This study shows that the brain arises from two distinct progenitors: one forms the forebrain and midbrain, whereas the other generates the hindbrain. These insights enable the generation of human hin...

In macaques, old memories, relative to new ones, are supported by more stable and interconnected cell assemblies. New-biased and old-biased assemblies reactivate during overnight sleep and can sometim...

Midbrain dopamine neurons are thought to implement a temporal difference (TD) reward prediction error (RPE) that updates cached values stored in striatum. This has been challenged by evidence that dop...

Prior experience is used by the brain to guide adaptive behaviour during decision making. Here, the authors show that mice also selectively use information learned through recent and longer-term exper...

Adventures with a cultural Copilot

By definition, episodic memory is a conscious phenomenon. Memory traces reactivated by the hippocampus and reinstated in the sensory cortices need to enter conscious awareness for them to be re-experi...

This study shows that cerebellar circuits learn and encode prior probabilities of event timing. Cell-type-specific neural activity reflects environmental statistics and guides predictive motor behavio...

Claude Code Snapshot for Research. All original source code is the property of Anthropic. - instructkr/claude-code

Nature Neuroscience - Jang et al. measured dopamine and acetylcholine release in the striatum of rats performing a decision-making task and found that the relative timing of cholinergic and...

Neural population activity can be described either by low-dimensional dynamics on neural manifolds or by single-neuron selectivities. Using a theoretical approach, Pezon et al. relate these two statis...

Understanding how animals learn is a central challenge in neuroscience, with growing relevance to the development of animal- or human-aligned artificial intelligence. However, existing approaches tend...

Standard accounts of memory consolidation emphasise the stabilisation of stored representations, but struggle to explain representational drift, semanticisation, or the necessity of offline replay. He...

Tracking the intellectual DNA of Computational and Systems Neuroscience through its flagship meeting

Author summary Activity in the brain represents information about the outside world and how we interact with it. Recent evidence shows that these representations slowly change day to day, while memori...

Objectives To investigate whether initiation of glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) receptor agonists is associated with both reduced risks of incident alcohol, cannabis, cocaine, nicotine, opioid, and ot...

Neuronal firing patterns have significant spatiotemporal variability with no agreed-upon theoretical framework. Using a combined experimental and mode…

Spatial attention supports navigation by prioritizing information from selected locations. A candidate neural mechanism is provided by theta-paced sweeps in grid- and place-cell population activity, which sample nearby space in a left-right-alternating pattern coordinated by parasubicular direction signals. During exploration, this alternation promotes uniform spatial coverage, but whether sweeps can be flexibly tuned to locations of particular interest remains unclear. Using large-scale Neuropixels recordings in freely-behaving rats, we show that sweeps and direction signals are rapidly and dynamically modulated: they track moving targets during pursuit, precede orienting responses during immobility, and reverse during backward locomotion — without prior spatial learning. Similar modulation occurs during REM sleep. Canonical head-direction signals remain head-aligned. These findings identify sweeps as a flexible, attention-like mechanism for selectively sampling allocentric cognitive maps. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. European Research Council, Synergy Grant 951319 (EIM) The Research Council of Norway, Centre of Neural Computation 223262 (EIM, MBM), Centre for Algorithms in the Cortex 332640 (EIM, MBM), National Infrastructure grant (NORBRAIN, 295721 and 350201) The Kavli Foundation, https://ror.org/00kztt736 Ministry of Science and Education, Norway (EIM, MBM) Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences; NTNU, Norway (AZV)

New research looks at how leading AI models hold up doing actual white-collar work tasks, drawn from consulting, investment banking, and law. Most models failed.

We have a streetlight problem

Dopamine release in the basal ganglia of the zebra finch is driven by neurons associated with reinforcement learning and by cholinergic signalling, and tracks performance quality during long-term lear...

Enlightening the brain

Immense progress in gene-editing, drug discovery and conservation are just some of the reasons to be cheerful about 2025.