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Also it's "now" more clear that these effects are histamine-mediated.

Some more awesome work by the Rivlin lab: science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv

Had never received such a high number of summer student internship applications that read more or less the same: same tone, same paragraph ordering and size, same highlights of my research, same interests. And some critical words in quotes.

I can't think of any explanation other than ChatGPT. What a blight.

#academia

Didier Raoult now published a 'preprint' claiming I am 'close' to Gates Foundation - citing a France Soir article as the reference. He also suggests that my poor facial recognition skills are linked to autism, with 'serious psychosocial consequences'. What a sad man. hal.science/hal-04795904/

Don't say #science or #academia are useless, I just spent three hours showing magnetic or #astronomy wonders to about 250 children in two events, organised by the University of Bologna, so that their parents could enjoy wild shopping or aperitives in the city centre for some time, and it's a service to society I was happy to provide!
The kids seemed happy too.
#astrodon

Persistence of spike protein at the skull-meninges-brain axis may contribute to the neurological sequelae of COVID-19

Some unrest and abuse about this paper- Parts of the pre-print have been abused previously. What does it show?

cell.com/cell-host-microbe/ful
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@Hickl I wonder to what extent such tools can be used to track the stagnation of a scientific field...

Predicting the results of experiments is challenging, especially in fields like neuroscience. This recent study shows that fine-tuned LLMs, like BrainGPT, can predict neuroscience results more accurately than human experts on benchmarks. 🧪

nature.com/articles/s41562-024

Boost this toot if you're planning on sticking around Mastodon & the Fediverse whether or not it's more popular than Bluesky.

Very useful resources, I definitely have some reading to do...

No video at hand right now, but I'll compile one eventually as a visual sanity check for our method of separating high- from low-velocity head turns.

The main change since the preprint is that we introduced Fourier-based quantification of information and redundancy (thanks to the anonymous reviewer for pushing us in this direction).

Preprint here: biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/20

Natural stimuli drive concerted nonlinear responses in populations of retinal ganglion cells

The role of the vertebrate retina in early vision is generally described by the efficient coding theory, which predicts that the retina discards spatiotemporal correlations in natural scenes. It is unclear, however, whether the predicted decorrelation in the activity of ganglion cells, the retina’s output neurons, holds under gaze shifts, which dominate the natural visual input. We here show that species-specific gaze patterns in natural stimuli can drive strong and correlated spiking responses both within and across distinct types of ganglion cells in marmoset as well as mouse retina. These concerted responses violate efficient coding and signal fixation periods with locally high spatial contrast. Finally, novel model-based analyses of ganglion cell responses to natural stimuli reveal that the observed response correlations follow from nonlinear pooling of ganglion cell inputs. Our results reveal how concerted population activity can surpass efficient coding to detect gaze-related stimulus features. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest.

bioRxiv
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The "high-correlation-mode" within or between types of ganglion cells we examined probably reflects the computation of a visual feature related to fine spatial contrast in natural scenes.

How these robust spatial-contrast signals are used by cortical or subcortical areas is an open question. Pure speculation here, but "coarse-to-fine" processing during fixations may require nonlinear and fast parasol cell responses that predict the upcoming (higher-spatial-frequency) midget cell responses.

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The latest piece of my PhD work is now published! Check it out at nature.com/articles/s41586-024

We explain how correlated responses in the retinal output may arise when nonlinear receptive fields are stimulated with natural scenes. We think that these concerted responses violate the decorrelation prediction of efficient coding in a cell-type-specific manner in both marmosets and mice.

Thanks for the writeup @elduvelle_neuro and @jessetm for the great work!

I did not read the paper in depth for a journal club, but I was completely unaware of the VTE literature and I find it fascinating.

I think we are observing similar phenomena in freely moving mice performing perceptual decision-making tasks. Some mice have inherent biases towards turning to a particular side. When a stimulus is presented that indicates the opposite side is correct, they may start turning towards their favorite side, and quickly "overwrite" the initial decision by making a strong head turn to the correct side.

We think that this head-turning signal indicates stimulus detection by the mice, and we can use it to decode trial outcome quite decently. I was very intrigued to see the same in the rat data of @jessetm

my (personal) summary and then comments for this #JournalClub

any corrections, comments, additional questions are welcome, especially from the first author @jessetm

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The main goal of this paper is to test if #VTEs (Vicarious Trial-and Error) and medial prefrontal cortex LFP relate to navigation behaviour parameters such as behavioural flexibility, performance and strategy use, during allocentric* navigation.

VTEs are a behaviour that rodents and humans do at choice points, looking alternatively at the different available options before choosing one (check video below). They have been studied mostly during response-based tasks (when the subjects have to learn a body-oriented response or sequence of responses to the reward). From that research, two possible roles for VTEs have been suggested: deliberation (weighing down the available options) or uncertainty (hesitation).

The current paper aims to test which is the most likely role of these two, by having a task involving a lot of deliberation and a lot of uncertainty (protocol explained below).
The main conclusion is that these two VTE types actually exist, which means VTEs should not just be interpreted as a marker of behavioural flexibility or deliberation. There is are also some interesting findings about different LFP rhythms in the medial prefrontal cortex being stronger during different types of behaviours (explained below).
(*) (allocentric = based on an external reference frame, like the Water maze task)

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cc: @Andrewpapale, @drdrowland, feel free to add your comments /questions anywhere you want!

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Huge congrats to @karyna-mi.bsky.social (shes not on here) for her paper published today in Science! She found that the hippocampus is really important for a key strategy we use to make decisions called hidden state inference! 🧪 🧠 1/7 science.org/doi/10.1126/scienc #neuroscience

We wrote a review on analysis methods for large-scale neural recordings science.org/stoken/author-toke @marius10p #neuroscience 🧠

Anything we missed? Reply w/ your fav method!

@computingnature @marius10p

Great review! I think the statistical pitfalls section would deserve to become a full article itself

Functional diversity in the output of the primate retina biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/20

Functional diversity in the output of the primate retina

The visual image transmitted by the retina to the brain has long been understood in terms of spatial filtering by the center-surround receptive fields of retinal ganglion cells (RGCs). Recently, this textbook view has been challenged by the stunning functional diversity and specificity observed in ~40 distinct RGC types in the mouse retina. However, it is unclear whether the ~20 morphologically and molecularly identified RGC types in primates exhibit similar functional diversity, or instead exhibit center-surround organization at different spatial scales. Here, we reveal striking and surprising functional diversity in macaque and human RGC types using large-scale multi-electrode recordings from isolated macaque and human retinas. In addition to the five well-known primate RGC types, 18-27 types were distinguished by their functional properties, likely revealing several previously unknown types. Surprisingly, many of these cell types exhibited striking non-classical receptive field structure, including irregular spatial and chromatic properties not previously reported in any species. Qualitatively similar results were observed in recordings from the human retina. The receptive fields of less-understood RGC types formed uniform mosaics covering visual space, confirming their classification, and the morphological counterparts of two types were established using single-cell recording. The striking receptive field diversity was paralleled by distinctive responses to natural movies and complexity of visual computation. These findings suggest that diverse RGC types, rather than merely filtering the scene at different spatial scales, instead play specialized roles in human vision. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest.

bioRxiv
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