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Eric Garr

@garrface.bsky.social
847 followers 496 following 118 posts

Research scientist @ NIH. Behavior, brains, biking, bagels. ericgarr.com

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Reposted by Eric Garr
Carl Zimmer @carlzimmer.com · 27/09/2026
Four days ago, a scientist was surprised by the news that Anthropic discovered new virus genes for making DNA. He says he’s been studying them for years—and feeding his data to Anthropic’s AI as part of his own research. Coincidence? Here’s my story. nyti.ms/3VSWayc
nyti.ms
Did Anthropic’s A.I. Really Make a Scientific Discovery on Its Own? (Gift Article)
An expert at the University of Copenhagen said his team had been sharing its research with the company’s A.I. model, Claude, and that its new finding matched their work.
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Eric Garr @garrface.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Heading to the Pavlovian Society meeting in Montreal, may never return.
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Eliezyer de Oliveira @eliezyer.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
After a long journey through review, our paper is finally out in Nature Communications. We started with a simple problem: The visual cortex is strongly modulated by movement. So how can it represent the visual world without movement interfering with everything? www.nature.com/articles/s41...
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Earl K. Miller @earlkmiller.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
New paper! Decision-making isn't just picking winners via more neural firing, the brain reorganizing activity patterns into different subspaces, shifting from "one option vs. another" to "chosen vs. rejected" doi.org/10.1016/j.is... #neuroscience @picowerinstitute.bsky.social @mitbcs.bsky.social
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Nature @nature.com · 04/09/2026
An agreement paves the way for hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of projects to be transferred from the NIH’s institute for infectious diseases to the Department of Defense. go.nature.com/4ycEbk8
go.nature.com
Revealed: inside the US military's plan to tap huge sums from the NIH
An agreement paves the way for hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of projects to be transferred from the NIH’s institute for infectious diseases to the Department of Defence.
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Neuropsychopharmacology @npp-journal.bsky.social · 07/08/2026
This study found opposing effects of fentanyl on tonic vs. phasic dopamine that may reveal insight on impaired non-drug reward seeking during opioid exposure
nature.com
Acute fentanyl induces opposing directions of changes in tonic and phasic dopamine release patterns and impairs Pavlovian task performance
Neuropsychopharmacology - Acute fentanyl induces opposing directions of changes in tonic and phasic dopamine release patterns and impairs Pavlovian task performance
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Mike Tadross @miketadross.bsky.social · 05/08/2026
1/6 Opioids trigger a dopamine surge that can create dangerous reward associations—yet that same dopamine signal may help shape central pain perception. Can the dopamine surge and reward associations be separated? Our recent Nature study says yes www.nature.com/articles/s41...
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bioRxiv Neuroscience @biorxiv-neursci.bsky.social · 06/08/2026
The Cellular and Synaptic Actions of Dopamine During Behavior www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/20…
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Anthony Ramnauth @philoneurosci.bsky.social · 05/08/2026
This seems super important for in vivo experiments #Norepinephrine and #dopamine #sensor crosstalk depends on local innervation density doi.org/10.1038/s415...
doi.org
Norepinephrine and dopamine sensor crosstalk depends on local innervation density - Nature Neuroscience
This study shows that GPCR-based norepinephrine and dopamine sensors display crosstalk in several brain areas. Relative innervation densities determine the extent of crosstalk, and loss-of-function co...
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Nina Friedman @ngfriedman.bsky.social · 04/08/2026
Starting in Spring or Summer 2027 K99/R00 (under its new activity code KT1/R00) will only be available to US citizens, permanent residents, and non-citizen nationals. I am hearing this from many program officers, but NIH has yet to make an official statement to my knowledge.
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bioRxiv Neuroscience @biorxiv-neursci.bsky.social · 30/07/2026
A conserved population of genetically defined striatal neurons gates opioid reward www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/20…
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Juan Linde-Domingo @lindedomingo.bsky.social · 24/07/2026
Replay of procedural memory is independent of the hippocampus 👀👀 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
nature.com
Replay of procedural memory is independent of the hippocampus - Nature Neuroscience
Thompson, Rollik and colleagues show that, during sleep, the brain replays procedural memories in the striatum independently of the hippocampus. Replay content was shaped by prior reward and error out...
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Eric Garr @garrface.bsky.social · 14/07/2026
🚨Postdoc position available in computational/theoretical neuroscience at NIMH! The intramural NIH research community is great (amazing collaborators, no worrying about grants, lots of opportunities for professional development). Please repost! www.training.nih.gov/jobs/pd-0931...
training.nih.gov
Postdoctoral Fellow
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Annual Reviews @annualreviews.bsky.social · 13/07/2026
The 2026 volume of the Annual Review of Neuroscience is now online 🧠 The most read article is "Planning in the Brain: It's Not What You Think It Is" by @marcelomattar.bsky.social and @nathanieldaw.bsky.social
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Hugo Spiers @hugospiers.bsky.social · 06/07/2026
Just how goal-directed are hippocampal theta sweeps, anyway? Great News & Views from @adredish.bsky.social Lab on recent theta goal papers: www.nature.com/articles/s41... #neuroskyence
nature.com
Just how goal-directed are hippocampal theta sweeps, anyway? - Nature Neuroscience
Planning is a cognitive process that is thought to be grounded in hippocampal sequences, but recent studies have suggested that a simpler mechanism, fundamentally incompatible with those planning hypo...
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David Ho @davidho.bsky.social · 23/06/2026
This amount would fund the US National Science Foundation for a decade. 🧪
apnews.com
Pentagon seeks $80 billion from Congress for Iran war
The Pentagon has told lawmakers it needs roughly $80 billion, mostly to cover the cost of the war in Iran.
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Kevin J Miller @kevinjmiller.bsky.social · 03/06/2026
Computational models are a key part of science but discovering new ones is hard! DataDIVER discovers concise models from data, which surface new mechanistic ideas and clear predictions for future experiments From Google Deepmind Neuroscience Lab + collaborators www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
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bioRxiv Neuroscience @biorxiv-neursci.bsky.social · 29/05/2026
Local control of dopamine release in nucleus accumbens gates opioid withdrawal aversion www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/20…
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Jenna Norton @jenna-m-norton.bsky.social · 29/05/2026
Excellent summary of how Vought’s proposed rule will destroy science. Please be ready to comment tomorrow, call Congress, tell your friends. If you’ve been waiting for the right moment to speak up, that moment is now.
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Eric Garr @garrface.bsky.social · 19/05/2026
TIL the MED-PC sample-without-replacement function (RANDD) generates sequential dependencies. This problem is absent in MED-PC V. www.researchgate.net/publication/...
researchgate.net
(PDF) The misbehavior of the RANDD function in Med-PC IV
PDF | The RANDD function in Med-PC® IV is supposed to randomly select a value from a list, without replacement. By happenstance, we detected sequential... | Find, read and cite all the research you ne...
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Eric Garr @garrface.bsky.social · 30/04/2026
I always told myself that if I could remain in research with better pay, even if not a PI, I would be thrilled. I’m therefore excited to join the Unit on Neural Computations in Learning (PI: Angela Langdon) at NIMH, where I’ll start as Research Fellow.
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Blake Richards @tyrellturing.bsky.social · 29/04/2026
Could agentic AI topple grant-funding systems? Man, I hope so... the system has been broken for a while, hopefully this will force a thorough rethink. www.nature.com/articles/d41... 🧪
nature.com
Could agentic AI topple grant-funding systems?
Funders must take action before an increase in submission of high-quality proposals written using AI models makes it impossible to sort the wheat from the chaff.
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The Transmitter @thetransmitter.bsky.social · 27/04/2026
Prediction without understanding sustained astronomy through a thousand years of epicycles, writes @tonyzador.bsky.social. AI is now offering neuroscience the same deal. #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/machine-lear...
thetransmitter.org
Can AI do neuroscience without understanding?
Prediction without understanding sustained astronomy through a thousand years of epicycles. Artificial intelligence is now offering neuroscience the same deal.
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Andrew MacAskill @macaskillaf.bsky.social · 26/04/2026
Huge congrats to @snierwetberg.bsky.social , David (not on BSky), and @maxwellxchen.bsky.social for their paper! They developed a mouse task in which relational structure can be isolated from cue identity and reward statistics. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 🧠📈🧪 #neuroskyence @uclnpp.bsky.social
biorxiv.org
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Matt Banghart @mattbanghart.bsky.social · 16/04/2026
Excited to share our new study on how the brain generates placebo pain relief! We developed a mouse model that recapitulates key features of human placebo analgesia, then used it to identify causal circuitry. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... today.ucsd.edu/story/neurob... 1/n
today.ucsd.edu
Neurobiologists Hack Brain Circuits Tied to Placebo Pain Relief
Scientists have identified the brain circuits tied to placebo pain relief. Researchers have known that placebo effects can be a powerful treatment, yet the underlying neurological mechanisms have not ...
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Ann Kennedy @antihebbiann.bsky.social · 03/04/2026
transformer-circuits.pub/2026/emotion... This got press hate because of the word "emotions" but it is cool work. "Internal motivational states" serve as a form of working memory that helps animals organize their behavior, so why not ask if similar computational primitives help LLMs to do the same?
transformer-circuits.pub
Emotion Concepts and their Function in a Large Language Model
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Eric Garr @garrface.bsky.social · 03/04/2026
Hey @ditzkoff.bsky.social I knew I recognized you! Sorry for the identity mishap, trying to work on my journalist vs. neuroscientist decoder.
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Sam Gershman @gershbrain.bsky.social · 29/03/2026
@jhennig.bsky.social has shown that dopamine exerts a real-time effect on conditioned responding, beyond its role in learning: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Another indication that dopamine is more than a learning signal! A joint effort with @naoshigeuchida.bsky.social and @mhburrell.bsky.social.
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Eric Garr @garrface.bsky.social · 22/03/2026
Remember this example whenever anyone tells you that you’re generally safe living in a blue city within a red state (something I was told frequently while on the faculty job market)
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Alex Williams @itsneuronal.bsky.social · 19/03/2026
Cosyne invited me to give a long tutorial (4 hours!) on methods to quantify differences high-d neural recordings across animals, brain regions, deep neural nets, etc. The recording is up on youtube. I hope it inspires more research on this fundamental topic! www.youtube.com/watch?v=n44x...
youtube.com
Cosyne 2026 - Cosyne Tutorial: Comparative Analysis of Neural Population Codes
YouTube video by Cosyne Talks
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Arc Institute @arcinstitute.org · 11/03/2026
Today in @nature.com, the @christophthaiss.bsky.social & @maayanlevy.bsky.social labs trace age-related memory loss to the gastrointestinal tract & map the complete gut-to-brain pathway driving it. Targeting this pathway can reverse cognitive aging in mice. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
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Ben Saunders @bensaunders.bsky.social · 09/03/2026
Check out our latest research drop! We show BLA dopamine signaling encodes the emotional weight of sensory transitions, but not the associative strength or value of stimuli. These signals dynamically rescale when the learning context changes: "this matters most!" www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
biorxiv.org
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Eric Garr @garrface.bsky.social · 20/02/2026
Here's a quick analysis I did on data I've been collecting on psych/neuro faculty applicants. I don't have data on unsuccessful applicants, but my inference is that women mentored by women have to rely more on bringing in $ to get a faculty job than men mentored by men.
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Vijay Mohan K Namboodiri @vijay-mkn.bsky.social · 15/02/2026
Very excited to post our paper led by @daburke.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41... where we uncover a simple mathematical rule underlying how brains learn that a cue predicts a reward. 1/26
nature.com
Duration between rewards controls the rate of behavioral and dopaminergic learning - Nature Neuroscience
Cue–reward learning rate scales proportionally with the time between rewards. Consequently, learning over a fixed duration is independent of the number of trials. This challenges trial-based dopamine ...
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Eric Garr @garrface.bsky.social · 30/01/2026
Now published in Neuropharmacology! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
sciencedirect.com
Fentanyl reinforcement history has sex-specific effects on multi-step decision-making
It is commonly thought that drug addiction involves a transition to habitual control of action, where the choice to consume drugs becomes automatized …
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Greg Folkers @gregfolkers.bsky.social · 26/01/2026
Science: U.S. government has lost more than 10,000 STEM Ph.D.s since Trump took office By Jeffrey Mervis, Monica Hersher @science.org @policyhound.bsky.social @mghersher.bsky.social bit.ly/3M8yf9B
bit.ly
U.S. government has lost more than 10,000 STEM Ph.D.s since Trump took office
A Science analysis reveals how many were fired, retired, or quit across 14 agencies
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Eric Garr @garrface.bsky.social · 22/01/2026
Since the Namboodiri lab isn’t on Bluesky (I think?), I’d like to amplify this cool paper which I and others in the Janak lab made a small contribution to.
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Jeremy Berg @jeremymberg.bsky.social · 20/01/2026
The conference (agreement between House and Senate) appropriations bill that includes HHS and NIH was released this morning. www.appropriations.senate.gov/news/majorit... 1/5
appropriations.senate.gov
Committee Releases Conferenced Defense, Homeland Security, Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies, and Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and Related Agencies Bi...
United States Senate Committee on Appropriations
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Crawford Kilian @crof.bsky.social · 18/01/2026
A long, absolutely must-read article from Cory Doctorow: www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-i...
theguardian.com
AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage | Cory Doctorow
AI is asbestos in the walls of our tech society, stuffed there by monopolists run amok. A serious fight against it must strike at its roots
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Roddy Grieves @roddy-grieves.bsky.social · 05/01/2026
Can humans & animals really use internal maps to take shortcuts? Tolman famously said yes - based largely on his Sunburst maze. Our new review & meta-analysis suggests evidence is far weaker than you might think. 🧵👇 doi.org/10.1111/ejn.... @uofgpsychneuro.bsky.social @ejneuroscience.bsky.social
doi.org
Tolman's Sunburst Maze 80 Years on: A Meta‐Analysis Reveals Poor Replicability and Little Evidence for Shortcutting
In 1946, Tolman et al. reported that rats could take a novel shortcut to a goal after training on an indirect route, supporting the Cognitive Map theory. However, a review of subsequent Sunburst maze...
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Dr Kathleen Millen @neurodevkathy.bsky.social · 02/01/2026
I don't think you non-science people realize what it takes to get a grant funded by NIH. Started experiments in Sept 2021 to generate 3 new mouse mutants to model human disease. Prelim dara shows they have relevant disease phenotypes worthy of study. Need a small grant first to characterize /1
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Arif A. Hamid, Ph.D. @arifahamid.bsky.social · 30/12/2025
Excited to share latest study from the lab by an amazing RA, Dylan Flink. We solved a small (important) puzzle while in the trenches of a larger (wavy 🌊) puzzle. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 🧵...
biorxiv.org
Dual cholinergic mechanisms for sculpting striatal dopamine in vivo
Striatal dopamine (DA) and acetylcholine constitute a computationally powerful neuromodulatory dyad that orchestrates action selection, motivational vigor, and reward learning. Striatal cholinergic in...
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Tim Verstynen @tdverstynen.bsky.social · 22/12/2025
Sleep dependent consolidation and replay that doesn’t require the hippocampus? Very beautiful work by Marcus Stephenson-Jones’ lab on sleep driven sequential skill consolidation in the striatum. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
biorxiv.org
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Munir “Gunes” Kutlu @guneskutlu.bsky.social · 13/12/2025
🚨New Kutlu Lab preprint! Excited to share our latest work led by Oyku Dinckol and Noah Wenger. 🔗 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... We find that ACh shapes DLS neural ensembles for outcome learning but is biased toward signaling threats over rewards 👇
biorxiv.org
Dorsolateral striatal acetylcholine reorganizes neural ensembles to anticipate threat
Adaptive behavior requires flexible encoding of emotional valence. Although striatal acetylcholine (ACh) signaling is critical for reinforcement learning, its contribution to aversive learning has rem...
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Drug Monkey @drugmonkey.bsky.social · 02/12/2025
22% fewer NIH grants
22% fewer NIH grants funded in FY 2025
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Dan Goodman @neural-reckoning.org · 27/11/2025
Nature Sci Rep publishes incoherent AI slop. eLife publishes a paper which the reviewers didn't agree with, making all the comments and responses public with thoughtful commentary. One of these journals got delisted by Web of Science for quality concerns from not doing peer review. Guess which one?
Two posts from Bluesky. The first one shows a figure from a paper published in Nature Scientific Reports full of totally incoherent AI fabricated gibberish words. The other a comment on a recently published paper by eLife discussing the paper and its peer reviews which were published along with the paper.
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Ben Saunders @bensaunders.bsky.social · 24/11/2025
So excited to see our latest paper out today in @natcomms.nature.com! Studies led by the amazing @margestelzner.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41.... VTA GABA neurons have a unique role in economic decision making - they integrate reward seeking motivation and the current cost of seeking
nature.com
Ventral tegmental area GABA neurons integrate positive and negative valence - Nature Communications
The role of ventral tegmental area GABA neurons in behavior is unclear. Here, authors show that VTA GABA but not dopamine neurons integrate positive and negative valence to encode motivational conflic...
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Mel Sharpe @melissajsharpe.bsky.social · 17/11/2025
Good morning everyone! Suitably following the #dopamine dinner, we have our #dopamine symposium at 9:30am in SDCC room 6B! ‘Beyond Value: Non-canonical roles for dopamine in aversion and reward’ Come join us! 🧠 🧪
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Eric Garr @garrface.bsky.social · 13/11/2025
If you're at SfN on Monday, come by poster board II10 to see how fentanyl changes cell type-specific encoding of choice outcomes in the striatum to influence decision-making phenotypes. Looking forward to seeing some cool science and supporting SfN during these difficult times!
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Eric Garr @garrface.bsky.social · 13/11/2025
If you're at SfN on Monday, come by poster board II10 to see how fentanyl changes cell type-specific encoding of choice outcomes in the striatum to influence decision-making phenotypes. Looking forward to seeing some cool science and supporting SfN during these difficult times!
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