Brain Matters

Brain Matters is a podcast about neuroscience and the scientists behind the bench. Subscribe on iTunes #scicomm

[Brain Matters @brainpodcast]

🔥NEW PREPRINT🔥

Anthony here – excited to share work from my postdoc.

We found that ventral hippocampal somatostatin interneurons play a crucial role in extinction memory expression of both negative and positive associations.

Here’s the longer story:
https://t.co/Lr6FyigNZR

[Sheena Josselyn @sjo09]

New paper from the lab. Using longitudinal ca imaging, activity-dependent tagging and optogenetics, we show that newly allocated fear engram neurons in amygdala undergo a brief period of coordinated “offline reverberation” immediately after learning.

https://t.co/ELcRXieer2

[Danilo Bzdok @danilobzdok]

Out now:

Our AI team at Mila/McGill reveals how hallucinations arise in neural networks in global landmark study

In a five year effort, our lab has led a consortium across three continents to conduct the world’s largest study on how psychedelic drugs lead to instability and chaos that derails normal function in network circuits.

- Brain-scanning allowed to examine the activity changes inside neural networks in real time, as participants were under the influence of a psychedelic substance, compared to sober state.
- 10x bigger study than any previous brain research in psychedelics (>500 brain scans, hundreds of participants).
- Our study focused on psilocybin, lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), mescaline, dimethyltryptamine (DMT), and ayahuasca.
- Main finding: 5 different drugs have something in common; they cause “flattening” of the hierarchy of network systems; higher information-generating networks form cross-layer short circuits with lower-level information-receiving network for seeing and hearing.
- Published in Nature Medicine; one of the most prestigious scientific journals.

Our systematic assessment explains key mechanisms of how hallucinations come about in human brain circuits.

Read our article: https://t.co/43leRp1LGF

Nature News: https://t.co/rX4QWEXcdO

The New York Times: https://t.co/wQqQWjeVf3

National Geographic: https://t.co/T3OI8KhFqh

The Guardian: https://t.co/r09mwLdO3T

Mila: https://t.co/wIGHQoPGtv

McGill: https://t.co/GoHEvFvE5K

@C_Angermayer, @RickDoblin, @ProfDavidNutt, @EricTopol, @Drug_Researcher, @hubermanlab, @tferriss, @DeepakChopra, @foundmyfitness, @PeterAttiaMD, @bryan_johnson, @dwarkesh_sp, @lexfridman, @labenz, @richroll, @paytonnyquvest, @PeteRei, @reidhoffman, @COMPASSPathway, @DillanDiNardo, @Gerd_Gruender, @Helus_Pharma, @definiumtx

[Agustin Ibañez @AgustinMIbanez]

Music helps to understand the mind and the brain. Throughout the history of science, metaphors have shaped how we understand complex phenomena. The brain-as-computer metaphor has guided decades of theories and research. We propose music as a scientific metaphor for understanding the mind and brain via triplicate interfaces (listener, performer, composer) and a compound set of predictions. Multiple domains of music can be mapped onto different neural, cognitive and intersubjective processes such as network coordination, prediction, emotion and meaning. Neurocognition is not static but a dynamic, embodied, and time-sensitive system, much like a self-organized orchestra in which multiple processes interact simultaneously. Drawing on synergetics, predictive processing, and embodied cognition, we outline musical principles illuminating cognitive and action integration across time, offering new conceptual frameworks and testable predictions for future research. I enjoyed writing this piece with these stellar authors: @Kaiameye, @acolverson1, Christopher Bailey, @brucemillerucsf, @dafneduron90, Nicholas Johnson, Olga Castaner, @PierLuigiSacco, Eoin Cotter and Lucia Melloni. Science, like music, advances through new ways of listening to complex systems: https://t.co/W3pJRyXJOH

[Friedman Brain Institute @SinaiBrain]

SUPER EXCITED! 2024 Emerging Scholars Program Awardees are @VanderbiltU’s @JoseC_Zepeda, @CUanschutz’s @egstokes7 w/ HONORABLE MENTION to @CUNY's Katherine Anderson @zebrafinchkt. CONGRATULATIONS🎉JOIN US 6/21, 12:30pm as awardees present their work. RSVP👉https://t.co/CJFtDYgbeb

[Brain Matters @brainpodcast]

RIP Steve Albini, thanks for all the music and being a legendary hater.

[Brain Matters @brainpodcast]

@LindsayHalladay @halladaylab Congrats! Tucson has a lot of great things going for it 🌵🌞

[Brain Matters @brainpodcast]

@julie_charlton_ Sounds amazing, can't wait to read, and congrats!

[Max Blumenthal @MaxBlumenthal]

"Who failed Uvalde?"

Outstanding chant

[Glenn Greenwald @ggreenwald]

Between the banning of TikTok and the long-planned crackdown on anti-Israel speech and activism on US college campuses -- based on the familiar claim that it is racist hate speech -- the last six months have seen the greatest success for the pro-censorship movement in years.

[Read Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell) @JPHilllllll]

UT Austin students chanting “You don’t scare us” even as countless militarized Texas Troopers swarm their campus, attack their protest, and bring in horses. This movement will not be stopped.

[Brain Matters @brainpodcast]

@mameister4 Resolution difference in the first bar? Some kind of stitch?

[Michael Irving @MikeIrvo]

The audio log you find in a trashed office in a sci-fi horror game:

[Brain Matters @brainpodcast]

@TheMattDavis Many people are saying it

[Brain Matters @brainpodcast]

🔥NEW PREPRINT🔥

Anthony here – excited to share work from my postdoc.

We found that ventral hippocampal somatostatin interneurons play a crucial role in extinction memory expression of both negative and positive associations.

Here’s the longer story:
https://t.co/Lr6FyigNZR

[Brain Matters @brainpodcast]

Huge thanks to @melcregor for all the support and guidance along the way, as well as help from amazing scientists @neurotriee, Rasika Iyer, Saqib Khan, and Mazen Mohamed, and all the @SinaiBrain community. And if you like what you see, I’m on the job market!

[Brain Matters @brainpodcast]

Finally, our results were not limited to fear extinction. We observed a similar involvement of vCA1 SST-INs in appetitive extinction retrieval.

[Brain Matters @brainpodcast]

We hypothesize that once a context is rendered ambiguous following extinction learning, vCA1 SST-INs function like a mnemonic gate that controls whether new or old learning prevails, potentially by biasing which memory-related ensemble or synaptic pathway dominates.

[Brain Matters @brainpodcast]

Manipulating vCA1 parvalbumin+ INs had no effect on freezing. SST-INs appear to play a privileged role in extinction memory expression.

[Brain Matters @brainpodcast]

It’s possible that stimulating a large heterogenous population of INs disrupts typical brain function. However, when we stimulated *only* the SST-INs active during extinction retrieval, we replicated our findings.

[Brain Matters @brainpodcast]

Synaptic drive onto these SST-INs was altered following extinction learning, biasing them to be more excitable.

[Brain Matters @brainpodcast]

Optogenetically silencing vCA1 SST-INs impaired extinction retrieval, and stimulating these cells prevented relapse. Importantly, stimulating before extinction learning had no effect, suggesting extinction-dependent plasticity is required for SST-INs to affect freezing behavior.

[Brain Matters @brainpodcast]

During relapse, elevated c-Fos expression in vCA1 SST-INs is reversed, suggesting their activity relates to extinction retrieval and is subject to opposing modulation by extinction and relapse.