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...

‘Natural’ behavior is an emergent pattern resulting from interactions between an organism’s abilities, drives, environmental conditions and life history. Behavioral training is more emphasizing a subset of this landscape than engaging novel capacity. How do you know which subsets generalize best?

Many neuroscientists suspect brain mechanisms for natural behaviors are ‘specialized’, whereas mechanisms for trained behaviors are ‘general’.

Where does this belief come from? Do biologists believe it? Seems like a conflation of ‘natural’ with pseudoscientific notions of ‘innate/hardwired’

Neuroscience has a species problem If neuroscience is serious about building general principles of brain function, cross-species dialogue must become a core organizing principle.

If neuroscience is serious about building general principles of brain function, cross-species dialogue must become a core organizing principle rather than an afterthought, writes @suthanalab.bsky.social.

#neuroskyence

www.thetransmitter.org/animal-model...

By the way, if you’re interested in working together on problems like this, I’m starting my lab at UCSF this summer. Get in touch if you’re interested in doing a postdoc! More info here: wj2.github.io/postdoc_ad (7/7)

Most insects slow down in bitter cold. Not snow flies. - UW Medicine | Newsroom

Grateful to @pewtrusts.org for funding our snow fly work, in collaboration with Sebastian Brauchi at Universidad Austral de Chile.

We are now looking for post-docs to work on the biophysical mechanisms that allow snow fly neurons and muscles to function below zero.

newsroom.uw.edu/news-release...

This is a nicely detailed explanation! But when people express frustration with low-D dynamics, I think it is exactly what you say this paper disproves: the notion that variance explained is a proxy for the important parts of neural computation

“the conventional focus on low-dimensional coding subspaces” is tired, and in many cases just an artifact of low dimensional behavior. Excited to see comp models moving past it!

Bird Brains and Behavior: A Synthesis From two avian neurobiologists, a captivating deep dive into the mechanisms that control avian behavior.The last few decades have produced extensive resear

A reminder to anyone interested in #brains #birds or behaviour, our new book is available for FREE as an ebook in addition to print copies.
#neuroethology #neuroskyence #ornithology 🧪🧠🪶

direct.mit.edu/books/oa-mon...

I’m so excited to be a part of this! Looking forward to interesting dialogues btw researchers already working at a massive scale and those trying to grow out ‘bespoke’ systems (like myself w/ chickadee neuroscience)

This was such a joy to read! Naive question: what are the D2-msn learning?

🚨Our preprint is online!🚨

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

How do #dopamine neurons perform the key calculations in reinforcement #learning?

Read on to find out more! 🧵

Tonic dopamine and biases in value learning linked through a biologically inspired reinforcement learning model Nature Communications - Accurate future predictions are essential for guiding behavior, and disruptions in this process are associated with psychiatric disorders. Here the authors show that changes...

My first paper with @naoshigeuchida.bsky.social is finally out in @natcomms.nature.com ! rdcu.be/eACGf

TL;DR: asymmetric learning rates can be induced by shifts in tonic dopamine giving rise to pessimistic/optimistic biases in agents or animals undergoing reinforcement learning .

Yea, perhaps makes more sense to psychologists than neuroscientists? In practice I think those are best used as 3 styles of investigation, for any topic, rather than as saying anything intrinsic about the subject matter

Come visit Calcutta in the last week of August and see some amazing neuroscientists talk about the neural basis of behaviour at @behaviour2025.bsky.social

With @neuroetho.bsky.social @danielavallentin.bsky.social @selmaan.bsky.social @arkarupbanerjee.bsky.social and Michael Brecht!

My latest Aronov lab paper is now published @Nature!

When a chickadee looks at a distant location, the same place cells activate as if it were actually there 👁️

The hippocampus encodes where the bird is looking, AND what it expects to see next -- enabling spatial reasoning from afar

bit.ly/3HvWSum

Remote activation of place codes by gaze in a highly visual animal Nature - Place cells in the chickadee hippocampus coherently represent locations in space, whether physically visited or viewed, enabling spatial reasoning at a distance through a unified process...

So excited to see @hannahpayne.bsky.social‘s paper out today: rdcu.be/eqAd4

It’s a beautiful result, and using a great model species for this question makes it powerfully clear and simple. Scaling up tools in a single model system won’t get you there on its own!

Exclusive: US NIH scientists barred from attending conferences on their own time and dime Researchers at the U.S. National Institutes of Health have been told they cannot attend scientific conferences and meetings without official permission, even if they pay their own way and go during time off, three current and former NIH scientists told Reuters.

"We will never use this agency to censor scientists who disagree. If scientists are censored, we can't have excellent science."

-NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya.
9 days ago on Fox and Friends.

My first paper as a senior/corresponding author, had a fantastic experience with the eLife model! Revised manuscript coming soon

Hi friends, If you haven't seen it already, I was part of a mess this week — about science in the United States, and about NIH research aimed at understanding things like Alzheimer's, schizophrenia, autism, and depression.

🧪 Thread with some details. 🧠📈 🧠🤖
1/10

How does the brain work in natural scenarios, in multi-animal societies of wild animals? 🧠 🧪 🦇

doi.org/10.1126/scie...

(1/n)

Congrats to @maxkozlov.bsky.social and @avaskham.bsky.social for having this story first, and glad the NYT picked it up from them and is sending it out to a broader audience.

What is the nature of cache memory in Parids? A comment on Chettih et al. 2024 - Animal Cognition Recent findings by Chettih et al. (Cell 187: 1922–1935, 2024) from electrophysiological recordings in the hippocampus of black-capped chickadees shed light on the debate about how food-hoarding Parids...

Further musings about how food-hoarding titmice and chickadees remember the locations of their caches....
link.springer.com/10.1007/s100...

Thanks Tom! I appreciate the comments, and I agree our evidence is for cued recall in the paper. But I should add: we have no evidence *against* free recall, we just did not analyze it yet. Topic of ongoing experiments. So I’d add that caveat to your comments here until we get results!

This includes NY11, ie Staten Island

Stand Up And Be Counted

🔥 take on 🧪 industry silence to NIH changes: '“three levels of corruption” ... Biopharma CEOs: what will protect you then? Speak up, speak up now. Because as it stands, you're forming up on the wrong side of a very important line. Time will not be kind.' www.science.org/content/blog...

flying back from interviews to lab = same vibe

Interested in understanding how things work? In particular the tools you use to study the brain? Join us at TENSS 2025 where we brainstorm ideas, build and debug microscopes, electrophysiology and behavior rigs amidst the picturesque Transylvanian hills! tenss.ro
Apply by: February 16th!

Technically a mountain chickadee, not the black capped chickadee I study. But they all share that ‘tiny dog aggressively yelling at every big dog it sees on the street’ energy