The Orange Cat Brain Atlas is here. 🧠🐈
Today, we published the first comprehensive cellular map of the orange cat brain. The new atlas reveals a single, specialized neuron responsible for behaviors like staring at walls, knocking objects off tables, and the 3am "zoomies."
Congratulations Aaron!
This moves the goalposts for what makes a mind-blowing illusion
Leftmost goal isn't actually facing the camera
Great for MOCAP making it to last Saturday's NYT Crossword
Miranda Priestley "Details of your incompetence do not interest me" from the Devil Wears Prada
The academic version of
Reach out if you have any comments! I will put together a bluesky version ("skeetprint"?) over the weekend.
I want to thank to the reviewers for their tough but fair feedback, which I honestly think made this work stronger. I was nervous about trying eLife's new model, but editor and reviewers made it a smooth experience. (Also: the longest revision/response letter I have written so far).
Our latest work is now a version-of-record article (rather than a reviewed preprint) at @elife.bsky.social :
elifesciences.org/articles/90780
with co-authors Kahori Kita, Scott Albert, Bob Scheidt, @rezashadmehr.bsky.social, and John Krakauer.
Congratulations!
Random thoughts while going through paper proofs - how long until the terms "clockwise" and "counterclockwise" stop making intuitive sense? As traditional clocks become less common/relevant
Trust as in, is the linear fit shown indeed calculated based on the data? Maybe, there are many blue dots on the top-right. More color contrast would be nice! Trust as in, is a linear fit a good description of what's going on here, not so sure...
The frequency of review requests seems to follow the "when it rains, it pours" rule
For your enjoyment (by @jagarikin)
Congratulations!
Non-science post: if you are among the trivia aficionados in LearnedLeague, check out today's round on Ancient Roman cuisine that my friend Max and I put together!
Recently published work found that reinforcement motor learning was impaired in individuals within 3 months after #stroke. The findings are important for optimizing #neurorehabilitation after stroke as some #rehabilitation approaches rely on reinforcement. 🧠📈 🧪
journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1...
Congratulations Sam!
I am also honored to receive a Career Development Award from the @americanheart.bsky.social to push this work forward. I want to thank both the AHA and my faculty mentors in this award: David Lin at MGH, Conor Walsh at Harvard SEAS, and Monica Perez at Shirley Ryan.
Excited to share my recent appointment as Instructor at MGH/HMS! I will continue and expand my work dissecting the neural mechanisms behind the different components of post-stroke motor impairment. The goal/hope is that better mechanistic understanding will reveal new targets for rehabilitation.
Correct, all mysteries in the brain will be unveiled through the *cough* prism of visuomotor rotations.
This suggests a clear benefit for latency reduction in computer-based training that involves implicit sensorimotor learning. Critically, it means that across-study differences may be explained by differences in unmeasured feedback latencies. We thus need to measure, report, and minimize latency. 6/6
We found that, just a 60 ms increase in latency (from 25 ms to 85 ms) decreased implicit learning by 1/3 and increased explicit learning proportionally. Implicit sensorimotor learning was much more (5-10x) sensitive to latencies in the sub- 100 ms range than to higher latencies. 5/6
We trained participants on a visuomotor rotation (VMR) under latencies of 25, 85, or 300ms. 25ms was the minimum we could achieve in our optimized setup; 85ms is within the latencies expected on an average setup. We dissected learning into implicit and explicit components using aim reports. 4/6
Neurophysiology suggests that learning-related mechanisms such as cerebellar LTD and cortical LTP are disrupted by similarly short latencies, so this question might be worth investigating. 3/6
Short delays in visual feedback (under 100 ms) are common in human-computer interactions—and, while hard to perceive, they’re known to hurt performance in tasks like pointing or robotic surgery. Do these tiny lags also impair sensorimotor learning? 2/6
Our latest paper with Maurice Smith and team is now out: Tiny visual latencies can profoundly impair implicit sensorimotor learning, in Scientific Reports rdcu.be/eldlh. A brief summary: 1/n
Is it Kobe or somewhere by the Aegean?
Congratulations!
Following up on my email from last year
