Nader Nikbakht

Neuroscientist at McGovern Institute for Brain Research @MIT

[Frederik Gieschen @FrederikNeckar]

Jim Simons: "My algorithm has always been: you get smart people together and you give them a lot of freedom. Create an atmosphere where everyone talks to everyone else. Provide the best infrastructure. And make everyone partners. That was the model that we used in Renaissance."

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

Tumbleweeds start out as tiny seedlings; by summer the plant has a round shape. They grow flowers and fruits. By fall they dry and detach from their roots, so they spread their seeds

[source: https://t.co/XLKA9YjF8U]
[video: https://t.co/JqAMLmJ4nx]

[Nader Nikbakht @NaderNiki]

@LabeledLines @andpru And drug gangs!!
https://t.co/pPA93eYETU

[Nader Nikbakht @NaderNiki]

@AdamZaidel Perhaps relevant?
https://t.co/0GIkenbxpB

[Markus Meister @mameister4]

Why does it take 10,000 trials to train a mouse on a trivial 2AFC task? When the same animal will learn a complex sequence of decisions in just 10 trials? I wrote a review with some speculations: https://t.co/qbpKh2gjVp. Also outside the paywall: https://t.co/1uhj3FL70Z.

[Alexey Polilov 🕊️ @AlexeyPolilov]

I am proud of the work of our team on the flight of the smallest beetles, published in the third issue of @Nature this year.
https://t.co/pGNpUGxHWG
1/9

[NPerentos @NPerentos]

And here's one of the sheep performing a cognitive task during hippocampal and cortical single neuron recordings.

[Oded Rechavi @OdedRechavi]

Scientists when they're allowed to use grant money to purchase a laptop

[Nader Nikbakht @NaderNiki]

@AthenaAkrami @zamakany @neurochong Thanks Athena, @zamakany I'm happy to discuss this with you any time! I'm not sure I can answer your exact question (do they perceive red as color), but they surely see if something is illuminated by longer wavelengths visible light (including red).

[Nader Nikbakht @NaderNiki]

Beautiful study on the Dynamics of history-dependent perceptual judgment in rats and humans:
https://t.co/0GIkent8h9

[Nader Nikbakht @NaderNiki]

@neuroscientistt @HenekaMichael Many congrats Dilek! But where is your mask????👻

[Nader Nikbakht @NaderNiki]

@jmrko @mpiNeuro Btw, the bird on your shoulder doesn't know what it's doing...

[Jörgen Kornfeld @jmrko]

Honored to open my lab at @mpineuro -- we use volume EM & computational methods to investigate how a bird learns & stores its song in the connectome, and whether we can decode it again. We are hiring :)!

[David Tingley @davidwtingley]

and so begins my journey into the rest of the body! There are a few things I really loved and learned during this study…

https://t.co/BUq0xkdUDY

a thread… 1/n

[Oded Rechavi @OdedRechavi]

Going over the bibliography to see if they referenced you https://t.co/tlBvTNRqKb

[Nader Nikbakht @NaderNiki]

@viajesubmarino Yet I needed to monitor their head and whisker movements during the trial using hi-speed cameras. Using red illumination I saw they were still perfectly able to do the task 🥴 So I kept shifting the WL to longer and longer till I reached IR where their perf dropped to chance.

[Nader Nikbakht @NaderNiki]

New paper @eLife (https://t.co/XkC5ZcQJNe +Banner): Rats are not blind to red light! We measured their capacity for visual discrimination under red light of various wavelength bands and demonstrate their conserved visual capacity under red light (1).
Illustration by @mulesome

[Nader Nikbakht @NaderNiki]

@viajesubmarino Thanks for your note. Mice should be pretty similar given more or less similar photoreceptor and core/rod distribution. Initial motivation was in the design of the original task https://t.co/J0KNn6Jz30 where I wanted to have catch trials where my rats could neither see nor touch.

[Nader Nikbakht @NaderNiki]

@NeuroChooser Thanks for reading and sharing. We also wondrd why this wasnt done before :)) all you need is a psychophysics task (good stats) involving real object shined by lights of a given WL, where in the lack of vision your subjects can still show they are able to do it (another modality)

[Nader Nikbakht @NaderNiki]

@MJLacagnina Thank you for the kind note. I'm glad we were able to shine a tiny bit of (red) light on this. We had to figure out what works for the visual-tactile control trials where rats could neither see nor touch the stimulus; yet we needed to be able to use our hispeed cam for monitoring