Raunak Basu

Research Technician Research Technician position available in the Grienberger lab at Brandeis University. We are a new neuroscience group studying the cellular basis of learning and memory in the mammalian brain. This is...

We’re looking for a new Research Tech! Our research tech is heading to graduate school (very exciting!), which means we’re recruiting someone new to join our team. The position involves hands-on neuroscience research in a collaborative environment.
brandeis.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/Jobs/job/Bra...

Striatum-wide dopamine encodes trajectory errors separated from value - Nature Cue-evoked striatal dopamine release in mice encodes bidirectional trajectory errors, spatially and temporally separated from value coding, reflecting the relationship between the speed and direc...

Striatum-wide dopamine encodes trajectory errors separated from value
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
#neuroscience

Orbitofrontal cortex drives predictive filtering of sensory responses - Nature Neuroscience Top-down projections from the orbitofrontal cortex carry predictive signals that grow with sound experience and suppress the auditory cortex via inhibitory circuits, revealing a predictive mechanism f...

Orbitofrontal cortex drives predictive filtering of sensory responses

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

#neuroskyence

As body-augmenting technologies become more common, it is important to understand how the brain decides what counts as "the body", and how that changes over time.

My first postdoc paper 🦾 now out in @elife.bsky.social 👇

Human hippocampal theta–gamma coupling coordinates sequential planning during navigation

Impressive study from Dan Bush's Lab at UCL:

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Place cells in CA1 lack topographical organization of firing locations | PNAS Topography is a well-described and well-known concept for cortical organization in primary sensory and motor cortices of mammalian brains. Similar ...

A half-century old question may have its final answer. Using high-resolution #Mini2P microscopes, we find no evidence of local topography in #PlaceCells. Place fields of neighbouring cells are no more similar than those of randomly selected cells. 🧠🗺️ Out now in @pnas.org www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Neuronal spiking in the mammalian forebrain is dominated by a heterogeneous ground state Neuronal firing patterns have significant spatiotemporal variability with no agreed-upon theoretical framework. Using a combined experimental and mode…

With this one in print, I think I finally earned that PhD... 😅
Presented for the first time at the cosyne when the world ended (March 2020). I'll bring over a summary thread from twitter when it was still twitter...

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

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 ...

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

Our paper is out in @natneuro.nature.com!

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

We develop a geometric theory of how neural populations support generalization across many tasks.

@zuckermanbrain.bsky.social
@flatironinstitute.org
@kempnerinstitute.bsky.social

1/14

Bluesky Map Interactive map of 3.4 million Bluesky users, visualised by their follower pattern.

I made a map of 3.4 million Bluesky users - see if you can find yourself!

bluesky-map.theo.io

I've seen some similar projects, but IMO this seems to better capture some of the fine-grained detail

"..hippocampal-prefrontal systems represent emotion concepts in a map-like way at multiple levels of abstraction.."

Map-like representations of emotion knowledge in hippocampal-prefrontal systems
by
@yumengma.bsky.social and @pkragel.bsky.social

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Hybrid neural–cognitive models reveal how memory shapes human reward learning - Nature Human Behaviour Using artificial neural networks applied to human data, Eckstein et al. show that good models of reinforcement learning require memory components that track representations of the past.

Hybrid neural–cognitive models reveal how memory shapes human reward learning
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

An updated version of the following paper is now available on bioRxiv:
Early spatial and contextual coding deficits in hippocampal CA1 precede performance decline in an Alzheimer's disease model.
Yimei Li, Mary Ann Go, Hualong Zhang, Simon R Schultz.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

The hippocampal map has its own attentional control signal!
Our new study reveals that theta #sweeps can be instantly biased towards behaviourally relevant locations. See 📹 in post 4/6 and preprint here 👉
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
🧵(1/6)

With some trepidation, I'm putting this out into the world:
gershmanlab.com/textbook.html
It's a textbook called Computational Foundations of Cognitive Neuroscience, which I wrote for my class.

My hope is that this will be a living document, continuously improved as I get feedback.

Neuro-computational account of how mood fluctuations arise and affect decision making - Nature Communications Fluctuations in mood are known to affect our decisions. Here the authors propose and validate a model of how mood fluctuations arise through a slow integration of positive and negative feedback and re...

I love papers that summarize what we know versus don't about a thing (most often via a model) and lead to clarity about what's unknown.

Three cheers to @fabienvinckier.bsky.social et al for this paper that does exactly in a space with much too little clarity: mood!

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Our new paper (with @biotay.bsky.social) is out and on the cover story of @currentbiology.bsky.social !!!! Veronika, a Carinthian mountain cow flexibly uses a “multi-purpose tool” to scratch herself. A video and more information will follow in the comments.
www.cell.com/current-biol...

Please spread the word🔊My lab is looking to hire two international postdocs. If you want to do comp neuro, combine machine learning and awesome math to understand neural circuit activity, then come work with us! Bonn is such a cool place for neuroscience now, you don't want to miss out.

When and why do modular representations emerge in neural networks?

@stefanofusi.bsky.social and I posted a preprint answering this question last year, and now it has been extensively revised, refocused, and generalized. Read more here: doi.org/10.1101/2024... (1/7)

Prefrontal neural geometry of learned cues guides motivated behaviours - Nature The dorsomedial prefrontal cortex encodes the value, salience and valence of learned stimuli along distinct neural dimensions, and the geometry of these representations shapes motivated behaviours in mice.

Nature research paper: Prefrontal neural geometry of learned cues guides motivated behaviours

go.nature.com/49HCsKd

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...

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

Asynchronous firing and off states in working memory maintenance Persistent spiking activity and activity-silent mechanisms have been proposed as neural correlates of working memory. To determine their relative cont…

New paper from the lab: "Asynchronous firing and off states in working memory maintenance"

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Sleep-dependent infraslow rhythms are evolutionarily conserved across reptiles and mammals Nature Neuroscience - Bergel et al. show that an infraslow rhythm connecting the brain and body during sleep is shared by lizards, mammals and birds, revealing an ancestral process and reshaping...

⚠️ New paper alert and what a way to end 2025! 🎉
Happy to share our story “Sleep-dependent infraslow rhythms are evolutionarily conserved across reptiles and mammals.” published today in Nature Neuroscience.

Sleeping dragons 🦎 and functional ultrasound!
Read the full paper here: rdcu.be/eWJHb 1/8

We invite applications for postdoctoral researchers with strong expertise in in vivo electrophysiology and circuit neuroscience to join our team at the Paris Brain Institute (ICM).

Insular cortex predictions regulate glucose homeostasis Brain-body interactions are essential for physical and emotional homeostasis. The brain uses information from the external world to predict upcoming bodily changes. This process involves interoceptive...

lab preprint! Interopceptive predictions are central to many brain-body interactions theories, but it's unclear if/how they affect bodily physiology. We (fearless Einav Litvak et al) show that insular cortex predictions are essential for glucose homeostasis-THREAD.. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Dimensionality reduction may be the wrong approach to understanding neural representations. Our new paper shows that across human visual cortex, dimensionality is unbounded and scales with dataset size—we show this across nearly four orders of magnitude. journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...

How distributed is the brain-wide network that is recruited for cognition? - Nature Reviews Neuroscience Both localized and distributed views on the functional organization of the brain have been put forward. In this Perspective, Rosen and Freedman examine the degree to which these two views account for ...

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

*Fully funded PhD student positions available to discover what changes in 🧠 when we learn something new.*

You think virtual reality + laser scanning microscopy are cool? You like 💻 and 🐭? Come join us!

Apply either through
www.udel.edu/academics/co...
or
www.udel.edu/academics/co...

Terrific work led by @emmaroscow.bsky.social showing that hippocampal replay reflects events with large prediction errors, all the better to bootstrap learning as we slumber

Congratulations to Matt Jones & Nathan Lepora for seeing this through to the end!

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

𝗛𝗼𝘄 𝗱𝗼𝗲𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗯𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻 𝗶𝗺𝗽𝗹𝗲𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗱𝗲𝗰𝗶𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 𝗶𝗳 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝗶𝘀 𝗻𝗼 "𝗰𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗿𝗮𝗹 𝗲𝘅𝗲𝗰𝘂𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲" (𝗮𝗸𝗮 𝗵𝗼𝗺𝘂𝗻𝗰𝘂𝗹𝘂𝘀)?
Via Decision Formation Through Multi-Area Population Dynamics
Excellent short review.
doi.org/10.1523/JNEU...
#neuroskyence