Jang et al. measured dopamine and acetylcholine release in the striatum of rats performing a decision-making task and found that the relative timing of cholinergic and dopamine release gates whether dopamine promotes reinforcement learning or movement vigor.

NeMO Analytics is a compendium of public transcriptomic data focused on the neocortex, enabling biologists without coding expertise to explore hundreds of datasets. Joint decomposition of these data yields insight into brain development and its modeling.

Raam, Li, Gu and colleagues identify neural mechanisms underlying group huddling in mice during cold exposure. They find that the prefrontal cortex encodes decisions to huddle and that silencing neural activity in some animals causes partners to compensate in response.

Single-nucleus epigenomic maps of the adult human brain and spinal cord reveal that adult oligodendroglia retain developmental chromatin patterns, suggesting a molecular memory that may shape repair processes and cancer vulnerability.

Neurons in medial entorhinal cortex collectively represent discrete nonlocal positions during immobility. During this nonlocal coding, CA1 is uncoupled from entorhinal cortex. These representations are of task-relevant locations.

Synchronization of sharp-wave ripples across the dorsoventral hippocampus during sleep supports coordinated reactivation that represents negative experiences more faithfully than positive ones.

This study from Wei-Guang Li, Tian-Le Xu and colleagues shows that neuropeptide Y released by specific hippocampal inhibitory neurons can switch fear memories into extinction memories by acting on two distinct receptor-defined neuron populations.

ALS/FTD-linked mutations in UBQLN2, a protein quality control factor, impair degradation of enzymes essential for mitochondrial lipid catabolism, leading to metabolic dysfunction and neurodegeneration.

This study reveals how the dentate gyrus gradually learns to integrate olfactory and spatial signals from the entorhinal cortex, transforming them into sparse and highly specific representations that improve with experience.

A new optical imaging study demonstrates that norepinephrine and the state of arousal influence hemodynamic correlations across cerebral cortex, calling for a conceptual shift in interpreting functional magnetic resonance imaging data.

Van den Heuvel et al. show that lesion-network mapping (LNM)-derived circuits converge across disorders and argue that this convergence reflects a fundamental methodological limitation of LNM. We evaluate ways forward for future LNM studies, including robust null models, in light of these concerns. We view recapitulation of connectome modularity and high-order network properties by LNM as clinically informative and biologically meaningful.

As neuroscience increasingly recognizes that understanding the brain requires studying natural behavior, it has begun to adopt more naturalistic experimental environments as a means to that end — an important and welcome shift. Yet environmental realism alone does not guarantee that natural behavior is being studied and, in some cases, can create the illusion of ecological relevance or even promote unnatural behavior if the behavioral context is poorly aligned with a species’ ecology. Keeping sight of our central goal — understanding how brains support the actions animals evolved to perform — requires an ethological focus not only on where experiments occur, but on what animals are actually doing and whether the environment affords those behaviors.