transformer-circuits.pub/2026/emotion... This got press hate because of the word "emotions" but it is cool work. "Internal motivational states" serve as a form of working memory that helps animals organize their behavior, so why not ask if similar computational primitives help LLMs to do the same?

Hey @ditzkoff.bsky.social I knew I recognized you! Sorry for the identity mishap, trying to work on my journalist vs. neuroscientist decoder.

This is only true for people who understand neither science nor economics. The NIH budget for this year is FIFTY times larger than OpenAI’s $1B pledge. The foundation of US science & innovation is public funding. The private sector cannot replace it. US science is being killed

@jhennig.bsky.social has shown that dopamine exerts a real-time effect on conditioned responding, beyond its role in learning: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Another indication that dopamine is more than a learning signal! A joint effort with @naoshigeuchida.bsky.social and @mhburrell.bsky.social.

Remember this example whenever anyone tells you that you’re generally safe living in a blue city within a red state (something I was told frequently while on the faculty job market)

Cosyne invited me to give a long tutorial (4 hours!) on methods to quantify differences high-d neural recordings across animals, brain regions, deep neural nets, etc. The recording is up on youtube. I hope it inspires more research on this fundamental topic! www.youtube.com/watch?v=n44x...

Today in @nature.com, the @christophthaiss.bsky.social & @maayanlevy.bsky.social labs trace age-related memory loss to the gastrointestinal tract & map the complete gut-to-brain pathway driving it. Targeting this pathway can reverse cognitive aging in mice. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Check out our latest research drop! We show BLA dopamine signaling encodes the emotional weight of sensory transitions, but not the associative strength or value of stimuli. These signals dynamically rescale when the learning context changes: "this matters most!" www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

NIH Director Bhattacharya signals an end to the affirmative action program for ESI drugmonkey.wordpress.com/2026/02/26/n...

Here's a quick analysis I did on data I've been collecting on psych/neuro faculty applicants. I don't have data on unsuccessful applicants, but my inference is that women mentored by women have to rely more on bringing in $ to get a faculty job than men mentored by men.

Very excited to post our paper led by @daburke.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41... where we uncover a simple mathematical rule underlying how brains learn that a cue predicts a reward. 1/26

Now published in Neuropharmacology! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Science: U.S. government has lost more than 10,000 STEM Ph.D.s since Trump took office By Jeffrey Mervis, Monica Hersher @science.org @policyhound.bsky.social @mghersher.bsky.social bit.ly/3M8yf9B

Since the Namboodiri lab isn’t on Bluesky (I think?), I’d like to amplify this cool paper which I and others in the Janak lab made a small contribution to.

The conference (agreement between House and Senate) appropriations bill that includes HHS and NIH was released this morning. www.appropriations.senate.gov/news/majorit... 1/5

A long, absolutely must-read article from Cory Doctorow: www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-i...

Can humans & animals really use internal maps to take shortcuts? Tolman famously said yes - based largely on his Sunburst maze. Our new review & meta-analysis suggests evidence is far weaker than you might think. 🧵👇 doi.org/10.1111/ejn.... @uofgpsychneuro.bsky.social @ejneuroscience.bsky.social

I don't think you non-science people realize what it takes to get a grant funded by NIH. Started experiments in Sept 2021 to generate 3 new mouse mutants to model human disease. Prelim dara shows they have relevant disease phenotypes worthy of study. Need a small grant first to characterize /1

Excited to share latest study from the lab by an amazing RA, Dylan Flink. We solved a small (important) puzzle while in the trenches of a larger (wavy 🌊) puzzle. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 🧵...

Sleep dependent consolidation and replay that doesn’t require the hippocampus? Very beautiful work by Marcus Stephenson-Jones’ lab on sleep driven sequential skill consolidation in the striatum. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

🚨New Kutlu Lab preprint! Excited to share our latest work led by Oyku Dinckol and Noah Wenger. 🔗 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... We find that ACh shapes DLS neural ensembles for outcome learning but is biased toward signaling threats over rewards 👇

22% fewer NIH grants

Nature Sci Rep publishes incoherent AI slop. eLife publishes a paper which the reviewers didn't agree with, making all the comments and responses public with thoughtful commentary. One of these journals got delisted by Web of Science for quality concerns from not doing peer review. Guess which one?

So excited to see our latest paper out today in @natcomms.nature.com! Studies led by the amazing @margestelzner.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41.... VTA GABA neurons have a unique role in economic decision making - they integrate reward seeking motivation and the current cost of seeking

Good morning everyone! Suitably following the #dopamine dinner, we have our #dopamine symposium at 9:30am in SDCC room 6B! ‘Beyond Value: Non-canonical roles for dopamine in aversion and reward’ Come join us! 🧠 🧪

If you're at SfN on Monday, come by poster board II10 to see how fentanyl changes cell type-specific encoding of choice outcomes in the striatum to influence decision-making phenotypes. Looking forward to seeing some cool science and supporting SfN during these difficult times!

If you're at SfN on Monday, come by poster board II10 to see how fentanyl changes cell type-specific encoding of choice outcomes in the striatum to influence decision-making phenotypes. Looking forward to seeing some cool science and supporting SfN during these difficult times!

Delighted to see this finally out: rdcu.be/eO9oW We tested whether brief striatal dopamine release events influence the vigor of skilled movements. Despite popular belief, we did not find any evidence linking rapid dopamine dynamics to motor vigor on a moment-by-moment basis.

VTA dopamine neuron activity produces spatially organized value representations https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.11.04.685995v1

Nature suggests you use their "Manuscript Adviser" bot to get advice before submitting I uploaded the classic Watson & Crick paper about DNA structure, and the Adviser had this to say about one of the greatest paper endings of the century:

I first heard Jack DeJohnette as part of the Keith Jarrett trio when I was ~14. I didn’t like his drumming and thought it sounded sloppy. For whatever reason, it clicked with me much later. Here’s a 🔥 clip I discovered recently. RIP JD youtu.be/a3CZHr5uiNM?...

Some great consideration of differences in learning and performance during blocking (the sine qua non of PE phenomena) in sign vs goal trackers here: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Nice preprint from Veronica Alvarez's group on cortically-evoked DA mediated by ACh! I We observed something quite similar in birds, and interesting to see the sensory/prefrontal distinction

We have an open NIH-funded postdoc position in the lab to study circuit and neurochemical mechanisms of cognitive and motivational deficits in opioid withdrawal. Apply here: recruit.ap.uci.edu/JPF09885 or message/email for more information.

I'm recruiting a PhD student to study how enkephalins affect cognitive processing in the rodent frontal cortex. The project uses pharmacology, multi-electrode recordings, and fiber photometry, and is funded by NIDA. Please share with trainees applying this cycle. Thanks!

This may be the most important paper ever published about NIH funded research. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

A mechanistic theory of planning in prefrontal cortex https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.23.677709v1

Today 1-2 pm CST bit.ly/3VOJrcy Join us!

🚨Our preprint is online!🚨 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... How do #dopamine neurons perform the key calculations in reinforcement #learning? Read on to find out more! 🧵

This article is truly impressive, both for the significance of its findings and the enormous amount of work it represents! Briefly, it demonstrates that the gut-brain vagal axis exerts a considerable influence on dopamine-dependent reward-related processes... 1/n www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

How does the brain decide? 🧠 Our new @nature.com paper shows that neural activity switches from an 'evidence gathering' to a 'commitment' state at a precise moment we call nTc. After nTc, new evidence is ignored, revealing a neural marker for the instant when the mind is made up. rdcu.be/eGUrv

Though it’s traumatic for me to bring this up, I was targeted by a group allied with Turning Point USA in 2018, with the help of Tucker Carlson on Fox. My home address circulated online and I got death threats. 1/

Director Bhattacharya says there are no banned words at the NIH. The data suggest otherwise.

I am beyond excited to host a stellar group of scientists for the first installation of our series: Brain Talks on The Isthmus. Thank you to everyone who contributed by spreading the news, submitting abstracts, reviewing the submissions, and offering kind words of support. I am grateful and smiling

🚨 We’re hiring a postdoc! 🚨 Excited for our new NiCE grant with @lauerlab.bsky.social @batwoman123.bsky.social 🎉We use a comparative approach, two-photon imaging & optogenetics to identify why bats🦇 and deer mice resist noise but lab mice don't. If you're interested, please DM or e-mail me!

What can *genetic insensitivity to opioids* teach us about endogenous opioid function in humans? Fully funded position in Oslo (PhD student or postdoc) Interested in pain, mu/kappa opioids, behavioural genetics, RCTs, or related? Apply here: 2411.webcruiter.no/Main2/Recrui... Please RT for reach

TL;DR: 5 justices say Trump doesn't have to immediately restore the funding, but 5 *also* signal that the underlying directives are unlawful. That sends a fairly strong (if mixed) message that Trump will lose these cases *eventually,* but only once they're brought in the Court of Federal Claims.

🚨BREAKING NEWS: RFK Jr. is a danger to this nation. Don’t give in to Trump & his cronies: we are NOT trading innovation for ideology. We demand the immediate IMPEACHMENT and REMOVAL of RFK. Stop the quack. Protect Science. Protect Democracy Sign & share here: zurl.co/PEPyD #StandUpForScience

This op-ed from NIH director Jay Bhattacharya is *infuriating*. He says we have to stop funding mRNA vaccine research because it hasn't "earned public trust." Motherfucker, WHO DID THAT.

I’m excited to share my latest paper, in which we used latent state modeling to reveal how fentanyl shapes decision-making dynamics in rats. Here’s a summary of what we found (thread). www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...