Thanks for highlighting our preprint!

Definitely there is something here. I’m very interested in seeing your model extended to include cell types and their firing data.

Excited to read this preprint by Yi Zuo's lab, using 2p imaging to track spine growth following psilocybin.

Many similarities with our findings. The new study crucially also tested dose dependence and dived deep into spine characteristics like clustering.

👉 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Congrats to @neuroknox.bsky.social who received the NOA for her F31 fellowship today! 🎉

NEI will support her study on psychedelics, GABAergic cell types, and visual processing.

Follow her for updates 😀

Neurobiologists Hack Brain Circuits Tied to Placebo Pain Relief Scientists have identified the brain circuits tied to placebo pain relief. Researchers have known that placebo effects can be a powerful treatment, yet the underlying neurological mechanisms have not ...

Excited to share our new study on how the brain generates placebo pain relief!

We developed a mouse model that recapitulates key features of human placebo analgesia, then used it to identify causal circuitry.

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

today.ucsd.edu/story/neurob...

1/n

For nearly a century, we believed the therapeutic effect of ECT is the seizure. Our latest research suggests we may have been looking at the wrong event.
A thread on why cortical spreading depression (CSD) might be the driver of therapeutic benefit.
Work led by @therehugolad.bsky.social

Thank you @nate-h-heller.bsky.social and @fredbarrettphd.bsky.social at the @jhpsychedelics.bsky.social for initiating this “Lost Foundations” collection highlighting the historical literature.

The techniques have changed, but the questions have not. What gives rise to the subjective experience? Which receptors are key to psychedelic drug action?

Same pursuit by Aghajanian, Jacobs, and others at the time.

The line of research stems from George Aghajanian’s groundbreaking paper in 1968, showing LSD shuts down the activity of midbrain raphe neurons, cells that produce serotonin in the brain. The work sparked a 15-year long series of research from him and other people in that era.

Dorsal Raphe Revisited: A Systems Neuroscience Lens on Psychedelic Drug Action - Alex C. Kwan, 2026 Psychedelics rose to prominence in the 1960s, around the same time when neurobiologists identified the midbrain raphe as the brain’s primary source of serotonin...

For those interested in the history of psychedelic research…

I wrote a narrative piece describing studies of psychedelic effects on serotonergic neurons in the dorsal raphe, from late 1960s to 1980s:

journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

The complete morphology of a single LC-NE neuron.

First off, these cells are gigantic. This one, for example, has >72 cm of axon! To our knowledge, it’s the longest neuron ever fully reconstructed. I leave it to the reader as an exercise to estimate the length of a human LC neuron. 5

Very impressive! We have been interested in how these ASD genes affect dendritic function..

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.

Very excited to share new work by Leonardo Lupori. In mice, a single dose of the antipsychotic clozapine results in changes to behavior and cortical activity patterns that remain detectable a week later.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Brain coral on a beach in US Virgin Islands.

Seeing a different kind of brain on vacation 🧠 🏝️

For #FluorescenceFriday: an image that didn’t make the final paper. A dopaminergic, anaxonic OB neuron with dendritic release sites in magenta. Gephyrin in orange; TH in cyan confirms the GFP-labelled cell’s identity.

I defended my PhD 10 years ago today. That was the least remarkable thing that happened that day. Sharing something I wrote about it last year. Since then "the horrors persist but so do we." And with dignity.

Congrats!!

Looking at raw data always reminds me why I chose to do this. Saw some handsome synapses yesterday.

Hopeless in Tehran Essays on neuroscience

Today I received a note from a grad student who lives in Tehran. Her note gives you firsthand experience of what it’s like to live in a city that is being bombed, and what it’s like to be young and feel despair about your future.

rezashadmehr.blogspot.com/2026/03/hope...

Here's a (daily updated) NIH grant listing that doesn't suck:
sashagusev.github.io/nih-grants-f...

Mind trip: How psilocybin changes the brain New research may help improve psychedelic therapy for neuropsychiatric disorders

It's remarkable how @alleninstitute.org tools have changed our research.

At least 6 papers from my lab in recent years leveraged their scRNAseq, spatial, ISH, and viral tools.

Bioinformatics for hypothesis generation. Then we test the predicted drug effects.

alleninstitute.org/news/mind-tr...

22 years of Brain Science: what CoSyNe tells us about the evolution of Neuroscience Tracking the intellectual DNA of Computational and Systems Neuroscience through its flagship meeting

I tracked every keyword in 22 years of Cosyne abstracts to map how computational neuroscience evolved — from Bayesian brains to neural manifolds to LLMs — and where it's heading next.

Two-photon calcium imaging at 24,000 lines/s, with the resonant axis spanning 4x what other systems can do. Inertia-free. Diffraction-limited. No tradeoffs. Che-Hang Yu developed a 4x angle multiplier for laser scanning. His paper is out today: opg.optica.org/optica/fullt... 1/n #fluorescenceFriday

Dendrites help neuroscientists see the forest for the trees Dendritic arbors provide just the right scale to study how individual neurons reciprocally interact with their broader circuitry—and are our best bet to bridge cellular and systems neuroscience.

Dendritic arbors provide neuroscience with an ideal opportunity to study how individual neurons interact with their broader circuitry and are the field’s best bet to bridge cellular and systems neuroscience, writes @justinkohare.bsky.social.

#neuroskyence

www.thetransmitter.org/dendrites/de...

Meet the neuroscientist running for Congress Sam Wang, a neuroscientist running for the U.S. House of Representatives, has been interested in “fixing bugs in democracy” for decades.

I spoke with Laura Schenkman at The Transmitter about my candidacy for the House!

Going from the lab to public life is a huge transition. From a lifetime of research to biotech to democracy to running for office, here’s the story of one scientist: www.thetransmitter.org/policy/is-th...

A brief trip to visit the Weizmann Institute and Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

The students left a big impression - some of most engaging trainees I've met. They care a lot about the science. I hope they enjoyed the exchange of ideas as much as I did.

PS - hummus! We had hummus every meal.

Spiking of head-direction cells in the postsubiculum during movement (top) and during the transition from non-REM to REM sleep (bottom). Cells are sorted and colour-coded according to their preferred directions.

I don't think I'll ever get bored of looking at raster plots of head-direction cells 🤩

Yikes. Even if so, and that happened recently to us, they should issue a publishers correction 🤦‍♂️

This 👇is the last revolution. We are working on the next one - and need your help.

HIRING: Postdoc at NYU (Center for Psychedelic Medicine). Looking for strong neuroimaging, human subjects experience, a publication track record, and top scientistiness.

Send CV to joshua.siegel@nyulangone.org

Seems risky to start with a receptor specific agonist with unclear clinical relevance 🤷‍♂️