New lab paper! 🧠

Human hippocampal & MTL theta activity is linked to eye movements, but only during memory-guided navigation. Theta is also strongest during longer, more exploratory eye movements.

plos.io/4dwJhR8

Huge congrats to Humza & team! 👏

The age of animal experiments is waning. Where will science go next? Advances in organ and computer models are raising the prospect that some animal experiments could be eliminated. But there are still huge hurdles to overcome.

Ok, but the methods are better if they’re actually better, not just new www.nature.com/articles/d41...

What a terrific group of DUNE Scholars we are privileged to have this summer! We learned so much together with human brains in our hands during our Neuroscience Retreat Day. Great young minds asking great questions and offering insightful remarks. @neurocircuits.bsky.social @dukebrain.bsky.social

And the driver of this reorganization? Hippocampal neurogenesis! Eliminating hippocampal neurogenesis prevented engram rewiring and ‘froze’ memories in their original precise state. Conversely, promoting hippocampal neurogenesis accelerated hippocampal rewiring and the emergence of gist.

7/n

Thanks everyone who came to see our trialwise RSA poster.

Preprint went live today!

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

Today in @natureneuro.bsky.social, @changlabucsf.bsky.social and @berkeleyengineer.bsky.social's Gopala Anumanchipalli, PhD, have developed a new AI-based method that decodes neural data into audible speech in real-time: engineering.berkeley.edu/news/2025/03...
#Neuroskyence 🧪

Session C on Sunday evening 5-7pm. @mslayton.bsky.social will present Understanding the mechanisms of lateral parietal memory modulation in Mild Cognitive Impairment (C65).

This project shows a change in semantic representations after TMS in prodromal AD, and we hope leads to new therapies for AD.

Multiple brain activation patterns for the same perceptual decision-making task - Nature Communications Here, the authors show the brain uses multiple activation patterns to perform the same task. Even the default mode network, which is often inactive during focus, plays a role.

New paper alert! Have you ever looked at single-trial fMRI activation maps? If so, you know that they are super variable. Here we show that the variability is not just noise. In fact, the same task can consistently elicit different activation patterns. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Drawing of Mosso’s ‘human circulation balance’, used to measure cerebral activity during resting and cognitive states

This is cool.

What do you picture when you think of the first brain imaging experiment? An fMRI machine? A PET scanner?

How about a wooden seesaw with a person lying on it? ...In 1884.

1/7

#NeuroSkyence #PsychSciSky

The administration is presenting the reduction in indirect cost rates as a way to free up more funds for research, or sometimes a cost saving to taxpayers suggesting the funds will be returned to the treasury. But, in my view, this is unlikely to be the case.

/fin

NIHTRO021025

BREAKING: Federal judge blocks Trump administration move to immediately cap federal research grants overhead at 15%. Judge Angel Kelley in Boston, a Biden appointee, grants temporary restraining order. Doc: www.documentcloud.org/documents/25... Earlier: www.politico.com/news/2025/02...

Are we paying too much for biomedical research? Trump's attack on NIH

Wonderful explainer on indirect costs by Dick Aslin open.substack.com/pub/dickasli...

Cognitive maps for hierarchical spaces in the human brain www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.02....

1. Today the NIH director issued a new directive slashing overhead rates to 15%.

I want to provide some context on what that means and why it matters.

grants.nih.gov/grants/guide...

MVPA can do more heavy-lifting than we thought! Compelling thread on the sorts of questions that can have fairly reliable answers with reasonable participant population sizes

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

doi.org/10.1126/scie...

(1/n)

SPM 25: open source neuroimaging analysis software Statistical Parametric Mapping (SPM) is an integrated set of methods for testing hypotheses about the brain's structure and function, using data from imaging devices. These methods are implemented in ...

🚨🚨New SPM version alert! 🚨🚨

Introducing SPM 25.01, plus a more modern, open ethos to its development.

Some more information about whats changes can be found here - arxiv.org/abs/2501.12081

Stable release - www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/spm/software/
GitHub developer version - github.com/spm/spm

Moving Eyes Make the Ears Squeak Scientists can now pinpoint where someone is looking just by listening to their ears. Following Duke researchers’ initial discovery that the ears emit subtle...

Did you know your ears make sounds when your eyes move? We made a demo👇 & read on about our discovery #neuroskyence 1/
youtu.be/P3geSFX48ig

🧠Hippocampal functions modulate transfer-appropriate cortical representations supporting subsequent memory🧠
Just published in the Journal of Neuroscience: www.jneurosci.org/content/earl...