A neuromodulatory circuit-to-molecular pathway for reformatting aversive memories during recall Tan et al. identify a neuromodulatory circuit-to-molecular pathway in rats that updates aversive memories when they are recalled. Noradrenaline from the locus coeruleus triggers synapse-to-nuclear tra...

Excited to share our new paper:
We uncover a locus coeruleus→amygdala circuit linking β-adrenergic signaling to transcription regulation in defined amygdala cells during memory reconsolidation—+ stress or elevated noradrenergic signaling at recall can strengthen memory.
www.cell.com/neuron/abstr...

el apoyo a las familias afectadas y el impulso a la investigación científica que permita mejorar el diagnóstico, el tratamiento y la calidad de vida de quienes conviven con estas patologías. #diamundialenfermedadesraras #rarediseasesday

Muy orgullosa de formar parte de este equipazo de investigación que estudia una enfermedad ultrarrara #Laforadisease, para dilucidar sus mecanismos moleculares y encontrar un tratamiento. #FEDER_ONG @rarascsic.bskysocial @ibv-csic.bsky social #diamundialdelasenfermedadesraras #rarediseasesday

New lab preprint! Can we study conscious perception of gut sensations in mice to reveal its neuronal basis? Can we train mice to report their gut sensations? Omer Rafael and Stav Shtiglitz in the lab teamed up to discover that…YES! Thread…1/6 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Isabelle Rapin, la neuropediatra que libró a las madres de la culpa del autismo - Mujeres con ciencia Isabelle Rapin. Neuropediatría. Trastorno del espectro autista. Problema biológico. Comportamiento de los progenitores. Enfermedad. Síntomas. Desórdenes neurológicos y metabólicos.

#HaceOchoAños Isabelle Rapin, la neuropediatra que libró a las madres de la culpa del autismo
Un artículo de Rocío Benavente

Four camera-type eyes in the earliest vertebrates from the Cambrian Period - Nature Early vertebrates, particularly myllokunmingids, possessed four camera-type eyes (a pair of lateral eyes and pineal and parapineal organs), which indicates that these structures functio...

New paper presenting rather compelling evidence that the stem-vertebrate Haikouichthys had paired lateral and supranumerary medial eyes (!!!), and proposing that the medial eyes may have deep homology with the pineal and parapineal organs.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Examining the Three‐Dimensional Spatial Architecture of Mouse Amygdala Engram Ensembles Memories are stored in a sparse population of neurons active at the time of an event, an engram ensemble, and reactivation of the engram ensemble drives memory recall. Although the amygdala is essent...

New Year, new paper from our lab. Emily Kramer used 3D light-sheet imaging and tissue clearing to examine the spatial architecture of mouse amygdala engram ensembles.

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Rethinking the centrality of brain areas in understanding functional organization Nature Neuroscience - Parcellation of the cortex into functionally modular brain areas is foundational to neuroscience. Here, Hayden, Heilbronner and Yoo question the central status of brain areas...

New Perspective from myself, Sarah Heilbronner and @myoo.bsky.social . “Rethinking the centrality of brain areas in understanding functional organization” in Nature Neuroscience. 🧵

rdcu.be/eVZ1A

Mapping the genetic landscape across 14 psychiatric disorders - Nature Genomic analyses applied to 14 childhood- and adult-onset psychiatric disorders identifies five underlying genomic factors that explain the majority of the genetic variance of the individual disorders...

1/4 Thrilled to be sharing new work published today in Nature describing the third wave of results from the PGC Cross-Disorder Group. This reflects a massive group effort to examine shared and unique genetic signal across >1 million cases for 14 psychiatric disorders. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Uauh, muchas felicidades Idoia! Súper merecido!

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences: Vol 380, No 1939

Our special issue on Evolutionary Functions of Consciousness, coedited with Tecumseh Fitch and Adina Roskies, now online royalsocietypublishing.org/toc/rstb/202...

Contributions by (1) Irina Mikhalevich; (2) Eva Jablonka and Simona Ginsburg; (3) Nicholas Humphrey; (cont'd)

Cover of this week's Nature showing a brain rendering Cover caption from the journal: Brain development: Our ability to process information into complex emotions, behaviours and decisions relies on the rich diversity of cell types that make up the human brain. Uncovering the molecular and cellular events that take place during brain development could reveal not only the mechanisms that give rise to this diversity but also shed light on how this process might go awry in neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism and schizophrenia. In this week’s issue, the BRAIN Initiative Cell Atlas Network (BICAN) builds on its previous work creating atlases of cell types in the adult mouse, non-human primate (NHP) and human brains to present cell-type atlases of the developing human, mouse and NHP brains. Across a suite of papers, nine of which are published in Nature, the researchers uncover the complex programs through which cell types emerge during brain development in humans and animals, revealing both the shared and unique features of the human brain. The latest work, along with future research directions, is summed up in a Perspective article by Tomasz Nowakowski and colleagues

New issue of Nature - with NINE studies on #brain #development from the BRAIN Initiative Cell Atlas Network (BICAN) 🧠🧪🔬

An amazing set of resources for all scientists working on the brain!

🧠 Immersive feature:
www.nature.com/immersive/d4...

🧠 Perspective:
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I am thrilled to share our latest work: we identified a population of central amygdala neurons that promote the earliest and perhaps most important social behavior: pup suckling!... We also developed new tools for pup neuroscience
Work by @Jeff Moore now at USC, a collaboration with @Sam Pfaff lab

Bebo Valdés & Chucho Valdés.- Tres palabras YouTube video by Calle54Records

El pianista Chucho Valdés (1941) cumple hoy años
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jqg5...

Non-overlapping social and food reward representations in the basolateral amygdala The ability to consider and appraise positively valenced stimuli in the environment, such as food and social interaction, to guide appropriate action is important for survival of most animals. Several...

Excited to share our latest preprint led by @jarildy.bsky.social looking at social and non social reward representations. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1.... with help from @hyma2194.bsky.social and @jennisisaac.bsky.social.

Postnatal plasticity in the olfactory system of the juvenile swine brain - Brain Structure and Function Swine have an excellent sense of smell and highly complex olfactory brain structures, which play a crucial role in their complex social interactions. In other mammals the olfactory system is known to exhibit significant plasticity, even during adulthood. The aim of this study was to investigate postnatal plasticity in olfactory areas of juvenile swine brains by studying immature cells immunoreactive for the microtubule-associated protein doublecortin (DCX). Using immunofluorescence, we studied DCX coexpression with the cell proliferation marker Ki-67, and different neuronal markers. Our results show the existence of numerous DCX + cells throughout the olfactory pallial areas. In some of them, we found DCX+/Ki-67 + coexpressing cells, suggesting that they were proliferating. Some of these proliferating cells were grouped in tangentially-oriented migratory-like chains, forming the rostral migratory stream to anterior olfactory area and olfactory bulb. Moreover, chains of DCX + cells were found in the external capsule and white matter adjacent to the temporal horn of the ventricle. Chains of DCX + cells were observed crossing the internal layers of the piriform and entorhinal cortices. In layer II of these cortices, DCX + cells of varying maturity degrees and neuronal phenotypes (including NeuN expression) were present. This suggests the existence of multiple migratory streams along the anteroposterior axis. Most DCX + immature cells in the migratory chains and in the anterior olfactory area, piriform and entorhinal cortices expressed the transcription factor Brn2 (Pou3f2), suggesting the incorporation of new glutamatergic neurons in these areas. Together, these results highlight the interest of swine to study the role of postnatal brain plasticity and their potential for regeneration in large, gyrencephalic brains.

Happy to share our new article with Júlia Freixes, Fatma Abdel-Rahman, Roberto Nebbia and @edesfilis.bsky.social on postnatal plasticity in olfactory areas of the juvenile swine, published in Brain, Structure and Function link.springer.com/article/10.1...

The interoceptive origin of reinforcement learning

This Review article represents a true quest for the Holy Grail: the origin of reward!

In short, reward originates deep within our bodies, in our viscera, and not in the external environment!

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

1/n

Transcriptomic diversity of amygdalar subdivisions across humans and nonhuman primates Specialized cell types and links to psychiatric disorders are revealed by genetic mapping of primate amygdala neurons.

Very excited to share my second postdoc, now out in Science Advances! We used targeted snRNA-seq to profile four major subnuclei of the primate across three species (including humans). 1/13 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

A brain-wide map of neural activity during complex behaviour - Nature The International Brain Laboratory presents a brain-wide electrophysiological map obtained from pooling data from 12 laboratories that performed the same standardized perceptual decision-making task i...

Sad day for peope who still believe brain areas are the primary organizational units of function in the brain.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Photo of the organizers and the speakers of PRamón symposium. From left to right, Paula Alonso-Almorox, Sara Jiménez, Nicolas Vidal-Vazquez, Nerea Moreno, Loreta Medina, Luis Puelles, Adrián Chinarro and Júlia Freixes.

Photo of the organizers and the speakers of PRamón symposium. From left to right, Paula Alonso-Almorox, Sara Jiménez, Nicolas Vidal-Vazquez, Nerea Moreno, Loreta Medina, Luis Puelles, Adrián Chinarro and Júlia Freixes.

First day of the #senc 20th meeting in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. This morning it has been a great symposium of the neuroevodevo PRamón Network, paying tribute to Prof. Rudolf Nieuwenhuys. Congratulations to the organizers @loretamedinah.bsky.social and Nerea Moreno and to all speakers!

Nicolás Vidal-Vazquez (Univ. Santiago de Compostela), Adrián Chinarro (Univ. Complutense de Madrid), Sara Jiménez (Achucarro Center for Neuroscience), Júlia Freixes (Univ. de Lleida & IRBLleida), and Paula Alonso-Almorox (Univ. Las Palmas de Gran Canaria)

Special thanks to Prof. Luis Puelles (keynote speaker), and five younger researchers that gave excellent talks, as follows

Crying spells triggered by thumb-index rubbing after thalamic stroke: a case report

Remarkable. Uncontrollable laughing or crying can happen *without* emotion ("pseudobulbar affect"). Here's a video of one individual whose crying is triggered by real or imagined rubbing of his finger & thumb. Intense response but not sadness. /1

static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10...

Brain Surfaces of 70 primate species

1
To predict the behaviour of a primate, would you rather base your guess on a closely related species or one with a similar brain shape? We looked at brains & behaviours of 70 species, you’ll be surprised!

🧵Thread on our new preprint with @r3rt0.bsky.social , doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Thalamic CGRP neurons define a spinothalamic pathway for affective pain | PNAS Pain is both a sensory and emotional experience caused by various harmful stimuli. While numerous studies have explored peripheral and central pain...

New paper out in @pnas.org Thalamic CGRP neurons form a spinothalamic pain pathway relaying pain signal to the amygdala & insular, but not sensory cortex to encode the affective dimension of pain. Huge congrats to first author Sukjae Kang & coauthors. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Top: Representative images showing the spatial localization of labeled dmPFC neurons with BFP (blue) or retrobeads (red), taken using 10 X (upper) or 40 X (lower) objectives. The majority of labelled neurons were located in layer II/III of dmPFC. Scale bars, 100 μm (10 X) and 25 μm (40 X). Bottom: Summary on the neural circuit mediating the transition from memory retrieval to freezing behavior. Presentation of CS+ activates LA neurons and TeA neurons. The activated LA neurons activate dmPFC T-neurons, which in turn activate dmPFC S-neurons and LC neurons. S-neurons receive inputs from TeA and send their outputs to BLA, which projects to PAG to enable freezing behavior. Activated LC neurons release NE in the dmPFC via their projections.

Which neural circuits allow memory retrieval to influence behaviors? This study shows how #fear #memory activation initiates & sustains #FreezingBehavior in mice via the interplay of #norepinephrine & activation of different prefrontal #neuron subtypes @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/3TGqt7a

How does the human brain coordinate hierarchical cortical development? Our work in Nature Neuroscience identifies a role for thalamocortical structural connectivity in the expression of hierarchical periods of cortical plasticity & environmental receptivity in youth 🧵 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

https://www.garnelio.de/spitzschlammschnecken-lymnaea-stagnalis

1/3 First evidence of anxiety in snails

They exhibit fear responses hours after the source of their anxiety is removed. These responses can be reduced with an anxiolytic, such as alprazolam. They have also demonstrated high-level learning.

(paper) www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Alert! ... for the child development world!

@fluxsociety.bsky.social @fitngin.bsky.social ‪

The Healthy Brain and Child Development (HBCD) Study has released its first data wave - it’s massive.

Check here:
docs.hbcdstudy.org

and here:
nbdc-datahub.org

Here’s why it matters 🧠🍼

NEW PAPER🎺
How does cognition determine an individual’s fitness? A systematic review of the links between cognition, behaviour and fitness in non-human animals

Lots of studies try to explain how cognition might evolve, by taking a behavioural ecology approach

Has this approach made any progress?🧵