1/n. New paper from us: here we explore the mechanisms underlying maternal aggression in mice as a means of addressing how an individual transiently can gain access to a behaviour normally outside of its repertoire. Lead investigator Stefanos Stagkourakis (not on 🦋)🧵: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Excited to share that I landed my dream job!🎉🎉🎉 The Pennington Lab will be opening at the University of British Columbia in January 2026! @ubcpsych.bsky.social @dmcbrainhealth.bsky.social

This is fantastic work. Monkeys show the same pattern of “optimistic” exploration in multi-arm bandits www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

VTA monosynaptic connections by local glutamate and GABA neurons and their distinct roles in behavior www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🧵 BREAKING: Gene therapy shows promise in slowing Huntington’s disease progression. A major milestone in neurodegenerative disease research. @uclqsion.bsky.social @ucl-hd.bsky.social www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Please RT 2 new positions in the lab as postdoc & PhD! Interested in stress, pain, or reward? This project has it all! We are a friendly but ambitious group. Oslo is a capital city on the fjord & bordered by forest, great urban & outdoors opportunities: 💃 ⛷️ 🚣 🎭 🎶 www.jobbnorge.no/en/available...

Just learned about this diamond journal, which has apparently been running since 2015! Looks like a very nice place for any meta-sciency work & probably deserves some visibility. septentrio.uit.no/index.php/no...

Two flagship papers from the International Brain Laboratory, now out in ‪@Nature.com‬: 🧠 Brain-wide map of neural activity during complex behaviour: doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09235-0 🧠 Brain-wide representations of prior information in mouse decision-making: doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09226-1 +

Those of us still using anatomical masks for nucleus accumbens core and shell in humans, time to stop with that practice. In humans it appears to be a gradient, not sharply delimited areas. 💥

I bombed my first faculty job interview by riffing in my chalk talk about how the NAc shell/core distinction was a weak organizing principle in primates. I feel vindicated. bsky.app/profile/pras...

Nice paper from @superkash.bsky.social and team in @npp-journal.bsky.social comparing the contribution of CRF and GABA release from the same BNST neurons to ethanol self-administration. Tom you know I am obsessed with co-transmitter release this is really elegant work! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Following up: searching for the distribution of estrogen receptors in the brain, I realized the Allen Brain Atlas is male only. How is it possible that something this fundamental is still missing?

"How Are the Very Rich Feeling About New York’s Next Mayor?" A Dramatic Reading of The Recent New York Times Dispatch from the Hamptons. Presented by The Gilded Age's Morgan Spector.

❄️ Common shrews shrink their brains in winter. 🧠 The process is reversible and occurs because brain cells shrink, rather than die off. As a result, neuronal numbers stay constant and preserve brain function. I can defo relate to seasonal brain shrinkage. 🧪🦊🌍 Paper: www.cell.com/current-biol...

Super excited to share the first cooperative foraging paradigm in freely interacting mouse pairs! Stable leader and follower roles emerge spontaneously and predict learning. Well-trained mice show stereotyped, role-specific “behavioral motifs” absent in naive animals (1/5) doi.org/10.1101/2025...

new work from @zenbrainest.bsky.social and lab.

Thrilled to share this work, long time in the making! Carried through creatively by @siddjakes.bsky.social after initial design & piloting by @trackingskills.bsky.social, with help from @trackingactions.bsky.social. Modeling in collaboration with Massimo Vergassola & Nicola Rigolli.

A single stress exposure alters reward learning in ♀️ 🐀 depending on estrous cycle: ⬆️ responding in non-estrus, but ⬇️ in estrus. Repeated prior stress, however, ⬆️ cue-driven responding regardless of cycle stage

🎉 Happy to share our latest paper on #Physiology&Behavior @elsevierconnect.bsky.social Together with Luigi Micillo, Nicola Cellini and Giovanna Mioni we explored the link between cardiac #interoception and time perception 🧵in the comments

New paper from the lab, from Jeremy Biane and team, out today, characterizing the principles of stimulus feature coding in populations of ventral CA1 neurons.

My latest column for @thetransmitter.bsky.social - why neural populations are a convenient fiction doi.org/10.53053/FZK...

1/ Excited to share a new preprint! Our latest study uncovers how serotonin precisely controls the “time window” for fear learning, ensuring that our brains link cues (CS) & threats (US) only when it’s adaptive. #Neuroscience #FearLearning www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

It’s sad saying goodbye to my first PhD student, but nothing kills sadness like a katana with a manifold engraved on the blade

Dopamine dynamics in the nucleus accumbens core reflected decision confidence during evaluation of decisions in an economic foraging task in mice, as well as both past and future value during re-evaluation and change-of-mind @perothwell.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Backward Conditioning Reveals Flexibility in Infralimbic Cortex Inhibitory Memories https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.08.02.668258v1

Some neurons respond more strongly to visual stimuli than others. But the rest of the brain doesn’t prioritize signals from those neurons, according to a new study. Read more in this month’s Null and Noteworthy. By @ldattaro.bsky.social #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/null-and-not...

New lab paper by @merridee.bsky.social identifying a novel role for VTA GABA neurons in behavioral flexibility GABA, but not dopamine, neuron activation correlates with behavior when cues unexpectedly shift from predicting punishment to predicting reward www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

How do animals decide if they should forage for food or stay home to take care of newborn offspring? Whose needs come first? For my PhD work now out in Nature, we examined how hunger and parenting neurons interact and are reshaped postpartum in mice 🧵⬇️ www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Acute EtOH enhances septohippocampal coordination but disrupts intrinsic hippocampal theta dynamics during foraging https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.07.22.666144v1

Great opportunity! The Uni Vienna has launched a call (APART) for 4-funding for outstanding postdocs from a US institution. The host lab has to nominate by 1 August a candidate for further selection. Anyone interested in our work please contact me by email with CV/motivation letter. Hurry up!

New preprint!

 tl;dr — We ran around late at night to record wild rats in NYC and figured out how to quantify their behavior and environment. 🧵 w/ Dima Batenkov, @zamakany.bsky.social, Emily Mackevicius www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Finally it's out! www.nature.com/articles/s41... How flexible are essential innate behaviours and their underlying neural circuits? @felixbaier.bsky.social & I, with Hopi Hoekstra and @farrowlab.bsky.social, addressed this by studying the #evolution of threat avoidance in Peromyscus mice.

"I don't know why people have such a hard time getting papers accepted. Back in my day I published in Nature all the time."

i wrote an essay for @thetransmitter.bsky.social about what it feels like to serve on an NIH grant review panel (study section) right now www.thetransmitter.org/craft-and-ca...

The gut hormone mimetic era in medicine is just getting started www.nature.com/articles/s42... erictopol.substack.com/p/the-gut-br...

Homeostasis can keep population-level responses stable in the face of neural drift and "vanishing neurons" Nice write up of a paper I'm looking forward to reading but that seems to add more wood to the "populations are more than the sum of their neurons" fire www.nature.com/articles/s41...

This recent study found that environmental enrichment reduces sucrose cue-evoked cravings in 🐭 by disrupting neural processing in the prelimbic cortex, highlighting potential targets for developing treatments to control food cravings www.nature.com/artic...

Summary Table of the massive defunding of biomedical research in the United States www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

New paper from Deepa Ramamurthy in my lab, just out. Mice flexibly shift attention between different whiskers based on the recent history of whisker stimuli and rewards, during a tactile detection task. We saw a strong neural correlate of this attentional capture in S1 cortex. rdcu.be/euij3

🐾 Just out & open access! Exploring Animal Behavior Through Sound, Vol. 2 🎶 From insects to elephants and whales—how animals use & are affected by sound. Thanks to Christiane Erbe & all co-authors (me included)! 👉 link.springer.com/book/10.1007...

📣 We're on the lookout for a creative postdoc with strong computational skills! Be the go-to person in the lab for building simple but powerful simulations that test wild ideas on biological rythems: from daily cycles of mussel groups at deep sea, to firefly flash synchronization! More info below👇

Excited to see this finally out! Projection-TAGs allows you to do multiplex high-throughput multi-modal profiling of projection neurons. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A mouse brain stereotaxic topographic atlas with isotropic 1-μm resolution www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Hayashi et al. demonstrate that human touch-induced pleasurable tickling promotes affinity between rats and human hands. This is accompanied by increased OTR expression in the VMHvl, and blocking the oxytocin signaling inhibits such affinity. Find out more here: www.cell.com/current-biol...

The latest, from @aniloza.bsky.social at @statnews.com www.statnews.com/2025/06/25/n...

Very happy to see a Transmitter (@thetransmitter.bsky.social) piece on our recent work on estrous cycle modulation of hippocampal structure and function. Thanks to Sydney Wyatt (@sydneywyatt.bsky.social) for covering the work and its context: www.thetransmitter.org/neuroendocri...

My latest in @plosbiology.org journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...