I watched this a bunch of times, trying to figure out wtf could be going through RFK Jr’s head. As much as I detest the guy, the only logical conclusion I can reach is that he was going to get help

The NIH institute director firing last Friday is very bad. I made a video explainer about why. Stay for last post, w link to @science.org story from @jocelynkaiser.bsky.social 1/4 🧪

I made a video about the shutdown, and why this government worker won’t be a pawn. When the president and Supreme Court are both acting lawlessly, Congress must stand up and stop it. US science is collapsing and Congress needs to act. 🧪 Full video here: www.instagram.com/reel/DP1tXXE...

Nolan was the developer of the SNT TMS protocol, the most promising new treatment for depression there is. It’s a real tragedy

A thought-provoking piece in Nature Neuroscience by many neuroscience colleagues: "Science must break its silence to rebuild public trust". Lots to think about here. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

So I get that a Neuroscientist Couldn’t Understand a Microprocessor, and TBH I’m ok with that. But could a neuroscientist understand a deep RNN? Because that seems like a more pressing issue. *assuming you think the brain operates through the parallel activity of many connected input/output units

Anyone interested in optics needs to check out this wild story of how those gigantic photomultiplier tubes were made: www.hamamatsu.com/jp/en/why-ha...

It can be very easy for people who have never professionally sat with people (and their families) who experience the devastation of mental illness to pontificate about its existence and treatment from an armchair.

Look at the size of this photomultiplier tube in the Nobel Prize museum. Imagine doing two photon imaging with one of those!

It makes me sad there is an entire generation that has not seen Office Space

Language is how other people convey their thoughts to us, so we are naturally prone to take language as evidence of thought. But evolutionarily, thought is much older and deeper than language

I’m pleased to share our new paper, “Hippocampal ripple diversity organizes neuronal reactivation dynamics in the offline brain”, out in @cp-neuron.bsky.social ! With @vitorlds.bsky.social and David Dupret, we show that diversity in ripple current profiles shapes reactivation dynamics

I’m super excited to finally put my recent work with @behrenstimb.bsky.social on bioRxiv, where we develop a new mechanistic theory of how PFC structures adaptive behaviour using attractor dynamics in space and time! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Too late, Batman. Once this Tylenol floods the city's water supply, my wiki won't run out of editors ever again

🛑 Attention researchers who train freely-moving rodents! Jess Breda and I developed a protocol for training center-port nose fixation 61% faster than a previous curriculum while keeping violation rates low. Preprint here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

I was texting someone about the Tylenol/autism announcement, and for the first time, I accidentally typed “ducking” and my phone successfully autocorrected it to “fucking”

Some good news, which seems rare lately: I was promoted to Associate Professor!

Thrilled to share that our work is now published in Science! ✨ We found a preference for visual objects in the mouse spatial navigation system where they dynamically refine head-direction coding. In short, objects boost our inner compass! 🧭 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... 🧵1/

::slowly stands while clapping::

I’ve always found this type of snobbery weird. “I’m better than you because I’m a superior consumer of other people’s greatness”

This is easily the most hilarious yet devastatingly accurate scientific takedown I have ever read

My postdoc Hung’s main PhD paper is out in Neuron! Keep an eye on this guy; there will be many great things to come

This is why I object to the addiction field’s push to replace “relapse” with the allegedly-less-stigmatizing euphemism “resuming use.” It conflates controlled and uncontrolled use, implicitly promoting lifelong abstinence as the only road to recovery www.nytimes.com/2025/08/14/o...

A summary of NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya's comments during his visit to UAB today for a town hall style presentation: -Important for scientific work addressing our nation's health problems to be done in the same communities where those problems are concentrated

This is going to be Windows 8 all over again

Related to our previous post- if you had a grant terminated, Pro Publica wants to hear from you. Your work was funded because it was good, important science meant to help Americans. Reach out, and make your voice heard. www.propublica.org/getinvolved/...

Excited to announce that my first postdoc paper is now online! Links: www.nature.com/articles/s41... rdcu.be/eAcN7 In it, we examine the perennial question: what changes in the brain when learning a new motor skill? Read more below to find out 👇

I still get chills Meet Mike *30+ years severe depression *first hospitalized @ 13y *20 meds *3 rounds of ECT *2 near-fatal suicide attempts Mike felt joy for the first time in decades after we turned on his new brain pacemaker or PACE see videos, read paper, follow thread doi.org/10.31234/osf...

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

Hung-tu Chen, Nicolas Tritsch, Matt van der Meer, and I have submitted a new preprint (doi.org/10.1101/2025...) in which we use simultaneous hippocampal ephys and ventral striatal (VS) fiber photometry to establish a link between sharp-wave ripples (SWRs) and VS dopamine (DA) in mice. (1/9)

Coming March 17, 2026! Just got my advance copy of Emergence — a memoir about growing up in group homes and somehow ending up in neuroscience and AI. It’s personal, it’s scientific, and it’s been a wild thing to write. Grateful and excited to share it soon.

My first PhD student Elie de Oliveira just defended successfully! Check out his doctoral katana!

few outcomes, except for 99% of FDA-approved drugs, 174 recipients of 104 Nobel Prizes, training ~30K MDs and ~10K PhDs per year to enter the workforce, and a 34% reduction in age-adjusted cancer deaths since 1990 -- the largest decrease in history

Earlier my 7yo hit her head and opened up a ~1.5 cm scalp laceration. I debated Krazy Gluing it closed, but I wasn’t sure how to deal with the hair, so I brought her to the ER. I wish I had known about the HAT trick! Next time I guess I’ll google first www.aliem.com/trick-of-tra...

1/ Mapping synaptic connectivity between individual neurons is extremely laborious. We developed BRISC, a new method that makes it possible to map inputs onto 100s of neurons in the same animal in a matter of weeks! Led by Alex Becalick and @antblot.bsky.social. 🧵 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Please repost! We're hiring a postdoc to work with me and @salagapan.bsky.social on an exciting interdisciplinary project in human neuroscience and brain-body interactions underlying effortful behavior in health and mood disorders. siplab.gatech.edu/postdoc_ad_2...

New work! Learning is assumed to involve synaptic plasticity, but which specific synapses change to enable higher order cognitive functions? We actually find that cognitive flexibility involves potentiation of long-range GABAergic synapses from prefrontal PV neurons: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Our study is out in Nature! Using wireless Neuropixels we recorded hippocampal activity in freely flying bats and uncovered replay and theta(less) sweeps, revealing striking differences from classic rodent models. 👉 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

What I love about molecular biology is that people like Stahl and Watson lived to see single cell RNAseq and spatial transcriptomics. Has any other field ever achieved that much in the span of a single career?

The good news: I’m in Tam Cóc, Vietnam The bad news: I have f*cking Swedish skin

I saw Sinners for the second time last night. It’s really, really good. Nice to see that Hollywood is still capable of doing something original

Physics is the science of things that are easy to model.

Announcing two new lectures in our youtube neuroscience methods course: Lecture 12: experimental design (by Anita Autry) Lecture 13: neuronal population coding (in which I advocate a viewpoint that is... controversial) Please repost to help us spread the word! www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...

I’m old enough to remember when HHMI ran a competition for the best ideas they’d fund for the next 15 years. Some of us put huge efforts into that and went multiple rounds of review only to have the competition cancelled. Then our ideas started showing up in HHMI funded labs…

This weekend I showed my kids some of the best 90s-2000s movies their mom wouldn't approve of. They liked about half, and I wouldn't have guessed their top choices: First choice by far: Memento (the 10yo and 13yo loved it) Tied for second: Run Lola Run and District 9

🚨 This MUST READ essay and call to action spells out, in very clear terms, how the Trump administration could get away with slashing the NIH budget. NIH scientists and Dems in congress need to read and understand it. This is where we win or lose the battle to save the NIH and US science. 🧪 🧠 🧬 🔊

Well well well, if it isn't the perfect solution to my current problem. Seems to work too!

Sign of the time xkcd.com/3081/