Matteo Carandini

The apical dendrite looks great, and does wonders in a slice. What does it do in the living cortex? It depends on the cell. A causal spatial role for apical dendrites in the cortex www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... by @anyiliu.bsky.social with @kenneth-harris.bsky.social and @fedrossi.bsky.social

"Prefrontal cortex and striatum dissociate modality and learning order in cross-modal sensorimotor learning in mice" with Da Song Out now in Nature Communications: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Authors must be accountable for AI use, have intellectual input into the work and its interpretations. They must be verifiable human beings and affiliated with a verifiable organization to which we can turn if there are issues/allegations of misconduct. 3/n

This is the clearest behind-the-scenes exposé of Theranos I've heard. TylerShultz is my hero, and a funny guy too. Per Tyler, every scientist there knew that not only did the technology and tests not work, but there was no real technology to begin with. www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsUK...

I recently received an interesting email that turned out to be an LLM-powered funneling scam. Here I describe the story and how LLMs also turned out to be a powerful forensic tool. russpoldrack.substack.com/p/digging-in...

At SWC, we’re unravelling the mysteries of the brain. Ready to join us? Applications for our Systems Neuroscience PhD programme are now open! www.sainsburywellcome.org/web/content/...

Excited to share our first red ACh sensor! 🔴 We developed GRAB_rACh1h, the first genetically encoded red fluorescent sensor for recording acetylcholine dynamics in vivo. (1/3)

Almost four years ago, An and I were just starting to prepare this manuscript when tragedy struck. Since then, Qiyu and the team have worked extremely hard to bring this study to light. I could not be more proud of them.

If you liked this piece on Adrian's discoveries, consider reading the book that inspired me to write it: "Galvani's Spark", by Alan McComas. Strong recommend. It's expensive if you buy it new, but often available used (e.g. on AbeBooks) for a reasonable price. global.oup.com/academic/pro...

In two 1926 articles, Edgar Douglas Adrian revealed that neurons communicate through trains of spikes. @carandinilab.net describes the remarkable discovery and how it shifted focus from the medium (the nerve) to the message (the neural code). #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/history-of-n...

The neural code at 100 Out today in @thetransmitter.bsky.social www.thetransmitter.org/history-of-n...

📢Have work to share with the computational and systems neuroscience community? Abstract submissions for #COSYNE2027 are now open. Deadline: 18 October 2026, 11:59 p.m. AoE Submit your abstract: www.cosyne.org/abstracts-su... #Neuroscience

The platform combines two-photon optogenetic holography with wide field mesoscopy, which had not been done before. #neuroskyence By Simon Makin www.thetransmitter.org/brain-imagin...

A friend just wrote me about what is happening right now with AI decompiling games and applications (e.g., Adobe Photoshop) and it has really shaken me because the implications for the free market are staggering Basically closed source software is over forever and it happened overnight

2026 Brain Prize winner David Ginty spent his career mapping the nerve cells sensing pain. Then he got shingles — and used his own body to identify the neurons responsible. #BrainPrize #Neuroscience https://youtu.be/0UL0G2Yef9U

This is awesome! Super useful to have the pulse of what's hot in neuroscience right now (rather than in 2 years, when these papers will be published). And I would say this even if my lab didn't have 2 papers in the top 10. Only suggestion: please add links to the papers!!!

Ok now we have recognized optogenetics, which massively deserved that Nobel medal. Next on the list is dopamine, right? Wolfram Schultz and colleagues have changed our understanding of the brain and mind to the point that dopamine/reward are now part of popular culture (and for the right reasons).

Excited to be launching our new PhD program in Minds and Machines at UCL with co-Directors Tali Sharot and @nadinedijkstra.bsky.social To apply, find out more here: www.ucl.ac.uk/brain-scienc... Our launch event is on Nov 10th, with a cracking lineup of speakers: luma.com/cikzcth0

Thank you to everyone sharing in this moment! I’m so grateful to all my trainees & collaborators… dlab.stanford.edu/group-members (pic: Peter and I together in 2017) Reading for all those asking: for technical details: dlab.stanford.edu for everyone: deisseroth.org/projections

BREAKING: The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel “for their discoveries concerning light-gated ion channels and optogenetics.” More to follow.

BREAKING NEWS The 2026 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel “for their discoveries concerning light-gated ion channels and optogenetics.”

This is the best Substack I’ve ever read open.substack.com/pub/inprepar...

Applications are now open for the SWC Systems Neuroscience PhD Programme. Join us in London! 🎓 World-class neuroscience training 💰 Fully funded 4-year programme 🖥️Close links to @gatsbyucl.bsky.social Apply by 9 Nov: www.sainsburywellcome.org/web/content/...

Major Ukraine research center damaged in Russian strikes | Science | AAAS www.science.org/content/arti...

Ukraine: People escape historic Kyiv building hit by Russian drone

Had a UKRI funded grant proposal rejected at the "AI triage stage". "This AI-based triage was used only to identify approximately 50% of the strongest proposals to take forward to full human review." 🧪 #academicsky

56k submissions to ICLR These conferences are now 90% AI-written garbage. These ppl who submit AI papers to have a conference paper on resume (for job/position) have effectively turned that value that they are after to "0". Greed + AI slop -> a pile of rubbish x.com/denny_zhou/s...

2023: 8,039 proposals 2024: 10,360 proposals 2025: 17,066 proposals 2026: 21,627 proposals Something's gotta give

Happy to share the version of record of our locus coeruleus paper here: www.nature.com/articles/s41... Prior thread on some of our discoveries in this study: bsky.app/profile/jere...

After a long journey through review, our paper is finally out in Nature Communications. We started with a simple problem: The visual cortex is strongly modulated by movement. So how can it represent the visual world without movement interfering with everything? www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Now out in Nature Neuroscience: fantastic work by @cxue.bsky.social, Sol Markman et al who discovered a neural reason that performance suffers under cognitive load: “Feature interference underlies a neuronal basis for the behavioral cost of task uncertainty”. www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🧪🧵1/

If you thought "everything is everywhere" in the brain: inactivations reveal a clear distinction of labor. Sensory areas sense, colliculus promotes eligible actions (!), and prefrontal cortex integrates. The role of superior colliculus in a logistic decision www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

More stories like this one, please and thank you www.nytimes.com/2026/09/06/s...

Our BrainSaw serial-section 2-photon platform acquires whole-organ datasets automatically and requires minimal tissue processing. It has a growing international install base and has contributed to 35 publications. Learn more at: swcmicroscopy.com/brainsaw/ #microscopy #neuroscience

The superposition of these two studies — both incredible — reflect a snapshot of "one big thing" systems neuroscience has yet to resolve. In mice: 1. Task-related signals are everywhere. 2. Absent large swaths of "everywhere," suprisingly sophisticated learning & behavior remains.

Brainwide Representation of Navigation Enny recorded >20k neurons across forebrain and midbrain while mice navigated 1D VR. She found that every region encodes spatial position! Hippocampal formation stands out only in uniformity of the representation. But visual cortex beats it in precision...

Textbook: tracking position during navigation is primarily the job of the hippocampus. Recent findings suggest a more complicated story. Recording >20k neurons brainwide, we indeed find spatial representations in every region! With @kenneth-harris.bsky.social and @carandinilab.net

The Ferrier Medal and Lecture 2027 is awarded to Professor Kenneth Daniel Harris for his contributions to neuroscience by unifying experimental neurophysiology with advanced analytical methods and for pioneering methods that allow recording from thousands of neurons. #RSMedals https://bit.ly/4qCJZRo

How can we design experiments that make computational models disagree? One section of our new @natrevneuro.nature.com Review with @kriegeskorte.bsky.social and @heikoschuett.bsky.social examines studies that used stimulus sets designed to elicit distinct predictions from competing models. 1/16

Tonight the Palace of Westminster is illuminated in the colours of the Ukrainian flag to mark Ukraine’s Independence Day and show Parliament’s support for the people of Ukraine.

I am proud of this paper. Since it came out in 2022 it has received 0 citations (yes that's a zero). But multiple young scientists have found it useful! (from other labs, so they were not coerced...). Perhaps you will find it useful too? SOME TIPS FOR WRITING SCIENCE doi.org/10.1523/ENEU...

In 2023, @nature.com published 'Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time', receiving world-wide media attention. Our Matters Arising, published after a 32 month delay (more on that soon), shows that the reported decline can largely be attributed to dataset artefacts. 🧵

New substack: without big changes, slow growth is normal: chrisdillow.substack.com/p/stagnation...

Fascinating article on the progress of medical research and the surprising factors that can still hold it back. And I didn't know about Eroom's law! (it's the opposite of Moore's law)

‘If we don’t fight back, we don’t have a future’: the journalist taking on the ‘tech fascists’ of Silicon Valley

All BrainGlobe atlases now have Neuroglancer links so that you can explore atlases in the browser without needing to download them first! All links here: brainglobe.info/documentatio... Here you can view our Eurasian Blackcap atlas: neuroglancer-demo.appspot.com#!https://bra...

Lovely result from the Stephenson-Jones lab at SWC: during sleep, mice replay newly-learned motor skills in the striatum — and it continues even after the hippocampus is fully removed. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-026-02362-5

Pyramidal cells in the cortex send a long apical dendrite to layer 1. What is its role? What happens when it's gone? ✂️ A causal spatial role for apical dendrites in the cortex Out today with @kenneth-harris.bsky.social, @carandinilab.net and @fedrossi.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

@ptrrupprecht.bsky.social providing the new go-to GECI reference. Read when doing calcium imaging. rdcu.be/fwF82