iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Jimmy Dooley @jimmycdooley.bsky.social · 27/07/2026

Do you work with Rats? Do you do developmental manipulations? Are you tired of locating cortical areas via trial and error? Well, SUFFER NO MORE, FRIENDS! Step right up the see the brand-new, handy-dandy Top-Down Developmental Cortical Atlas! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

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Jimmy Dooley @jimmycdooley.bsky.social · 17/06/2026

I can say that this absolutely delivers on the promises of developmental neuroscience and pretty pretty pictures!

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Jimmy Dooley @jimmycdooley.bsky.social · 19/05/2026

Big thanks to ‪@sfnjournals.bsky.social‬ for highlighting our upcoming paper! We’re mapping out how the distinct building blocks of REM sleep—tonic and phasic dynamics—actually develop and organize in early life. Can’t wait for the final version to drop soon!

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Jimmy Dooley @jimmycdooley.bsky.social · 21/04/2026

This has been a long time coming - but our M1 Development/M1-RN paper is finally out in its final form! Rather than re-hash the original story, I'm going to talk about one of the biggest reviewer-suggested additions, as well as some unpublished data! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

nature.com

Motor cortex activity during sleep and wake movements sharpens across development but continues to lag the red nucleus - Scientific Reports

Scientific Reports - Motor cortex activity during sleep and wake movements sharpens across development but continues to lag the red nucleus

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Jimmy Dooley @jimmycdooley.bsky.social · 13/04/2026

I keep going back to how tough it would be to explain REM sleep and twitching to an alien (assuming they don't do it too, which maybe isn't a given)

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Jimmy Dooley @jimmycdooley.bsky.social · 06/04/2026

New paper (with lots of cute animal videos!) Ever watch your dog "run" while asleep and wonder what’s going on in their brain? In Current Bio we suggest that those twitches aren't just leaky dreams—they’re a vital maintenance system for the most precise movements www.cell.com/current-biol...

cell.com

REM-sleep twitching in adults and the maintenance of specialized sensorimotor systems

Blumberg et al. present video evidence of twitching during adult sleep in a diverse sample of animals. Adult twitching appears to selectively involve appendages used for active sensing, mirroring thei...

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Jimmy Dooley @jimmycdooley.bsky.social · 02/12/2025

New preprint! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... You've heard the phrase “sleep like a baby” - but what does it actually mean? Turns out, infant sleep is way different from adult sleep. And we still don’t understand the journey from infancy to adulthood. tl;dr babies are not just tiny adults 1/x

Creepy art from the middle ages showing a baby as a tiny adult

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Jimmy Dooley @jimmycdooley.bsky.social · 22/10/2025

They did more than compare these two species - they crossed them! Super super cool sounding paper that must've been an unimaginable amount of work

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Jimmy Dooley @jimmycdooley.bsky.social · 06/10/2025

I think the fact that this post is resonating so strongly says something very important about present-day academia. Just had a DM convo with Mike about it - we've both had people tell us "your postdoc is your best stage in academia" - an idea we agree with (but wish wasn't the case...)

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Jimmy Dooley @jimmycdooley.bsky.social · 04/10/2025

An argument always worth repeating. @marksblumberg.bsky.social I read this entire thread in your voice.

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Reposted by Jimmy Dooley

Brian Trainor @briantrainor.bsky.social · 23/09/2025

If you are funded by NIMH and only received 85% of your budget this year (like we did), check era commons to see if you have a new award notice. We just got the remaining 15% today.

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Jimmy Dooley @jimmycdooley.bsky.social · 09/08/2025

Two years of (non-federal!) funding for the lab! Should be able to fund science and (nearly) all salaries in that time. I guess people weren't lying - you need at least 10 rejections before the funding gods give you a win.

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Jimmy Dooley @jimmycdooley.bsky.social · 23/06/2025

Look what just moved to the top of our labs summer journal club reading list. Can't wait to take a look! So far, gorgeous visuals!

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Jimmy Dooley @jimmycdooley.bsky.social · 13/06/2025

An editorial from the lab was published today about a recent paper published in the journal Sleep that characterizes the development of PGO waves. It's short, so if you have ~5 minutes, go ahead and click through. Still, a quick summary in the 🧵 that follows. academic.oup.com/sleep/articl...

academic.oup.com

Building the dream: uncovering the development of REM sleep’s features

Imagine a factory that builds cars. Raw materials come in one end, the individual components are progressively assembled, and complete cars come out the ot

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Jimmy Dooley @jimmycdooley.bsky.social · 01/06/2025

Sky's are likely turning colors tonight. If you're in the Midwest, you should have cloudless sky's tonight - take a look at 10-11pm. And even if you can't see anything, point your phone to the northern skies, just in case

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Jimmy Dooley @jimmycdooley.bsky.social · 31/05/2025

There's a very decent case to be made for no AI overviews for medical searches. Someone is going to search for this and panic...

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Jimmy Dooley @jimmycdooley.bsky.social · 31/05/2025

If you rely on Federal funding, read this. And read it again next week, when it's updated to reflect today's budget requests

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Jimmy Dooley @jimmycdooley.bsky.social · 30/05/2025

In late January, I said we were "still exploring" a cool thing we found in RN. Well, we're back, and we've got movement kinematics (thanks to ‪@deeplabcut.bsky.social‬)! (You can find all the details in our updated bioRxiv paper, linked below) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

biorxiv.org

Subcortically generated movements activate motor cortex during sleep and wake in rats through postnatal day 24

During early postnatal life, cortical motor control emerges from complex interactions between cortical and subcortical circuits. Although activity dependent processes are essential for primary motor c...

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Jimmy Dooley @jimmycdooley.bsky.social · 22/05/2025

Another paper showing that circuits are never as straightforward as we'd assume... From the abstract: "The data suggest Purkinje cell spike activity changes cannot accurately predict nuclei cell changes" If it can't be straightforward, at least it's endlessly fascinating.

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Jimmy Dooley @jimmycdooley.bsky.social · 16/05/2025

I think i saw someone else post this same idea a little while ago...

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Reposted by Jimmy Dooley

Denis Wirtz @deniswirtz.bsky.social · 28/04/2025

A huge majority of Americans (77%) oppose the cuts to medical research that the current administration has made. (Source: Wash. Post/ABC/Ipsos poll)

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Jimmy Dooley @jimmycdooley.bsky.social · 10/04/2025

If we get a few more papers like this, saying "we pay too much attention to cortex" is going to stop being a hot take...

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Jimmy Dooley @jimmycdooley.bsky.social · 08/04/2025

I think this is an important message (and an underappreciated one). It's hard to do, but ignoring the framing (that this is a reduction in spending) ignores the larger point that all of the "savings" are being offset by other increases.

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Jimmy Dooley @jimmycdooley.bsky.social · 31/03/2025

I just finished @johngreensbluesky.bsky.social's book "Everything is Tuberculosis". It's excellent. As a scientist, it's easy to think that once we have a cure, the hard work is done. But this book gives a tragic counter example of why that isn't true. As he writes: Today, the cause of TB is us.

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Jimmy Dooley @jimmycdooley.bsky.social · 24/02/2025

In my systems neuroscience class the week after next, we're going to discuss receptive fields and neural coding. Does anyone know of a basic (and ideally math-light) overview on rate codes, time codes, etc?

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Jimmy Dooley @jimmycdooley.bsky.social · 17/02/2025

Love that this paper made the developmental connection! Subcortical motor structures can do more than we give them credit for.

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Jimmy Dooley @jimmycdooley.bsky.social · 30/01/2025

If you study sensorimotor neuroscience there's still a chance to get on this starterpack!

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Jimmy Dooley @jimmycdooley.bsky.social · 27/01/2025

That moment when someone else beats you to posting about your own paper... Proper runthrough to come, but for now: At 24 days old, M1 neurons should be JUUUST about ready to put the M in motor cortex. So how do they compare to a more mature motor nuclei in brainstem? Click the link to find out!

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Jimmy Dooley @jimmycdooley.bsky.social · 11/01/2025

The Developmental Systems Neuroscience starter pack is up to 30 people! If you missed the original post, that's what @meikeesther.bsky.social and I are calling developmental neuroscientists who use systems neuroscience methods I thought now's a good time to post it again. Want to be added? DM me!

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Jimmy Dooley @jimmycdooley.bsky.social · 08/01/2025

Wikipedia rabbitholes are worth it for those moments when the objective, neutral, wikipedia tone breaks down...

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Jimmy Dooley @jimmycdooley.bsky.social · 02/01/2025

2 reposts but no recommendations... Starting to think this is a reflection of how the field views opto experiments in practice

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Jimmy Dooley @jimmycdooley.bsky.social · 01/01/2025

I'm selecting papers for an upper-division undergraduate course on Systems Neuroscience, and want to have a paper that highlights the best of what's possible with modern genetic tools (particularly optogenetics, given the preceding lectures). Does any one have any recommendations?

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Jimmy Dooley @jimmycdooley.bsky.social · 23/12/2024

Check out the 7th post in this thread - it's really rare that a motor prep. paper gives such simple and straightforward outcome. I'm excited to read the whole paper!

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Jimmy Dooley @jimmycdooley.bsky.social · 22/12/2024

Super exciting study on Somatotopic development. I particularly love the behavioral adaptation story!

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Jimmy Dooley @jimmycdooley.bsky.social · 17/12/2024

There has to be someone who (like me) didn't know this. I just learned that for ~$40 you can buy a USB "microscope" that works great for electrode placement. Here's the one that we just got for the lab that recorded this video: www.amazon.com/Plugable-Mic...

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Jimmy Dooley @jimmycdooley.bsky.social · 14/12/2024

I'm looking for a high-resolution and detailed image of a cortical pyramidal cell for some office/lab artwork. Does anyone know of one? Ideal a microscope image, but a reconstruction that i can convert to an image works as well.

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Jimmy Dooley @jimmycdooley.bsky.social · 12/12/2024

I think today I'm officially a PI For the first time, I saw data that: 1. Was collected by another member of my lab (in this case by Madi, an incredible grad student), and 2. Is getting me to rethink what's going on with this circuit

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Jimmy Dooley @jimmycdooley.bsky.social · 09/12/2024

I want to read this review just because of this beautiful figure.... I love a good, ambitious, comprehensive, summary figure

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Jimmy Dooley @jimmycdooley.bsky.social · 06/12/2024

This is awesome! I'm gonna try to open a lecture with this driveby next semester.

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Jimmy Dooley @jimmycdooley.bsky.social · 06/12/2024

I may be biased, but SleepPeeps starterpack 2 is where it's at. Either that or the field has expanded beyond starterpacks 150 person limit and you should follow the complete list. Thanks @tonycunningham.bsky.social for putting these together!

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Jimmy Dooley @jimmycdooley.bsky.social · 04/12/2024

Now that we’re on Bluesky, it’s a good time to bring back #badsciencedrawings – a collection of figures that prove that science is more science than art. Before Biorender, all we had was MS Paint and a dream. But ovals, lines, and lightning bolts were all we needed Morales-Botello et al., 2012

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Jimmy Dooley @jimmycdooley.bsky.social · 03/12/2024

I don't want to brag, but this morning I got this Google Search Impact badge saying I've had 20 visitors in the past 4 weeks. If you do the math, that's getting awfully close to 1 click a day. #madeit

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Jimmy Dooley @jimmycdooley.bsky.social · 02/12/2024

This reads exactly like the lecture my postdoc advisor, @marksblumberg.bsky.social, busts out every 3-4 years. And the story is just as interesting every time I hear it.

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Jimmy Dooley @jimmycdooley.bsky.social · 28/11/2024

I just asked Timmy, a self-described "BroGTP" to come up with some metaphors to explain the major points from the ViewPoint article, and it did a pretty good job. I really like number 3

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Jimmy Dooley @jimmycdooley.bsky.social · 27/11/2024

Looking for an escape over the holiday? @meikeesther.bsky.social and I published a ViewPoint looking at the intersection of Developmental and Systems Neuroscience titled “More Than a Small Brain: The Importance of Studying Neural Function during Development” www.jneurosci.org/content/44/4...

jneurosci.org

More Than a Small Brain: The Importance of Studying Neural Function during Development

The nervous system contains complex circuits comprising thousands of cell types and trillions of connections. Here, we discuss how the field of “developmental systems neuroscience” combines the molecu...

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Jimmy Dooley @jimmycdooley.bsky.social · 23/11/2024

This paper gets at a tension that I'm seeing (and hearing) more and more about cortex: Most cortical neurons' response properties are too complex to be named in any way that isn't a misnomer (and therefore restrict thinking).

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Jimmy Dooley @jimmycdooley.bsky.social · 23/11/2024

I guess cortex is the biggest through-line of my papers. It's a shame I have 3 different forms of the word development- otherwise it might be competitive too.

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Jimmy Dooley @jimmycdooley.bsky.social · 17/11/2024

Doing a lit review today, and I spent the last 15 minutes closing the 50 tabs that got opened as I added papers into my citation manager. Every time I do this, I'm shocked at how many tabs popped up (and often lose which tab holds my original pubmed/google scholar search). Is there a better way?

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