How cool is this?
Tethering transgenic fruit flies to a torque meter inside of a 360° display to let them learn how to control a punishing heat beam with their turning attempts.
It looks like we have finally discovered in which neurons the plasticity takes place that is required for this kind of learning:
We may not be 100% sure, yet, but everything is pointing towards plasticity in the motor neurons of the ventral nerve cord that control the wing angles.
@brembs
The idea of short term learning in motor neurons in a ganglionic nervous system is giving me chills and I cant quite pick out why. Embodied learning where there isnt a clear distinction between "symbolic" learning of "how to control beam" as some thought abstracted from its physical reality as a motor pattern is beautiful to me, even if I am oversimplifying/misunderstanding bc I know next to nothing about fly brains and this long research question
Neuroscientists and electrophysiologists of Mastodon, what would your top choice analysis tool be for a novice getting started with working with ECoG data? I have a graduate student I will be co-mentoring starting this Fall who is very bright but has no programming experience, and I'd like to help her get up and running as quickly as possible. I've generally been a roll-my-own-analyses type of electrophysiologist so I don't have a favorite framework to get her started with. I know EEGLAB is popular, but my main experience with it has been helping other people get their Matlab path working properly again after something in EEGLAB clobbers it. I've played with MNE in Python but it doesn't seem to be as purely-GUI as EEGLAB and I don't want her to get bogged down in learning Python before she can do any analyses at all.
So, what's your favorite tool for ECoG analysis? What would you recommend a student who's starting from zero background in electrophysiology or programming begin to learn in 2024?
Boosts for reach appreciated. I also just like hearing folks' opinionated takes on their research tools.
Clever neuronal activity labelling strategy: Engineered Ca2+ sensor biotinylates nearby proteins. Those proteins can then be stained - works for single vesicles, organelles, dendritic compartments, all the way to neuronal engrams. Both in culture and in vivo!
I'm excited to share a new publication from my graduate work!
In this opinion piece, we describe a new idea about how the brain represents more than one object - by having neurons switch their activity over time. This new idea has implications across a wide range of other areas of neuroscience, including how parts of objects come together to form a whole, and how we select what to pay attention to in busy environments.
I’m part of the #EEGManyLabs project testing the #replicability of influential #EEG studies. We are using #PredictionMarkets as a tool in this effort and you are invited to take part, especially if you have some expertise in EEG research, no matter how little. See below for details.
You may well know about the success of “prediction markets” in forecasting the likelihood of replication (e.g., Dreber et al., PNAS 2015). We are delighted to announce that we have partnered with economists who led these seminal studies to test the wisdom of the EEG community.
From today (as we near the end of recruitment for this project - please see last calls below), we are opening a survey to ask you to vote on the likelihood of some hypotheses studied in the #EEGManyLabs project. Subsequently, you will be invited to bet on the likelihood of success through a stock market platform, where you will earn real money for you or a selected charity.
The success of this effort will become clear when we complete the full project in a few years time. But the results will immediately tell us about the degree of optimism/pessimism amongst our community.
So, please share this widely and place your bets now...
How can I sign up for the prediction markets? Registrations to participate in the prediction markets are administered via the sign-up form linked below. You must have experience of working with EEG (for example, through collecting and/or analysing EEG data, which may be evidenced by having published peer-reviewed articles or preprints with EEG or equivalent experience e.g. designing, collecting and analysing data from EEG experiments).
"A petavoxel fragment of human cerebral cortex reconstructed at nanoscale resolution" by Shapson-Coe et al. 2024 (Lichtman lab).
The reconstruction at its current state is already useful and very interesting. Here is to hoping the authors will put in more time and resources to further polish it.
A remarkable finding from Shapson-Coe et al. 2024 paper on human brain #connectomics: the presence of canalized connections in the human brain cortex. Canalized in the Kauffman boolean networks sense [1], which here means: among the many synaptic inputs that any one neuron integrates, some are far stronger (by number of synapses) than the rest.
[1] Canalisation as a term was introduced by Waddington in 1942 in the context of genetics to mean "some phenotypic traits are very robust to small perturbations" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canalisation_(genetics)
@albertcardona I was confused about the need for three separate ICs until I actually looked at the paper. Using a few op-amps is not too unreasonable. :-)
Happy birthday to #neurologist Santiago Ramón y Cajal (1852 - 1934), here in front of Purkinje and granule cells from a pigeon, based on one of his own drawings! Cajal &Golgi won the Nobel in 1906, "in recognition of their work on the structure of the nervous system". He was as much of an artist as he was a scientist & his 100s of drawings are still used for teaching purposes.
🧵1/n
#sciart#linocut#printmaking#histstm#PurkinjeCell#neuroscience#MastoArt
Great write-up by @annaleen on the modern history of the pseudoscience of "brainwashing" and how it has been (/tried to be) used for mostly nefarious ends.
We can say this "psychopolitics" is part and parcel of what the great political scientist Richard Hofstadter termed the "paranoid style in American politics".
Awesome to see a mention of Liang Qichao and how his term "xinao" (wash-brain) which meant modernization was usurped and became a negative connotation. He was one of the great early reformers who wanted to modernize Chinese philosophy by seeking a radical break from Confucianism. Pankaj Mishra's "From the ruins of empire" does a great job of his intellectual response to western imperialism in remaking Asia.
First time also hearing/reading about "stochastic terrorism".
The honeybee brain hosts over 600,000 neurons, at a density higher than that of mammalian brains:
"Our estimate of total brain cell number for the European honeybee (Apis mellifera;
≈ 6.13 × 10^5, s = 1.28 × 10^5; ...) was lower than the existing estimate from brain sections ≈ 8.5 × 10^5"
"the highest neuron densities have been found in the smallest respective species examined (smoky shrews in mammals; 2.08 × 10^5 neurons mg^−1 [14] and goldcrests in birds; 4.9 × 10^5 neurons mg^−1 [16]). The Hymenoptera in our sample have on average higher cell densities than vertebrates (5.94 × 10^5 cells mg^−1; n = 30 species)."
Ants, on the other hand ...
"ants stand out from bees and wasps as having particularly small brains by measures of mass and cell number."
A huge factor are eyes. Bees and wasps have large eyes and this requires more nervous system to support them.
But also, they have included ants of various sizes, tiny ants, big ants... but not tiny wasps? The ones who have the smallest functional brains of all.
On fairy wasps, they do include them. This is what they write:
"In the small Hymenoptera, neuron size may be a limiting factor for brain miniaturization, as shown for the smallest insects (the parasitoid wasp Megaphragma [42]), whose larval brains comprise less than 5000 cells, the cell bodies of which are lost during pupation. The brain of the smallest species in our sample (the parasitoid wasps Leptopilina; figure 1) comprised around 30 000 cells (electronic supplementary material, table S1). Similar neuron numbers (2.2 × 105–3.7 × 105 neurons; [43]) have been estimated for fairyflies (Hymenoptera: Mymaridae), which are smaller than the smallest of our samples, suggesting that our cell number estimates may be conservative."
On ants: ants have large antennae and use them for all sorts of tasks, including sensing wind, scent, and mechanoreceptively as if they were hands but also as drums for assessing through vibration the content and properties of what they are touching. Parasitoid wasps ("flying ants", sort of) use their antennae to drum surfaces, a form of active echolocation of caterpillars and larvae inside plant stems or wood. All of these activities need a lot of brain power to process them.
Granted, eyes as 2D surfaces require lots of repeated neurons for contrast and color, and neurons that integrate across them just to process movement in the visual scene. I'd like to see a comparison with the size of antennal lobes and AMMC (antennal mechanosensory and motor center) regions of wasps and ants.