“For 30 years, we’ve taught students that the mouse olfactory epithelium is divided into a handful of broad zones, within which receptor choice is essentially random,” @odorjohan.bsky.social told me. Now we know it's not random. My latest for @nature.com 🧪 www.nature.com/articles/d41...

The Developmental Origins of Behavioral Individuality - great review by Benjamin de Bivort www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

Re-reading Sperry's 1956 classic "The Eye and the Brain" - just an incredibly clear demonstration of innate patterning of neural connections share.google/LkHQjtH1WIqK...

The dialectical underpinnings of multilevel selection Evolution isn’t flat: new levels arise through conflict and then reshape the very dynamics that brought them into being

New paper (with lots of cute animal videos!) Ever watch your dog "run" while asleep and wonder what’s going on in their brain? In Current Bio we suggest that those twitches aren't just leaky dreams—they’re a vital maintenance system for the most precise movements www.cell.com/current-biol...

@macshine.bsky.social talks with Mario Senden about his new project using AI-driven bibliometrics to map the structural organization of neuroscience across 25 years. The field it reveals is at once thriving and theoretically adrift. #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/methods/what...

Our paper is out today!!! (not an April fool's day joke) Congrats to authors @azulsilva.bsky.social, @belalima-paiva.bsky.social, Ele Pronier, and mostly to the amazing scientist and human being who led this project @facuumm.bsky.social #neuroskyence #hippocampus www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Statistics of natural scenes shape contextual modulation in the visual cortex www.cell.com/neuron/fullt... - would be really interesting to do this right after eye opening!

On the latest episode, @braininspired.bsky.social with @juangallego.bsky.social about the wealth of evidence that supports the view that neural manifolds are real and useful, even if they may not completely solve the age-old mind-body problem. #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/brain-inspir...

Have you ever wondered why mice do what they do when they are free to do whatever they want? Check out our latest (and this slightly delayed thread about our recent paper, led by Caleb Weinreb and friends...) www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...

Get lost in the unexpected beauty of a developing zebrafish eye. These incredible 3D images are possible thanks to #HHMIInvestigator & Janelia Sr. Fellow Eric Betzig, who developed a microscopy technique combining two imaging approaches — including one used by astronomers.

1/8. New preprint! Using fUSi in head-fixed mice🐭, we found that arousal events trigger a brain-wide wave of activity 🌊🧠. Surprisingly, this pattern was preserved during opto manipulations of the locus coeruleus, pointing to a minor role for noradrenergic tone. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

I thought this was an exciting new theoretical perspective www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...

📢📢 My lab at @utah.edu is officially open and I'm RECRUITING — especially techs/specialists and postdocs! Our research focuses on the neurobiology of interoception and learning & memory using tools from systems/comp neuro. Please share! 🧠🏔️🏜️ Apply/more info: zimmerman-lab.org#positions

Very happy to see this out. 👏 @yinanwan.bsky.social Bogdan Bintu and team. Whole-embryo spatial transcriptomics at subcellular resolution from gastrulation to organogenesis | free link Science www.science.org/eprint/5MHTM...

New paper hot off the (pre-)press! We dig into the evolutionary origins of neural computations for behavioral control across mice, monkeys, and humans: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6.... As our lab's first foray into comparative analysis of neural dynamics, I’m super excited about this work! 1/18

super useful thread!

Super interesting work - congrats to all! 👏 A wonderful example of how innate circuit structure prepares the brain to represent experience. (Linking to Kant's idea of the innate category of Space)

1/7 🧠 My journey into development begins with this work and question: how does the brain's spatial navigation system develop? We found that the neural networks for spatial navigation (tori and rings) are preconfigured and only later anchor gradually to the world with experience! 🧵

New Perspective form Rory Maizels & me: "Gene regulatory networks: from correlative models to causal explanations" Gene regulatory networks are supposed to give us mechanistic explanations of development, so why are we drowning in 'hairballs' of statistical correlations? rdcu.be/e7zx7

1/n: A new collaborative preprint from the lab to start the year: "A multi-ring shifter network computes head direction in zebrafish" together with Siyuan Mei, Martin Stemmler and Andreas Herz from the LMU, Munich.

Recurrent cortical networks encode natural sensory statistics via sequence filtering www.cell.com/neuron/abstr... #neuroscience

Finally getting on top of new papers and god there are so many good ones. This from Lykken, Kanter, @edvardmoser.bsky.social & @m-bmoser.bsky.social is brilliant. Neuropixels showing differential phase shifts across grid modules drive place cell remapping. Elegant grid-to-place transformation story.

Dendritic arbors provide neuroscience with an ideal opportunity to study how individual neurons interact with their broader circuitry and are the field’s best bet to bridge cellular and systems neuroscience, writes @justinkohare.bsky.social. #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/dendrites/de...

Mission: record hippocampal place cells in zero gravity Crew: 3 rats with electrode arrays Vehicle: Space Shuttle Columbia Status: data now publicly available on DANDI, 28 years later The ratstronauts' mission is finally complete. 🐀🚀 h/t NASA about.dandiarchive.org/blog/2026/02...

Calcium spikes know which way the wind blows! Lily Nguyen and I wrote a dispatch on this fascinating work led by Itzel [email protected]+Gaby Maimon! authors.elsevier.com/a/1mfk53QW8S...

Our new paper is now out showing how time perception in animals is linked to their ecology. Using data from 237 species we show temporal perception is faster in species that fly and pursuit predators www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🌐

Wonderful new paper from @mikehgoldstein.bsky.social 's lab! royalsocietypublishing.org/rstb/article...

With this one in print, I think I finally earned that PhD... 😅 Presented for the first time at the cosyne when the world ended (March 2020). I'll bring over a summary thread from twitter when it was still twitter... www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

1. I’m quite happy with this popular piece that Lee Dugatkin and I wrote recently. For the next two weeks it’s free to read on the American Scientist website.

🚀 New preprint from the lab! Our first foray into the subiculum uses in vivo whole-cell recordings to show that dendritic plateaus are a prominent, learning-dependent signaling mode of subicular neurons. Feedback is welcome! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

My paper on the head direction neurons in the larval zebrafish is now published on Nature! Read it here: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

New paper alert! 🚨 We found that the brain's compass is remarkably stable at two scales 1️⃣ the system maintains its internal organization for weeks 2️⃣ It "remembers" its orientation for weeks, even after a single visit This may be key to how the brain aligns its other maps. Paper: rdcu.be/e3waP

PhD opportunity in "The role of neural development in multimodal intelligence" with me, @marcusghosh.bsky.social and @flor-iacaruso.bsky.social. Read details below 👇. Note there's a very short window for applying (deadline Feb 27). 🤖🧠🧪 www.imperial.ac.uk/school-of-co...

My first first-author paper is on bioRxiv! Here we ask whether the same subset of neurons in ACC always display object correlates during extensive familiarisation to 2 objects. A short 🧵1/10

There is a new wave of neuroscience research detailing how PIEZO channels contribute to the brain’s sense of what the internal organs are doing. It’s a “PIEZO-driven renaissance,” @wormsense.bsky.social says. By @callimcflurry.bsky.social #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/interoceptio...

What drives the sequential emergence of spatial neurons in developing rats? In our ICLR 2026 paper, we show how changes in movement statistics drive spatial tuning. Our model replicates experimental timelines and predicts novel conjunctive tuning maturation. doi.org/10.64898/2025.12.30.696864

I'm very excited to finally see this one out in @natneuro.nature.com ! It has been an incredible journey alongside extremely talented people! Thanks to everyone involved and enjoy the reading! 1/n www.nature.com/articles/s41...

After sketching out how PIEZO channels contribute to touch and proprioception, scientists are now using the channels as a tool to study internal organs, including the heart, bladder, uterus and kidney. By @callimcflurry.bsky.social #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/interoceptio...

Amid the hype around prattling "AI" models, astonishing research into living minds gets overlooked. Wonderful piece by @yaseminsaplakoglu.bsky.social in @quantamagazine.bsky.social about bats navigating in a natural environment, decoding the sense of direction. www.quantamagazine.org/how-animals-...

We had a lot of fun doing these experiments! Theta sweeps in MEC and internal direction signals in parasubiculum track moving objects during pursuit and reverse during backward movement. Simultaneously recorded HD cells in other areas remain locked to head direction across behaviors:

www.cell.com/cell/fulltex... We had a lot of fun working on this project (led by Itzel Ishida, not on bluesky). Some interesting highlights from the paper -

Whether the system can be flexibly redirected to prioritize specific locations has been unclear. Using large-scale #Neuropixels recordings in freely behaving rats, we find that both sweeps – and the internal direction signals driving them – are dynamically modulated moment by moment. (4/6)

New great work from our lab. Check out the beautiful videos! Bravi @azvollan.bsky.social and the team!

Excited for the publication of our recent work on how pyramidal cells shape the identity of interneurons in the Cortex! Big shout out to @artofbiology and Sherry Jingjing wu! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I’m very happy to share the latest from my lab published in @Nature Hippocampal neurons that initially encode reward shift their tuning over the course of days to precede or predict reward. Full text here: rdcu.be/eY5nh

For decades, imaging has forced the same trade-off: Set a frame rate → sacrifice resolution or field of view to go fast. We break that rule Using an EVENT-BASED CAMERA, we record neural activity without frames. Signals are captured only where and when they occur: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

This is going to be an amazing conference in Athens in June 2026 The Neural Basis of Natural Behaviours I'll be there talking about recording brains while riding the waves between atolls on trimaran in the pacific: conferences.weizmann.ac.il/NBNB2026/spe...

Excited to share @rbrianroome.bsky.social ‘s beautiful paper on development of the dorsal horn of the mouse spinal cord @science.org This is how the anatomical organization and cell types that process pain, touch, body position and more are laid down. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

1/6: New publication from the lab: “Plastic landmark anchoring in zebrafish compass neurons” by Ryosuke Tanaka (@ryosuketanaka.bsky.social) and Ruben is available here: rdcu.be/eX1L4