On 11 July 2026, neuroscience lost one of its most visionary scientists with the passing of Susumu Tonegawa at the age of 86. Across an extraordinary career spanning more than five decades, Tonegawa p...

The ability to anticipate rhythmic patterns is fundamental to human experience, enabling music appreciation, speech comprehension, and dancing in sync to music. How the brain learns to use acoustic information to guide motor behavior remains a key question whose neural underpinnings and evolutionary origins are debated, especially in non-human primates. To understand how brain areas involved in motor control naively respond to predictable tone patterns, we recorded large single neuron populations across primary somatosensory (S1), primary motor (M1), dorsal premotor (PMd), supplementary motor (SMA), pre-supplementary motor (preSMA) cortices, globus pallidus interna (GPi), and medial geniculate body (MGB) of a rhesus monkey. During passive listening (Experiment 1) with a reward only at the end of each trial, primarily the MGB, not motor areas, responded to the auditory tone patterns, ruling out the spontaneous entrainment of motor activity to auditory patterns. Almost all areas robustly

studies how early neural activity sculpts developing brain circuits and informs our understanding of neuroplasticity and neurodegenerative disease.

Nature - Experiments with human volunteers and macaques show that expectations produced by probabilistic cueing of future sensory inputs shape motor circuit dynamics in order to increase the...

Garcia et al. present RESPAN, a pipeline that enables automated dendritic spine analysis through seamless integration of deep learning image restoration and segmentation capabilities with comprehensiv...

Nature - Using SCN2A haploinsufficiency as a proof-of-concept, upregulation of the existing functional gene copy through CRISPR activation was able to rescue neurological-associated phenotypes in...

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Different classes of anesthetics can induce unconsciousness despite acting through distinct biological mechanisms. This raises the possibility that they produce a convergent effect on the dynamics or ...

Synaptic plasticity underlies learning by modifying specific synaptic inputs to reshape neural activity and behavior. However, the rules governing which synapses will undergo different forms of plasti...

The 2026 Gordon Research Conference on Basal Ganglia will be held in Lucca (Barga), Lucca Italy. Apply today to reserve your spot.

studies models of alcohol use disorder and the consequences of adolescent alcohol exposure on development and aging

They were recognized for contributions to chemistry, computer science, economics, neuroscience, and physics.

How neurons in the posterior striatum encode auditory information is not well understood. Druart et al. report that direct pathway neurons in the striatum respond more strongly to auditory stimuli. Th...

One year. What a wild ride. They give you a lump of money, an empty lab space, a course to teach, and a parachute. Before you can even comprehend the purpose of the parachute, you get roundhouse kicke...

Nature Communications - Misfolded α-synuclein propagates trans-neuronally through anatomically interconnected networks, but how this propagation impacts cellular and circuit activity is...

Fraser et al. demonstrate that contexts engage a model-based process that allows for rapid revaluation of reward-paired cues. They find that dopamine neuron activity is necessary for contexts to updat...

During the execution of learned motor skills, the neural population in the layer 2/3 (L2/3) of the primary motor cortex (M1) expresses a reproducible spatiotemporal activity pattern. It is debated whe...

Human hippocampal CA3 networks use sparse and broad synaptic connectivity, and their recurrent synapses employ reliability, precision, and long integration times to enhance memory capacity. Thus, the ...

Park et al. show that motor cortex and subcortical striatum act in concert to specify the movement parameters of a reach-to-pull action in mice.

In natural environments, animals must efficiently allocate their choices across multiple concurrently available resources when foraging, a complex decision-making process not fully captured by existin...

Multiple brain regions in the human medial temporal lobe (MTL) are coordinated in memory processing. Traveling waves is a potential mechanism to coordinate information transfer through organizing the ...

A temporally asymmetric synaptic plasticity kernel results from bidirectional modifications of synaptic weights around the induction of a place field.

Season's Greetings and Happy New Year from all of us at The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory! As we reflect on the discoveries of 2024, we wish you…

Ventral striatal dopamine D3 and D1 receptors regulate motivation and reinforcement, respectively, through dissociable physiological actions.