Aquaria at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena bustle with tiny translucent jellyfish, adrift like dust motes in a sunbeam, rhythmically pulsing with long tentacles in tow. They’re beautiful—they may also be an important tool for neurobiologists. According to … Continue reading
Journal Club
Highlighting recent, timely papers selected by Academy member labs
Category Archives: Neuroscience
Jellyfish species proves its mettle as a neurobiology model organism
Categories: Neuroscience
Tagged bell, Clytia hemisphaerica, cnidarian, GCaMP, jellyfish, model organism, neuron, RFamide peptide, tentacle
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Harmful social behaviors are the toughest to shift
Social norms changed dramatically during the pandemic. Six-foot distancing and mask wearing became de facto rules in some communities, while elsewhere, wearing a mask was seen as an invitation for harassment. A new study in Proceedings of the Royal Society … Continue reading
Several brain regions help us anticipate what’s going to happen next
If you watch a movie clip on repeat, many areas of your brain begin to anticipate upcoming events onscreen, according to a recent study published in eLife. The first time you see the clip, your brain forms a distinctive neural … Continue reading
Categories: Journal Club | Neuroscience | Psychological and Cognitive Sciences
Tagged anticipation, brain, cognitive neuroscience, cortex, expectation, fMRI, hierarchy, memory, prediction, psychology
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Friends appear to share patterns of brain activity
Great minds think alike, so goes the saying. Greatness notwithstanding, a study in PNAS finds that the minds of friends do appear to share patterns of activity. “A lot of us have the intuition that our friends are kind … Continue reading
Categories: Journal Club | Neuroscience | Psychological and Cognitive Sciences
Tagged connectome, MRI, neural fingerprint
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Study finds clues to Alzheimer’s disease onset in the aging female brain
In the United States, women make up nearly two-thirds of all diagnosed cases of Alzheimer’s disease. On average, women live about 5 years longer than men, but that life expectancy discrepancy doesn’t likely account for such a large, sex-skewed prevalence … Continue reading
Categories: Immunology | Journal Club | Medical Sciences | Neuroscience | Physiology | Uncategorized
Tagged Alzheimer's disease, endocrine system, hippocampus, inflammation, menopause, microglia, neurodegenerative disease
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The hippocampus has brief but critical role in early task learning
How the brain learns new tasks is among the biggest and oldest questions in neuroscience. A recent study in Nature Neuroscience offers a new, potentially key part of the answer: the dorsal hippocampus is involved in the earliest stages of … Continue reading
Categories: Journal Club | Neuroscience
Tagged Alzheimer's disease, chemogenetics, decision-making, dorsal hippocampus, hippocampus, learning, memory, neuron
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Future choices may be guided by our memories of past ones
When it comes to making choices, past decisions may play a surprisingly large role. The traditional view of decision-making is that our choices are guided by what we remember about the outcomes of previous choices we’ve made. But in recent … Continue reading
Categories: Economic sciences | Journal Club | Neuroscience | Political Science | Psychological and Cognitive Sciences
Tagged choice, decision-making, fMRI, hippocampus, learning
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Judging others based on the rewards they receive correlates with political leanings
Which employee deserves the highest salary? Should a professor receive tenure? Did my spouse do their fair share of the household chores? These types of questions all require people to pass judgment on the effort expended by others. According to … Continue reading
Categories: Journal Club | Neuroscience | Political Science | Psychological and Cognitive Sciences
Tagged decision-making, politics, rewards
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Dopamine-making neurons, an ongoing mystery, play a bigger role in reinforcing learning than in initiating action
Deep in the midbrain, one type of neuron has two crucial jobs when it comes to acting while anticipating a reward—a state also known as Pavlovian conditioning. Called dopaminergic (DA) neurons, they can link a signal, such as a sound … Continue reading
For choices involving uncertainty, the brain simplifies the math that drives our decisions
Every day, people make countless decisions, big and small: Should I buy that new house? Do I want chocolate or vanilla ice cream? A recent study suggests that when faced with uncertainty regarding a choice, how a person evaluates their … Continue reading