I'm recruiting a postdoc! The Sheahan Lab at the Medical College of Wisconsin is looking to add a postdoctoral fellow to our team to expand our work studying the neurobiology of itch and pain in the central nervous system. Please share and reach out if you have any questions!

Findings from a recent study suggest that exploration targets are identified through coordinated activity binding prefrontal default network value representations to posterior hippocampal maps. Find out more: bit.ly/4ua2lLe

New neuromapr #rstats package is available from GitHub! Highly experimental, early adopters and bug identifiers are super welcome to report issues! github.com/lcbc-uio/neu... #neuroscience #rstats #neuroimaging

If this result generalises, then the field's great dendritic computation dream is over

#PenNLINC is recruiting a clinical coordinator / lab manager!!! Looking for someone who is good with both people + code, wants to learn to acquire + analyze imaging data. Alumni in this role have written 1st author papers + gone to top grad programs. Website: www.pennlinc.io Job: bit.ly/4ojvCir

@andrewpapale.bsky.social 's new explore/exploit paper in JNeurosci with @vanessabrown.bsky.social @drangelaianni.bsky.social Michael Hallquist & Bea Luna: www.jneurosci.org/content/earl... PFC-DMN and hippocampus encode value maxima in exploitation, but their synchronization peaks in exploration.

And now for something completely different! In this new lab preprint led by Ceci Westbrook, we find a link between successful control of repetitive thought and increased activity in attention-related brain networks. By contrast, default mode activity was not associated with regulatory success.

It's publication day for 📘Elusive Cures. What a moment! 1st book, 1st time on Mindscape (which, as many of you know, is one of my favorite podcasts). Here, @seanmcarroll.bsky.social and I have a wide-ranging conversation around: Why are brain and mental disorders so hard to understand and treat?

Reading the "Networking" chapter about the internet in "Algorithms to Live By." Are healthy relationships in social psychology characterized by interactions that mirror TCP packets in Additive Increase, Multiplicative Decrease (AIMD) algorithms?

does nature, in the form of neural ensembles, prefer winner take all (first past the post) voting or ranked choice voting? Making an analogy to Democratic systems on this primary election day. Can a neuron represent multiple simultaneous and competing options?

Given the forces acting on a golf ball during a putt and the shape of the green, how many possible paths can it take to get to the hole? On any particular path, what is the margin of error on the magnitude and direction of the force applied by the club? ⛳️

Hey folks! I'll be teaching two workshops in May on Structural Equation Modeling! One course is introductory (May 7-9): smart-workshops.com/intro-sem-info The other is on longitudinal models (May 14-16): smart-workshops.com/long-sem-info 🙏Please RT and share! 🙏 Let met tell you more...

We often use discretization to approximate continuous laws of physics, but it also goes the other way: You can use continuous equations to approximate the behavior of discrete systems! Here we'll see how electrical circuits can be modeled using the Laplace equation Δφ=0. [1/n]

Has anyone applied big O notation to derive constraints on decision-making algorithms on the timescale of neural processing? 🤔

Excited to share a summary of a new preprint looking at exploration in ventral prefrontal cortex and hippocampus using fMRI. A 🧵...1/15

Interested in dopamine? Have fMRI data? We’ve identified a temporal BOLD feature that carries rich information about dopamine physiology. This measure, obtainable from resting-state and task fMRI, opens new ways to indirectly probe dopamine’s role in cognition and disease. 1/n tinyurl.com/bddyz67b

Please share: FT RA opening in my lab w/ June/July start. Join a team studying cognitive risk for internalizing psychopathology during the transition to college. Good preparation for PhD (current RA is starting her PhD this fall, with me!) #PsychSciSky brandeis.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/Jobs/job/Bra...

We are recruiting a Principal Investigator in Computational Biology at @oicr.on.ca: oicr.bamboohr.com/careers/378. This position is in downtown Toronto, adjacent to the University of Toronto where your university appointment would be. Please contact me if you have any questions!

Carl Olson, Professor of the Neuroscience Institute at CMU, died Nov. 23, 2024. Carl was a renowned neuroscientist who provided insights into fundamental issues in the neural basis of cognition. Read more about Carl's life and legacy in his published obituary. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

My academic department (at Wesleyan University, CT, US) is searching for a one-year Visiting Professor position in Developmental Psychology. Great place to teach for a year! Apply here: wesleyan.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/career...

Dear trainee friends (et al.), 'Tis true that parts of the sky are falling & this is distracting. However, if you happen to have done A THING (paper, etc.), we want to support you. Don't hold back from letting us know. So we can learn and 👏. We're still here for the science. Sincerely, Everyone

Prefrontal default-mode network interactions with posterior hippocampus during exploration www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Bluetorial: My NIH grant got funded; The money is in the bank What happens behind the scenes with NIH fund transfers

It might be fun 2 explore defining and categorizing simple shapes with the curvature method. Biologically, how do different joints and body compositions constrain curvature of movement trajectories? Could this lead to better control algorithms for robotics? en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curvature

Confirmed (by many sources) news about 50 NIH Study Sections being allowed to announce meetings in the Federal Register. As usual, MANY more questions than answers... 1/2

Good story up on funding lag from WESA, an NPR station in Pittsburgh. www.wesa.fm/health-scien... 1/2

Unfortunately, this seems ever more relevant.

Get in dorks, we're going protesting! STAND UP FOR SCIENCE WITH US ON MARCH 7TH, 2025 WASHINGTON DC AND EVERY STATE CAPITOL Because science is for everyone! Find us at www.standupforscience2025.org #standupforscience2025 #scienceforall #sciencenotsilence

Tesla's stock is ridiculously overvalued, and even a modest consumer boycott could tank the company, which accounts for the majority of Elon Musk's wealth. The divestment movement weakened apartheid South Africa. Let's do that again. slate.com/business/202...

I’ve been seething and grieving since yesterday’s Friday Night Massacre of NIH overheads, a seeming bit of bureaucratic trivial that will in fact destroy the US university system if unchecked. But I want to get away from budgets and rate breakdowns and F&A percentages for a moment. Humor me?

Everyone seems to be framing Trump's freeze on federal grants as a Constitutional fight over powers of the purse & whether presidents can disregard Congressional appropriations. It is that. But also at stake is the fundamental validity of government contracts! I see much less discussion on this... 🧵

Thoughts today: What is the psychology of why we find destruction (e.g. demolition of a building, a car crash) exciting and worth watching? Is it different than the impulse to break things ourselves?

I'm imagining a future where a trained therapist delivers targeted TMS during CBT at the precise moment when they share a method of coping or rethinking a troubling situation the patient shares with them. Someday maybe the patients themselves could have mobile stim devices.

omg a student somehow accidentally wrote an email addressed to a faculty-wide NYU listserv and my inbox is now a master class on who understands the difference between a listserv and an email chain

Here’s a brief summary of our new paper with @andrewpapale.bsky.social on ‘Symmetry in frontal but not motor and somatosensory cortical projections’ now @sfnjournals.bsky.social www.jneurosci.org/content/44/3... 1/24

Hot take: It's far more likely the cortex is based on intuitive geometrical principles like movement through imaginary spaces that Jeff Hawkins lays out in "A Thousand Brains" than statistical concepts like probabilities that we use to analyze cortex and that underlie modern AI.

Does anyone know the history of why Bell labs and other industry sponsored basic research enterprises dried up?

I'm glad you're still here. I'm glad you're choosing to be here and be kind.

Do any of my contacts have an MBA and a PhD/MD? How do the two degrees train you to think differently about problems? Do you think there could be a cleverly designed assessment to tease apart the differences in training and problem solving between the two?

Want to be my colleague? NYU is looking to hire an Assistant Professor appointed in both Neural Science & Psychology with a focus on human cognitive neuroscience. #psychscisky #neuroskyence #neuroai apply.interfolio.com/153500

Academics! Where do you prefer or hope to publish? Have a few minute to tell us? My group at CU Boulder is surveying the publication preferences of academics in a pairwise comparison survey called Publish or Comparish. → tinyurl.com/PubPrefs Thanks for considering & pls share with colleagues!

The discoverability of feeds is really lacking. Here's a list of just science feeds:

Exploration of contralateral cortico- cortical, -striatal and -thalamic anatomical connectivity from M1, S1, and two premotor areas in mouse. Strong bilateral symmetry in premotor but not S1 or M1. Premotor symmetry largely absent in corticothalamic projections. www.jneurosci.org/content/earl...

Bluesky Smiling at me Nothing but bluesky Do I see

How much does a graduate student cost per year in your program? I'm putting together a list of how much graduate students cost departments/faculty at different universities. Please contribute to the attached google sheet and please RT! Thanks! docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

Do memories of good things produce positive RPEs?

When you add 1+1 = 2 in Matlab, is it theoretically possible to compute how many transistors flipped state? Thinking about Marr's levels of analysis and what constitutes a 'mechanism.'

Google scholar word cloud! Built using this; t.co/mrkKxYHtRH

How does the brain maintain E/I balance while encoding long term memories in synaptic weights? Shouldn't there be a trade off or optimal balance of the two in networks according to Hebbian plasticity theory? Should E/I balance more accurately be characterized as a 3 way juggling act?

Very glad to join the blue skies of #HiSciSky, #neuroscience, #neuroskyence, #PsychSciSky, #Psychology, #PsychSci, #MedSky. My lab works on the neural dynamics of brain systems, how they issue contextual predictions from internal representations and perceptual signals, in health & disease. ⚡🧠⚡