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Chen et al. find that cerebellar Purkinje cells directly inhibit neurons in parabrachial nuclei that in turn influence many forebrain regions. This alternative output pathway could enable the cerebellum to regulate emotions, anxiety, aggression and affect.
What neurons encode when animals face a dangerous situation is unclear. Here, the authors show that the prefrontal cortex encodes both threat-specific information and a more general representation of the presence of danger.
Using direct intracranial recordings and modern speech AI models, Li and colleagues show representational and computational similarities between deep neural networks for self-supervised speech learning and the human auditory pathway.
Electrical deep brain stimulation therapy is limited by the risks of inserting electrodes into the brain. Here the authors report non-invasive deep brain stimulation in the human hippocampus using temporal interference of kHz electric fields.
This study examined the role of rat frontal and parietal cortices in choosing whether to gamble versus play it safe. A combination of perturbations, electrophysiology and quantitative modeling establishes that the frontal cortex is important for representing the expected utility of options in the service of economic choice.
The Hummel lab demonstrated that the striatum can be successfully and focally reached noninvasively via transcranial electrical temporal interference stimulation in humans, which resulted in improvements of motor learning in older adults.
The authors test artificial neural networks with stimuli whose activations are matched to those of a natural stimulus. These ‘model metamers’ are often unrecognizable to humans, demonstrating a discrepancy between human and model sensory systems.
Spatial transcriptomics reveals distinct composition and organization of cells and circuits in the mouse prefrontal cortex (PFC) relative to adjacent cortices, which concur with PFC’s diverse functions, and also help detect neurons involved in chronic pain.
We typically assume that we lose the ability to react to the outside world when sleeping. Oudiette et al. show that, in most sleep stages, humans can use their facial muscles to respond to spoken words during transient ‘connected’ periods.
In primates, activity in the visual cortex is not driven by spontaneous body movements. These results confirm the functional specialization of primate visual processing, in contrast with findings in mice, and highlight the importance of cross-species comparisons.
Neural networks must balance associative plasticity with rapid compensatory processes to maintain stable activity patterns. Andrei et al. provide in vivo evidence of a rapid homeostatic process that decreases network connectivity when excitatory neurons are synchronously activated.
The authors derive a local plasticity model that shapes neuronal representations to predict future sensory inputs. The same model accounts for fundamental neural plasticity phenomena and creates object invariance in deep neural networks.
The neocortex and cerebellum interact during cognitive functions. The authors assembled an activity map of the cerebellum in relation to its connectome with frontal cortex, which uncovered how the two areas form networks to orchestrate motor planning.
Wang et al. examine how populations of neurons encode decision certainty by characterizing the energy landscape underlying population neuronal dynamics during choice. They find that energy landscapes are steeper when more confident decisions are made.
Using single-cell genomics, addiction-like behaviors in outbred rats are associated with persistent cell-type-specific molecular signatures in the amygdala, implicating a pivotal role of energy metabolism in cocaine addiction.
A single cell type in the Drosophila visual system implements motion-opponent inhibition at multiple consecutive circuit levels. This neural architecture enables high stimulus selectivity without compromising sensitivity under noisy conditions.
Interleukin-12 (IL-12) can have anti-inflammatory properties; however, the underlying mechanisms are unclear. Here, the authors show that IL-12-sensing neurons mediate IL-12-induced neuroprotective tissue adaptation in autoimmune conditions of the CNS.
The sleep drive builds with time spent awake. Tossell et al. show in mice that tiredness triggers neurons in the prefrontal cortex to instruct the hypothalamus to initiate nesting and then sleep itself, ensuring that sleep occurs in a safe place.
Hong et al. show that activation of the medial prefrontal cortex induces REM sleep via its projections to the lateral hypothalamus, thus demonstrating a critical role of the cortex in the regulation of REM sleep.
Release of glutamate at high frequency involves a distinct subset of synaptic vesicles made by adaptor protein AP-3. Sorting of the phospholipid flippase ATP8A1 by AP-3 confers release at high frequency by recruiting synapsin to synaptic vesicles.