Eric Garr

Now published in Neuropharmacology! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

I wanted to highlight the work of Alison Comrie et al. that recently came out in Neuron and I don’t think it is getting enough attention: paper: cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(26)00674-4 #neuroskyence

Four days ago, a scientist was surprised by the news that Anthropic discovered new virus genes for making DNA. He says he’s been studying them for years—and feeding his data to Anthropic’s AI as part of his own research. Coincidence? Here’s my story. nyti.ms/3VSWayc

Heading to the Pavlovian Society meeting in Montreal, may never return.

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...

New paper! Decision-making isn't just picking winners via more neural firing, the brain reorganizing activity patterns into different subspaces, shifting from "one option vs. another" to "chosen vs. rejected" doi.org/10.1016/j.is... #neuroscience @picowerinstitute.bsky.social @mitbcs.bsky.social

An agreement paves the way for hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of projects to be transferred from the NIH’s institute for infectious diseases to the Department of Defense. go.nature.com/4ycEbk8

This study found opposing effects of fentanyl on tonic vs. phasic dopamine that may reveal insight on impaired non-drug reward seeking during opioid exposure

1/6 Opioids trigger a dopamine surge that can create dangerous reward associations—yet that same dopamine signal may help shape central pain perception. Can the dopamine surge and reward associations be separated? Our recent Nature study says yes www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The Cellular and Synaptic Actions of Dopamine During Behavior https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.08.05.742858v1

This seems super important for in vivo experiments #Norepinephrine and #dopamine #sensor crosstalk depends on local innervation density doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Starting in Spring or Summer 2027 K99/R00 (under its new activity code KT1/R00) will only be available to US citizens, permanent residents, and non-citizen nationals. I am hearing this from many program officers, but NIH has yet to make an official statement to my knowledge.

A conserved population of genetically defined striatal neurons gates opioid reward https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.07.28.741269v1

Replay of procedural memory is independent of the hippocampus 👀👀 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The 2026 volume of the Annual Review of Neuroscience is now online 🧠 The most read article is "Planning in the Brain: It's Not What You Think It Is" by @marcelomattar.bsky.social and @nathanieldaw.bsky.social

Just how goal-directed are hippocampal theta sweeps, anyway? Great News & Views from @adredish.bsky.social Lab on recent theta goal papers: www.nature.com/articles/s41... #neuroskyence

This amount would fund the US National Science Foundation for a decade. 🧪

Computational models are a key part of science but discovering new ones is hard! DataDIVER discovers concise models from data, which surface new mechanistic ideas and clear predictions for future experiments From Google Deepmind Neuroscience Lab + collaborators www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Local control of dopamine release in nucleus accumbens gates opioid withdrawal aversion https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.05.25.727738v1

Excellent summary of how Vought’s proposed rule will destroy science. Please be ready to comment tomorrow, call Congress, tell your friends. If you’ve been waiting for the right moment to speak up, that moment is now.

TIL the MED-PC sample-without-replacement function (RANDD) generates sequential dependencies. This problem is absent in MED-PC V. www.researchgate.net/publication/...

Could agentic AI topple grant-funding systems? Man, I hope so... the system has been broken for a while, hopefully this will force a thorough rethink. www.nature.com/articles/d41... 🧪

Prediction without understanding sustained astronomy through a thousand years of epicycles, writes @tonyzador.bsky.social. AI is now offering neuroscience the same deal. #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/machine-lear...

Huge congrats to @snierwetberg.bsky.social , David (not on BSky), and @maxwellxchen.bsky.social for their paper! They developed a mouse task in which relational structure can be isolated from cue identity and reward statistics. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 🧠📈🧪 #neuroskyence @uclnpp.bsky.social

Excited to share our new study on how the brain generates placebo pain relief! We developed a mouse model that recapitulates key features of human placebo analgesia, then used it to identify causal circuitry. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... today.ucsd.edu/story/neurob... 1/n

transformer-circuits.pub/2026/emotion... This got press hate because of the word "emotions" but it is cool work. "Internal motivational states" serve as a form of working memory that helps animals organize their behavior, so why not ask if similar computational primitives help LLMs to do the same?

Hey @ditzkoff.bsky.social I knew I recognized you! Sorry for the identity mishap, trying to work on my journalist vs. neuroscientist decoder.

@jhennig.bsky.social has shown that dopamine exerts a real-time effect on conditioned responding, beyond its role in learning: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Another indication that dopamine is more than a learning signal! A joint effort with @naoshigeuchida.bsky.social and @mhburrell.bsky.social.

Remember this example whenever anyone tells you that you’re generally safe living in a blue city within a red state (something I was told frequently while on the faculty job market)

Cosyne invited me to give a long tutorial (4 hours!) on methods to quantify differences high-d neural recordings across animals, brain regions, deep neural nets, etc. The recording is up on youtube. I hope it inspires more research on this fundamental topic! www.youtube.com/watch?v=n44x...

Today in @nature.com, the @christophthaiss.bsky.social & @maayanlevy.bsky.social labs trace age-related memory loss to the gastrointestinal tract & map the complete gut-to-brain pathway driving it. Targeting this pathway can reverse cognitive aging in mice. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Here's a quick analysis I did on data I've been collecting on psych/neuro faculty applicants. I don't have data on unsuccessful applicants, but my inference is that women mentored by women have to rely more on bringing in $ to get a faculty job than men mentored by men.

Very excited to post our paper led by @daburke.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41... where we uncover a simple mathematical rule underlying how brains learn that a cue predicts a reward. 1/26

Science: U.S. government has lost more than 10,000 STEM Ph.D.s since Trump took office By Jeffrey Mervis, Monica Hersher @science.org @policyhound.bsky.social @mghersher.bsky.social bit.ly/3M8yf9B

Since the Namboodiri lab isn’t on Bluesky (I think?), I’d like to amplify this cool paper which I and others in the Janak lab made a small contribution to.

The conference (agreement between House and Senate) appropriations bill that includes HHS and NIH was released this morning. www.appropriations.senate.gov/news/majorit... 1/5

A long, absolutely must-read article from Cory Doctorow: www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-i...

Can humans & animals really use internal maps to take shortcuts? Tolman famously said yes - based largely on his Sunburst maze. Our new review & meta-analysis suggests evidence is far weaker than you might think. 🧵👇 doi.org/10.1111/ejn.... @uofgpsychneuro.bsky.social @ejneuroscience.bsky.social

I don't think you non-science people realize what it takes to get a grant funded by NIH. Started experiments in Sept 2021 to generate 3 new mouse mutants to model human disease. Prelim dara shows they have relevant disease phenotypes worthy of study. Need a small grant first to characterize /1

Excited to share latest study from the lab by an amazing RA, Dylan Flink. We solved a small (important) puzzle while in the trenches of a larger (wavy 🌊) puzzle. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 🧵...

Sleep dependent consolidation and replay that doesn’t require the hippocampus? Very beautiful work by Marcus Stephenson-Jones’ lab on sleep driven sequential skill consolidation in the striatum. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

🚨New Kutlu Lab preprint! Excited to share our latest work led by Oyku Dinckol and Noah Wenger. 🔗 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... We find that ACh shapes DLS neural ensembles for outcome learning but is biased toward signaling threats over rewards 👇

Nature Sci Rep publishes incoherent AI slop. eLife publishes a paper which the reviewers didn't agree with, making all the comments and responses public with thoughtful commentary. One of these journals got delisted by Web of Science for quality concerns from not doing peer review. Guess which one?