Placing too much emphasis on a specific interpretation of dimensionality may lead neuroscience down the wrong path.

Barth uses learning tasks in mice to drive synaptic plasticity in the sensory cortex, hoping to unlock general principles of how the cortex works.

Spiking neurons underlie the brain’s extreme energy efficiency, and therefore have great potential in neuromorphic computing, although realising this efficiency in practice has proven challenging. We ...

Communication between distant brain regions is mediated by plastic networks of gap junction-coupled astrocytes.

Mice learning a neurofeedback brain–computer interface task show neuron-specific teaching signals in cortical dendrites, consistent with a vectorized solution for credit assignment in the brain.

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)

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Striatal dopamine (DA) and acetylcholine constitute a computationally powerful neuromodulatory dyad that orchestrates action selection, motivational vigor, and reward learning. Striatal cholinergic in...

A powerful computational feature of the brain is its ability to compartmentalize different functions in a way that can be flexibly recombined. Experimental evidence for such modularity arose from cyto...

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In an ever-changing environment, animals often need to switch between performing different tasks involving distinct sets of cognitive processes. Many such tasks involve neural activity distributed acr...

Primary taste cortex does far more than code tastes by turning taste codes into motor commands via population dynamics.

While the head-direction (HD) system is well-established as the brain’s internal compass, the mechanisms that allow it to be flexibly shaped by landmarks have remained unclear. Here we discovered that...

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The authors review evidence that the primary function of the brain, supported by distributed neural systems, is the predictive regulation of physiology (i.e., allostasis). An example from Alzheimer’s ...

The meninges, which envelop and protect the brain, host a large number of resident macrophages that play a crucial role in regulating homeostasis and neuroinflammation. Intracellular Ca2+ signaling me...

Nature - Studies in mice show that acute stress activates hyperglycaemia via activation of a medial amygdala–ventral hypothalamic circuit that controls glucose metabolic responses in the...

Vasodilatory signals are rapidly communicated across long distances by endothelial-endothelial gap junctions, enabling coordinated dilation of the arterial network during neurovascular coupling.

Nature Communications - Mice flexibly shift attention between specific whiskers on a rapid timescale based on recent stimulus reward history in a detection task. Attention is correlated with a...

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 ...

Ascending neuromodulatory projections from deep brain nuclei generate internal brain states that differentially engage specific neuronal cell types. Because neurovascular coupling is cell-type specifi...

Brain vasculature is a complex and interconnected network under tight regulatory control that exists in intimate communication with neurons and glia. Typically, hemodynamics are considered to exclusiv...