Planning in the Brain: It's Not What You Think It Is The neuroscience of planning has long been analogized to search algorithms in artificial intelligence (AI), which simulate future actions to guide immediate choices. We argue that advances in both neu...

New Annual Review with @nathanieldaw.bsky.social: “Planning in the Brain: It's Not What You Think It Is.” We argue that the brain's 'planning' machinery is mostly used for learning from simulated experience, and that thinking prospectively at decision time is just one special case of this process.

🚨Preprint Alert🚨

Our new preprint 'A Scalable fMRI Estimate of Basal Ganglia Brain Tissue Iron for Use in Developmental and Translational Neuroscience' is live!!

lnkd.in/gpG9naba

SCORE | Center for Open Science SCORE shows that there is no shortcut to producing credible research findings, and there is no single indicator of trustworthiness. Research progress depends on transparency, rigor, and establishing r...

SCORE, a collaboration of 865 researchers, is now released as three papers in Nature, six preprints, and a lot of data (cos.io/score/). SCORE examined repeatability of findings from the social-behavioral sciences and tested whether human and automated methods could predict replicability.

🚨 New preprint from the lab led by Shenghan Wang! 🚨

Excited to share our new paper proposing a new computational model accounting for the dynamic interaction btw drug #craving and #decision-making, led by Kaustubh Kulkarni, MD/PhD

rdcu.be/fab6B

#AddictionScience #Neuroscience #ComputationalPsychiatry #BehavioralScience

Association between GLP-1 receptor agonist use and worsening mental illness in people with depression and anxiety in Sweden: a national cohort study People with diabetes have an elevated risk of developing depression, anxiety, and suicide. GLP-1 receptor agonists are licensed to treat diabetes and …

Semaglutide reduces depression risk by 44%, anxiety by 38%, and substance use disorder by 47% (other GLP1s had lower or no effect).
That said, it the failed Alzheimer/GLP1 trial taught us something, it's that confirmatory RCTs are essential.
linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pi...

Precision reward/affect fMRI study out now in HBM! onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

@dvsmith.bsky.social @olinotom.bsky.social @coopersharp.bsky.social and @shenghanwang.bsky.social

Intensively sampled task + rest fMRI data with behavioral manipulation openly available on OpenNeuro!
(1/2)

New review/theory paper out with Julie Bugg, Chris Nuno, and Changrun Huang. The upshot is that we don’t know for certain why it’s so hard to get people to engage proactive control from trial to trial (but it’s fun to think about it and speculate!).

Neuropsychologist Desiree Byrd and neuroscientists Rita Goldstein and Daniela Schiller join clinical psychologist Shilpa Taufique to discuss the scientific issues behind the new play THE RESERVOIR — ... Following the 7:00 PM performance of THE RESERVOIR on Tuesday, March 10 at the Linda Gross Theater, audiences are invited to remain for an in-depth exchange between leading researchers in neuroscience...

Discussing The Resevoir this coming Tuesday
urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=htt...

Also check out a commentary on these results, which highlights the utility of these drug-biased behavioral measures in clinical addiction research!

@narcatms.bsky.social

Moving Beyond Self-Report in Characterizing Drug Addiction: Using Drug-Biased Behavior to Predict Treatment Completion and Dropout in Heroin-Primary, Medication-Maintained Opioid Use Disorder Drug addiction is accompanied by enhanced salience attributed to drug over nondrug cues. This bias can be objectively measured and is reliable but und…

Go check out our paper illustrating that objective cognitive-behavioral measures can outperform traditional self-reports when it comes to informing clinical outcomes! This is a promising step towards improving the tools we use to assess severity.

@narcatms.bsky.social @aoceceli.bsky.social

An Open-Source Restraint System for Magnetic Resonance Imaging in Awake Rats Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a critical tool for translational neuroscience, but preclinical studies frequently rely on anesthesia, which alters neural activity and limits comparison with human...

Excited to share this in final form @sfnjournals.bsky.social: An Open-Source Restraint System for Magnetic Resonance Imaging in Awake Rats www.eneuro.org/content/13/2... if anyone wants to try doing it, give us a call! Happy to help you get going!

New paper from the lab now out online! @changrun-huang.bsky.social asked whether people use informative pre-cues to up-regulate cognitive control in the spatial Stroop task. Surprisingly, they do not, and we rule out some possible reasons why. Enjoy!

Jspsych may be worth a look: www.jspsych.org/latest/

I reviewed 5+ fMRI papers on response inhibition within roughly the last year, and the same points come up over and over again. So I wrote a short note last week entitled "The unique limitations of BOLD-fMRI in the study of response inhibition". You can read it here.
osf.io/preprints/ps...

Mindfulness-Oriented Recovery Enhancement rebalances prefrontal responses to drug and natural reward cues in opioid use disorder Despite decades of clinical implementation of medications for opioid use disorder (OUD), overdose mortality rates remain high, underscoring a critical gap in treatments that target brain mechanisms dr...

Check out our new preprint documenting how Mindfulness-Oriented Recovery Enhancement rebalances neural responses to drug and natural reward cues in opioid use disorder! W/ Yuefeng Huang, @narcatms.bsky.social, @drericgarland.bsky.social et al
@sinaibrain.bsky.social
www.medrxiv.org/content/10.6...

Students need to remember that Inigo Montoya method for emails and greetings:
"Hello, my name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.”

Polite Greeting
Name
Relevant Personal Link
Manage Expectations

Keep it BRIEF.

New work from the lab! With @jameswyngaarden.bsky.social

GLP-1 Therapies for Addiction and Mental Health Comorbidities This narrative review discusses the current landscape of glucagon-like peptide-1 therapies in the context of alcohol and other substance use disorders, mental health considerations, and gaps and oppor...

🚨 Prospects of GLP-1 Therapies for Addiction and Mental Health Comorbidities—Quo Vadis?

jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

@jamapsychiatry.com

#acnp2026

Wrapping up my 4th #ACNP while savoring this view. Grateful to the presenters as I learned a ton from the panels and posters at #acnp2026. Looking fwd to returning in 2027! @acnporg.bsky.social @sinaibrain.bsky.social

Come talk addiction cogneuro (or anything else really...) with me at poster TH54 @5p! @acnporg.bsky.social @sinaibrain.bsky.social #acnp2026

@sinaibrain.bsky.social

In attendance with the @narcatms.bsky.social lab! Excited to see old friends and meet new ones. And for everyone to check out poster TH54 on Thursday 5-7p where I'll talk about goals and habits in addiction! #acnp2026

Striatal and hippocampal contributions to value-based learning in adolescence Neuropsychopharmacology - Striatal and hippocampal contributions to value-based learning in adolescence

Interactions between striatal–prefrontal & hippocampal–prefrontal systems shape value-based learning & goal-directed behavior during adolescence; asynchronous maturation of these circuits may contribute to vulnerability to mental health disorders

This paper had a pretty shocking headline result (40% of voxels!), so I dug into it, and I think it is wrong. Essentially: they compare two noisy measures and find that about 40% of voxels have different sign between the two. I think this is just noise!

Neat! The reward/salience angle resonates with our new study showing that MPH's state effects during learning (retrieval enhanced extinction of salient drug cues), can reshape drug memory updating and corticolimbic coupling (in people with cocaine addiction). www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

This is your brain on Ritalin. Got your attention? Stimulant medications like Ritalin (methylphenidate) do, but not in the way you might think. They don't act directly on the brain’s attention systems! Find out what's really happening in @cellpress.bsky.social. doi.org/10.1016/j.ce...

Greater automaticity -> greater devaluation sensitivity?? my mind -> blown

"Socioeconomic status (SES) — not IQ or psychopathology — showed the strongest associations with both resting-state functional connectivity and cortical thickness in the ABCD Study." www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...