Brad Hulse

Story time friends... Ring attractor networks rely on fine-tuned symmetric connectivity. The fly head direction network has ring attractor dynamics but heterogeneous connectivity. How is this possible? 1/🧵 Link: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

We are hiring an AI@HHMI Program Manager to help run HHMI's $500M AI initiative: projects, budgets, staffing, recruiting, events, outreach. Advanced degree, program management experience, fluent with AI tools and effective without them 😉. Work with me! hhmi.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/Extern...

How do 🐁deal with complex landscapes? Turns out they learn a lot very quickly. We think they do this by learning a set of repeated sparse paths, which form a type of compressed world model. Joint work with the Hermundstad lab, led by Tzuhsuan Ma and Alison Comrie: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Highlighting a couple of lovely behavior-focused preprints from some of the newer rodent neuro labs at Janelia: mice hunting crickets in the @emilyjanedennis.bsky.social lab (tinyurl.com/5fenwwh8) and exploring structured, complex environments in the @jvoigts.bsky.social lab (tinyurl.com/4ewsvvhw)

If you've ever wondered how the brain *really* keeps things in mind, come let Aaron, Nick & their colleagues in the Nagel lab tell you how the fly does it here: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Single-neuron computations depend on the subcellular distribution and voltage sensitivity of ion channels. | @pnas.org #HorizonEU @erc.europa.eu (1/5) www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Our lab's latest paper on the neurobiology of collective behavior is now published www.nature.com/articles/s41... This is the work of a great team in the lab - led by Jo-Hsien Yu, with Geoff Meyerhof, Jimjohn Milan, and Julia Napoli @nature.com @danionella.bsky.social

Preprint time! This is a cool one. Complex systems, be they neural nets, interacting genes, or power grids, can produce diverse dynamics-- things like point attractors, limit cycles, and chaos. The dynamic landscape you get depends on how elements interact. But those interactions can also change!

📢🔥🎉🤩 New preprint from the lab, in collaboration with @clopathlab.bsky.social ! What network mechanisms generate a diversity of neural activity sequences within and across circuits? www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 🧵👇

Ultrastructural reconstruction of hundreds of neurons by volume EM revealed cell types and a precise glomerular organization in the zebrafish olfactory bulb. A heroic effort by Nila! Special thanks to Nila @michalwj.bsky.social and the whole team! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Imaging of activity in the telencephalon of adult zebrafish moving through a virtual reality revealed amazingly precise, structured internal representations of spatial environments. And they get better over time! Great work by Kim! Thanks also to Sriram and Jan. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

New preprint by Tommaso: olfactory cortex (of zebrafish) represents not only odor information but also temporal context, and these multimodal representations are sharpened after learning. And check out Tommaso's new method for 2P imaging in awake adult zebrafish! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

We are hiring! Come join us in the Straw Lab at the @biologyunifreiburg.bsky.social . Seeking a scientist to work on the neural and computational mechanisms of visual navigation in honey bees. uni-freiburg.de/en/job/00005...

And now this new beast - the full male fly central nervous system connectome - is out in print! www.cell.com/cell/fulltex... A phenomenal resource, @ukri.org @hhmijanelia.bsky.social, @cellpress.bsky.social

(1/2) When Janelia set out to map every neuron in the fly brain in 2008, many thought it couldn’t be done. Nearly 20 years later, a complete wiring diagram of the 166,000+ neurons of the adult male fruit fly is helping to reveal the brain’s secrets: bit.ly/4zT7jPf.

I’m very excited to share our new paper, led by the very talented Jack Bowler, a postdoc in the lab! www.nature.com/articles/s41... We all know that the way we learn something matters. But how does a training curriculum actually shape how the brain learns to solve a problem? a 🧵 1/N

Olfactory cues are undoubtedly relevant for fruitflies seeking for rotten 🍊🍒🍐🍌. The Ruta demonstrates the neural computations of olfactory-guided vector memories in the central complex and their relevance for plume tracking. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

First Noel Lab Pre-print! If you are into "peri-personal space" and feel like we need more single cell recordings, this one is for you! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Difficult decisions take time, but can we keep all accumulated evidence in mind long enough to make better choices? We find that working-memory limitations constrain decision-making, and these effects are modulated by dopamine. biorxiv.org/content/10.6... bioRxiv out with Cina Aghamohammadi et al.

What regulates the urge to sleep? William Joo and colleagues identified brain regions that reflect how long mice have been awake. Strikingly, inhibiting one of these regions reduces sleep by 70%, without the major behavioral deficits associated with sleep deprivation. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Our digital sphinx, a cautionary tale about the interpretation of connectome-body models, is now a reviewed preprint at @elife.bsky.social. We are grateful to the reviewers for engaging seriously with what we hope is a useful (if absurd) demonstration. elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre...

Our new preprint #manuskrypt is a labor of love and has a profound story behind it. @gritz122.bsky.social @argalloni.bsky.social (1/11) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

The animal is the same. The stimulus is identical. Yet the behaviour varies. Why? In our new study, @ashritocyte.bsky.social explores the sources of this behavioural variability under fully controlled conditions in larval zebrafish doing optomotor response. (1/7) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

1/10 We all know that person... Fast asleep in the back of the seminar room. 😴 Suddenly, they WAKE UP 😳 ask the sharpest question ⚡ and everyone wonders whether they were listening all along. Our Arc mutant flies are THAT person. A thread! 🧶

HHMI is starting an institute-wide theory center, housed at Janelia and led by my brilliant friend, collaborator, and boss, Ann Hermundstad! It’s wonderful to see theory recognized as a central part of scientific discovery and understanding. Stay tuned for job postings.

Now in Science: How does the brain’s navigation system allocate its limited representational resources during behavior? We found that grid cells sweep toward locations of interest, providing a potential mechanism for allocating spatial attention in the cognitive map.🧵 science.org/doi/10.1126/...

🎉 this paper is now out - we show how subicular plateaus are linked to reward locations. Congratulations to the whole team! www.cell.com/cell-reports...

1/8 Breathing seems automatic. But it's a finely tuned motor behavior that has to be controlled. In this preprint, I map the circuits that match a fly's respiration to the metabolic demands of flight and mitigate the risk of dehydration. 🧵🪰 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

We are looking for other scientifically curious and creative team players with diverse perspectives to build up our group across all levels. If you are interested in joining or collaborating, please check out our website (www.schretterlab.org) and feel free to reach out (cschretter at smu.edu).

New preprint! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Nearly a decade after starting the project, the first major results from our comparative connectomics work is online! Comparing the head direction circuits of the central complex in bees, ants and flies, recapitulating >300million years of evolution.

👇👇👇 And don’t miss the appendix, especially if you’re a fellow bumpologist. They saved some cool ideas for the end. It’s a great read.

Very exciting to see our work being highlighted by @thetransmitter.bsky.social! Thanks to Natalia Mesa, and as always thanks to our collaborators in the Jayaraman lab!… back to grinding away at reviewer experiments

Thank you Natalia Mesa at the @thetransmitter.bsky.social for highlighting our labs preprint on synaptic mechanisms of head direction learning!! 🪰🧭 Work from @markplitt.bsky.social in my lab in collaboration with the Jayaraman lab! www.thetransmitter.org/learning-and...

This paper is an absolutely beautiful combination of a deep set of cognitive ideas, a super creative task, a surprisingly impressive behaviour, and an elegant modelling framework. One of my favourite things in the last year.

Agentic coding is genuinely useful now, and there are some impressive reports of AI agents doing science. But how well and how reliably can they handle tasks scientists actually want to hand off, ones that bottleneck progress? How do we even measure that?? New paper🧵 arxiv.org/abs/2606.07718 1/10

NEW PAPER. Why do larger networks train better? "Because they contain more candidate *sub*networks that can learn the task" → lottery tickets This popular explanation uses an appealing but misleading metaphor🧵 We propose an intuitive alternative grounded in theory: escape dimensions

It’s very fun to analyze other people’s data for your favorite model and theory, but data reuse actually takes a huge amount of effort. We tested if current agentic AI can help with data reuse. Conclusion: it definitely can, but requires careful human supervision. #AIforScience #compneuro #neuroAI

New preprint with @lingqiz.bsky.social: Neurodata Without Boredom: Benchmarking Agentic AI for Data Reuse arxiv.org/abs/2605.12808 1/10

Really pleased that this work with @dudman.bsky.social is now out in Neuron: A global dopaminergic learning rate enables adaptive foraging across many options

It was a blast to put this review together with @adriennekinman.bsky.social and Larissa! The subiculum is a gem of a brain region. Also - the manuscript process at @cp-trendsneuro.bsky.social was a pleasure - thoughtful&involved feedback from reviewers&editor that really elevated our manuscript