An imaging system developed to record cellular activity throughout the whole body of zebrafish captures cellular organ dynamics and identifies multiple distributed circuits.

New experiments reveal how astrocytes tune neuronal activity to modulate our mental and emotional states. The results suggest that neuron-only brain models, such as connectomes, leave out a crucial la...

Behavioral thermoregulation is critical for survival across animals. Balakrishnan and Haesemeyer discover that thermoregulatory behavior in larval zebrafish is organized into longer-term swim modes. T...

Autonomy is a hallmark of animal intelligence, enabling adaptive and intelligent behavior in complex environments without relying on external reward or task structure. Existing reinforcement learning ...

Thalamocortical projections contribute to the spatial organization and functional hierarchies of the mammalian cortex. Primary sensory cortices receive topographically segregated information from firs...

Skilled movement often requires flexibly combining multiple subskills, each requiring dedicated control strategies and underlying computations. How the motor system achieves such versatility remains u...

Astrocytes serve as crucial mediators of neuromodulatory processes previously attributed to direct communication between neurons, four new studies show.

As animals adapt to new situations, neuromodulation is a potent way to alter behavior, yet mechanisms by which neuromodulatory nuclei compute during b…

Researchers at HHMI’s Janelia Research Campus are decoding how neurons carry out computations carefully calibrated to an animal’s movement and environment to precisely regulate the release of neuromod...

Astrocytes, the most abundant non-neuronal cell type in the brain, have traditionally been thought of as passive supporters of neuronal circuits. However, in recent years, work from many […]

Both neurons and glia communicate through diffusible neuromodulators; however, how neuron-glial interactions in such neuromodulatory networks influence circuit computation and behavior is unclear. Dur...

Visuomotor experience is necessary for the development of normal function of visual cortex (Attinger et al., 2017) and likely establishes a balance between movement-related predictions and sensory sig...

Whole-brain imaging in virtual-reality-immersed zebrafish reveals that failed swim attempts are detected by noradrenergic neurons, which drive glial cells that accumulate calcium until they trigger the suppression of further futile attempts.

The authors show that norepinephrine signaling to astrocytes in the mouse visual cortex acts as a separate neuromodulatory pathway that regulates the effects of arousal on neuronal activity and cortic...

Zada and Schulze et al. study visually based schooling of the glassfish Danionella cerebrum and characterize the development of this collective behavior. By imaging brain-wide neural activity, they discover that midbrain neurons responsive to the shape of moving conspecifics emerge with the experience-dependent development of schooling behavior.