What Trump’s Psychedelics Executive Order Means for Basic Neuroscience
President Donald Trump issued an executive order to accelerate clinical research on psychedelic drugs, allocating at least $50 million for state‑run programs and directing the FDA to speed up drug reviews. The order also tasks the attorney general with reviewing the rescheduling of any Schedule I substance that has successfully completed Phase 3 trials, potentially moving it to Schedule III. Current DEA licensing limits basic research, with only about 900 researchers holding Schedule I permits compared with roughly 8,700 for lower schedules. The timeline and criteria for rescheduling remain unclear.
Switching Neural Code May Solve Ongoing Face-Recognition Debate
Neuroscientists recorded face‑patch neurons in macaques and discovered that these cells initially respond to broad visual features before rapidly switching—within roughly 100 ms—to a face‑specific code that encodes detailed attributes such as inter‑eye distance and hair color. This dynamic tuning transition,...
Liset De La Prida Explains How Neuron Subtypes May Control the Activity of Large Neural Populations, From Manifolds to Ripples
In a recent "Brain Inspired" interview, Liset de la Prida, director of the Centro de Neurociencias Cajal, revealed that distinct neuron subtypes in the hippocampus govern the formation and dynamics of neural manifolds and sharp‑wave ripples. Her work shows that...
At 25, INSAR Needs to Bring Autism Scientists Together More than Ever
The International Society for Autism Research (INSAR) marks its 25th anniversary with a meeting in Prague that draws more than 2,200 participants from 50 countries. Since its first 200‑person gathering in 2001, INSAR has become the premier global forum for...
To Understand Decision-Making, We Need to Truly Challenge Lab Animals
Neuroscientists are urging a shift from simple reward‑based tasks to richer, multi‑dimensional decision‑making paradigms for animal studies. While technologies like Neuropixels and optical imaging can record thousands of neurons, trivial tasks produce brief, ambiguous neural windows that mask the computations...
‘Overdue’ Debate Unfurls over Neuroimaging Method
A recent Nature Neuroscience paper criticized lesion network mapping (LNM), claiming it yields biased, overlapping networks across disorders. Harvard’s Shan Siddiqi and Michael Fox responded by re‑analyzing their data with additional statistical controls, posting a bioRxiv preprint that defended LNM’s...
What Neuroscientists Want From a New NINDS Director
NIH is seeking a new director for NINDS, with applications due April 27. The institute manages a $2.8 billion FY2026 budget and oversees roughly 1,300 staff, the Brain Initiative, and the NIH Blueprint for Neuroscience Research. Neuroscientists urge the incoming leader to...
Arousal Neurons’ Activity Explains Brain’s Blood Flow Dynamics in Mice
Researchers using Neuropixels recordings and functional ultrasound in mice identified two distinct neuronal populations—arousal‑plus and arousal‑minus—that drive blood volume changes during arousal states. These groups predict neurovascular coupling far more accurately than traditional bulk firing rates across wakefulness, sleep, and...
Autism-Linked Genes Alter Sleep Behavior, and More
Two recent Drosophila studies demonstrate that autism‑linked gene variants directly disrupt sleep. Flies carrying FOXP mutations exhibit severely fragmented and reduced sleep along with circadian rhythm disturbances. Separate work on NLGN3 variants shows altered sleep patterns, driven by either synaptic...
Why Neural Foundation Models Work, and What They Might—And Might Not—Teach Us About the Brain
Neural foundation models, akin to AI chatbots, are trained on massive neural datasets to predict activity, motor output, and sensory responses. Recent neuroscience shows that brain function is organized in collective activity patterns that are consistent across neurons, tasks, and...
Error Equation Predicts Brain’s Ability to Generalize
The study published in Nature Neuroscience proposes a single error equation that links the geometry of neural population activity to the brain’s capacity to generalize across tasks. By extracting four geometric metrics—task‑related correlation, dimensionality, signal‑to‑noise factorization and signal‑signal factorization—the authors...
Embrace Complexity to Improve the Translatability of Basic Neuroscience
Basic neuroscience researchers are urged to view heterogeneity as a feature, not a flaw, to boost translational relevance. The article outlines three practical steps—recognizing model limits, measuring variability, and probing mechanisms across scales—to embed complexity into experimental design. It highlights...
Romain Brette Reveals Fundamental Flaws in Commonly Assumed Neuroscience Concepts
Romain Brette, research director at the Institute of Intelligent Systems and Robotics, discusses fundamental flaws in the dominant neuroscience concepts of coding, information, representation, computation and prediction. In a recent "Brain Inspired" podcast, he argues these computer‑science metaphors cannot fully...
Arboreal Deer Mice Reveal Neural Roots of Dexterity
Researchers discovered that forest-dwelling deer mice possess twice as many corticospinal tract axons in the cervical spinal cord as their prairie counterparts, a difference linked to enhanced manual dexterity. Using selective staining, light‑sheet microscopy and behavioral training, the team showed...
Single-Gene Systems-Level Effects, and More
A new preprint shows that SYNGAP1 haploinsufficiency in whole‑cortex mice creates two opposing cortical activity patterns, while disruption limited to excitatory neurons yields a single change. This dual effect points to systems‑level circuit maturation disruptions as a source of SYNGAP1‑related...