ENCYCLICAL LETTER MAGNIFICA HUMANITAS OF HIS HOLINESS POPE LEO XIV ON SAFEGUARDING THE HUMAN PERSON IN THE TIME OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE [ Multimedia ] ___________________________

Background and Purpose The neural mechanisms underlying effects of acute stress on memory are poorly understood. We demonstrated previously that acute stress produces identical spatial memory defici.....

This work provides a mechanistic understanding of how certain prefrontal circuits in the rodent brain permit flexibility to selectively stop learned behaviours through interactions with core subcortic...

If we still believe that science is a vocation grounded in argument, curiosity and care, we can’t delegate judgement to machines, says Akhil Bhardwaj

Calcium imaging of mouse hippocampal neurons while mice learn a reward-based task over several weeks provides insight into the evolution of the hippocampal reward representation during extended periods of experience.

Perceptual decisions are shaped by expectations about sensory stimuli and rewards, learned through sensory and reward prediction errors. Dopamine is known to convey reward prediction errors that shape...

Jang and colleagues show that positive reward prediction errors elicited during incidental encoding enhance the formation of episodic memories.

In this Discord server, people impacted by AI delusions and psychosis share their experiences — and even help users out of delusional spells.

Dopamine encoding of reward prediction errors naturally fluctuates over females’ reproductive cycles with estrogenic signaling due to reduced expression of dopamine reuptake proteins.

Nature Neuroscience - Liu and colleagues show that the vigor (that is, speed and amplitude) of dexterous movements is not controlled by ongoing fluctuations in extracellular dopamine within the...

Whether and how anatomically distinct regions of the superior colliculus (SC) exhibit specialisation in multisensory temporal integration to facilitate different behavioural responses are not fully un...

Neural mechanisms underlying reinforcement learning in naturalistic environments are not fully understood. Here authors show that reinforcement learning (RL) agents with hippocampal-like recurrence, u...

This randomized clinical trial evaluates outcomes following adjunctive ketamine infusions vs midazolam for depression.

We found strong evidence that antidepressants differ markedly in their physiological effects, particularly for cardiometabolic parameters. Treatment guidelines should be updated to reflect differences...

Neuropsychiatry has yet to surmount the fundamental challenge of mapping behavioral pathology to its underlying neural pathology. This gap limits the development of treatments for specific circuit pat...

Significance The combination of two-photon calcium imaging and two-photon optogenetic stimulation, termed all-optical interrogation, provides spatial and temporal precision when recording and manipula...

Often, gene therapy reviews concentrate upon specific therapeutic modalities – particularly either viral vector-mediated or a non-viral approach. Here, we draw together a comprehensive array of knowle...

UCL is consistently ranked as one of the top ten universities in the world (QS World University Rankings 2010-2022) and is No.2 in the UK for research power (Research Excellence Framework 2021).

UCL is consistently ranked as one of the top ten universities in the world (QS World University Rankings 2010-2022) and is No.2 in the UK for research power (Research Excellence Framework 2021).

The roles of distinct dopaminergic neuron subpopulations and the circuit projections driving their activity during threat behaviors remain incompletely understood. Here, the authors demonstrate that substantia nigra pars lateralis dopamine neurons receive selective, robust excitation from auditory and temporal association cortices, which, combined with rapid action potential firing, contributes to auditory threat conditioning.

Differences in neuroeconomic decision-making influence nucleus accumbens dopamine dynamics and reflect choice confidence during evaluation, as well as past and future value during re-evaluation, which...

Neuropsychopharmacology - Prefrontal contribution to passive coping behaviour in chronic stress and treatment by fast-acting antidepressant

Kim et al. show that 5XFAD mice exhibit persistent risk-taking and reduced behavioral flexibility in naturalistic “approach food-avoid predator” foraging paradigms. Simultaneous neural recordings reve...

In dynamic environments where stimuli predicting reward or punishment unexpectedly change, it is critical to flexibly update behavior while preserving…

A multi-cell-type drug discovery strategy targeting dysregulated gene networks in neurons and glia identified letrozole and irinotecan as a combination therapy that significantly improved memory and r...

Background Racemic ketamine and its enantiomer, esketamine, have emerged as fast-acting antidepressant options for individuals with treatment-resistant depression (TRD). Yet, despite growing clinical ...

A stereotaxic atlas of the whole mouse brain, based on a Nissl-stained cytoarchitecture dataset with isotropic 1-μm resolution, achieved through continuous micro-optical sectioning tomography, promise...

Disclaimer: This post was written May 2025, and the arguments apply to AI code capabilities at this time. The arguments around lack of competence are certainly likely to become less prevalent-while th...

Our experience of the world is a continuous stream of events that must be segmented and organized at multiple timescales. The neural mechanisms underlying this process remain unknown. In this work, we...

Brain-wide neural circuits are formed by the diverse axonal branching patterns of many individual neurons. Here we introduce POINTseq (projections of interest by sequencing), a high-throughput and use...

Rewards play a crucial role in sculpting all motivated behavior. Traditionally, research on reinforcement learning has centered on how rewards guide learning and decision-making. Here, we examine the ...

Subchronic variable stress, a paradigm shown to have divergent behavioral effects in males and females, induces shared and distinct physiological adaptations in the VTA. While both males and females ...

Sosa et al. find that hippocampal neural activity in mice encodes both environmental location and experience relative to rewards, spanning distances far from reward, through parallel and flexible popu...

Dopamine is central to reinforcement learning, classically linked to reward prediction error signaling. However, recent findings suggest a more complex picture, with dopamine neurons responding to ave...

Emotional responses to sensory experience are central to the human condition in health and disease. We hypothesized that principles governing the emergence of emotion from sensation might be discovera...

A computational framework is introduced to study how molecular changes impact brain activity, using biophysically grounded mean-field models to evaluate how drugs acting on synaptic receptors lead to ...

Reinforcement learning task-based behavioral and computational measures displayed low test–retest reliability at the individual level. Also in contrast to self-assessed personality measures, behaviora...

CNS drug discovery is more successful than oncology!!

Nature - A study shows that loss of memory precision associated with systems consolidation can be explained by neurogenesis-dependent reorganization of engram circuitry within the hippocampus over...