Hello numerous people who joined and followed! I want to hear your neuroscience takes, but not the same old debates. There's so much we can discuss that's truly new. Here I'll start:
-The brain: too big, or not big enough
-Most overrated region of cortex
-manifolds: isn't just one fold sufficient
Remarkably, Yuefeng Huang, a post doc in Rita Goldstein’s lab at Sinai, started by sharing that SUD is understudied in women compared to men, though it’s well known that risks and tolerance are v different. They’ve designed a cue-reactivity task to capture the sex differences more effectively.
Moving to humans, Anna Konova of Rutgers implicates neurocognitive mechanisms underlying opioid use risk increase in females through estradiol fluctuation, which scales with striatal reward error signals
Thank you! It's a pleasure to get to share our work
Outstanding #acnp2026 day 2 start with @nicolagrissom.bsky.social reminding us of the principle that sex differences in neural mechanisms may drive behavior similarity. Leaning into the ambiguity of hidden markov models and showing that females exploit more; males explore more in a set shift task
Next fantastic talk by Erin Calipari showing incredible novel function of estradiol to potentiate dopamine release by direct action on nicotinic receptor, leading to observable functional differences between male and females, and females at different life stage #perimenopause #acnp2026
If you want to figure out what this poster says (or discover the secret of life) come and hang out at the dopamine dinner.
Tomorrow Sunday 8pm-End. Waterfront bar & grill. Share with friends, even serotonin people will feel welcome.
I fell ill and so can't be there as planned but #SfN25 this morning has awesome posters from lab members @nicglewwe.bsky.social and @micaelaporod.bsky.social
This morning #SfN25 check out @micaelaporod.bsky.social’s poster KK17, part of dream team collab with @nicolagrissom.bsky.social
This is one of the most profoundly beautiful pieces I have read in a long time
Very nice to see!
Also a (pre-covid!) conversation at acnp, which also failed (despite ample evidence) to convince either of us this is a dumb career
🥹😎Putting this post on my cv
✨smart 🐁 experiments… read 🧵👇
Some shoutouts!
The set shift is a touchscreen, mouseified adaptation of a task from the incomparable @bita137.bsky.social
And the touchscreen location paper had early inspiration from @drugmonkey.bsky.social, who, when not being a curmudgeon, knows some things about Ye Olde Anymal Behavioure
Screenshot of linked workshop page
Free NIH cognition and neuroscience workshop Apr 23, 11–5 ET, online. Register now.
Reasoning algorithms across species, models, diagnoses & development. 🧪🧠
events.teams.microsoft.com/event/46b514...
Did the h*ppocampus force you to say this Marshall
In conclusion I applaud these cool first author stories from @danamaemueller.bsky.social and @nicglewwe.bsky.social and you should too!!
Second, a few months ago we found that you can actually use the precise coordinates of a touchscreen response as a clue to the latent cognitive state of the animal, and of course once again female mice are more systematic. Provisionally accepted for publication so more soon
bsky.app/profile/bior...
Firsties, we developed a cool operant set shift task in the touchscreens for meeces, they can do many shifts in a single session
The kicker is female mice do better because they figure out how to follow two rules at once
bsky.app/profile/bior...
Touchscreen response precision is sensitive to the explore/exploit tradeoff https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.10.23.619903v1
Sex-biased computations underlying differential set shift performance in mice https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.04.01.646712v1
Hi everyone, the lab has been enabling my professional interest in doing weird shit with touchscreens (as opposed to my personal interest)
Blessed are the mice, for they cannot doomscroll
but here's some recent work you may enjoy if you want to see what mice do with their touchscreens instead
Moments before the accident. Jk
I had a fabulous visit to the Medical Discovery Team on Addiction at UMN. Was so lovely to meet with everyone. Thanks to my wonderful hosts Nicola Grissom and Jocelyn Richard!! @nicolagrissom.bsky.social @jocelynrichard.bsky.social
Picture of me being chauffeured around by a friend while bundled within an inch of my life is very on brand for me
Au contraire this is the kind of innovation we desperately need! If my brain were worth anything it would figure out how to use cheeseburgers to go infinite
I feel like given today's caloritic availability the brain is too small for our available diets. Our brains could use more folds I feel like they could be something more inkin to a mandal bulb in complexity and design. Also I am not qualified to be giving hot takes on Neuroscience.
I wrote about what Laura Helmuth accomplished at Scientific American, and what her resignation means for science journalism, and for me personally
defector.com/do-not-accep...
Spitting FACTS
-Neuron subtypes: can we just ignore them?
-Did evolution make brains recurrent to annoy us?
-Neuropixels should be the name of an imaging tool
