend more time in the safe areas they haven’t “developed a fear” /1
Emotionally driven behaviors may engage broader neuronal activity than previously thought—challenging the idea that facial expressions are largely reflexive and involuntary, a new study finds.
By @natmesanash.bsky.social
#neuroskyence
www.thetransmitter.org/emotion-proc...
It’s behind a paywall for some - text me if you’re curious
Recently published: The Study of Emotion in Other Animals - a primer on affective neuroscience in “nonhumans”. Framework and case studies for probing emotions in the brain. Cambridge Handbook of Human Affective Neuroscience. Thanks to @gogolla.bsky.social!
www.cambridge.org/core/books/a...
But really I’m confused and waiting for Ralph Adolphs’ new book to resolve this once and for all
Neuropeptide-dependent scaling/persistence of a valenced, (probably) generalizable internal state. It lets the organism compare otherwise incommensurable motivational concerns (hunger and pain). Certainly seems biomarker-ish, and emotion-like. Tempting to require subjective self-report, but why
Great! Does one bite the bullet and call this an emotion? It walks and quacks. Or is the framework too capacious, forcing us to use a conventional term in a confusing way. Like “valence”/chemistry and “stress”/physics, maybe we should port a new term into neuro, smth evocative that isn’t overloaded
"My New Year's Resolution is to find a principled way to think about all those cell types in the brain"
Why friend, you are in luck, because @rgast.bsky.social has just the perspective for you: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
One interesting thing about this finding: People with ADHD commonly experience issues with time perception, which Ritalin is able to restore. Notably, the networks observed here are the same ones we see in timing studies (including insula!)
New Perspective from myself, Sarah Heilbronner and @myoo.bsky.social . “Rethinking the centrality of brain areas in understanding functional organization” in Nature Neuroscience. 🧵
rdcu.be/eVZ1A
Oh, no reference, was just trying to start a cortico-cortical feud. Brain areas that compete for glory with the area that I work on need to be shamed, ridiculed, suppressed. Insular chauvinism. In our aggressive frontostriatal expansion campaign the ACC will be one of the first areas we annex
“Anterior cingulate cortex”. As if that’s a real place. You can tell it’s fake because neurons aren’t red. #ThereIsOnlyInsula
lab preprint! Interopceptive predictions are central to many brain-body interactions theories, but it's unclear if/how they affect bodily physiology. We (fearless Einav Litvak et al) show that insular cortex predictions are essential for glucose homeostasis-THREAD.. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
We could try, but we would fail. I just don’t think that’s how brains work. Others will no doubt disagree.
