I love this photo from Simon: the finches are perched on a thorny tree that evokes the basal ganglia medium spiny neurons we identify as the postsynaptic locus of learning. Full paper thread 👇

The patterns on this dragonfly's wings 😍

Mom and fawns in the neighborhood - most of the adults around here have these radio collars

Gorgeous pawpaw sphinx moth

#Inspirational

Squirrel from Ice Age vibes on this Brown Thrasher #birds

My brother went to Edinburgh and all I got was this lousy posterior update

finally got some rain so the shrooms are out

Birds:

Smol box turtle

Brb, moving to the top of a pillar from which I can declaim my Important Ideas. I'll call it: The Ivory Tower

6/ And the hyperactivity was likely *why* alcohol-exposed mice failed to appropriately use recent performance Chemogenetic suppression of M2→DMS activity *normally* also impaired history dependence, but in alcohol-exposed mice it *rescued* them by dialing down the aberrant hyperactivity

5/ That strategy shift had a neural signature. We'd previously found alcohol suppresses a neighboring circuit (OFC→striatum), but here M2→DMS did the opposite, becoming hyperactive during lever pressing

4/ The deficit was in strategy, not performance. Alcohol-exposed mice no longer used their recent actions to guide the next one. Each decision was more independent, less informed by the ones just before.

3/ We modeled chronic alcohol exposure in mice (chronic intermittent ethanol vapor (CIE) vs. Air control) and looked at behavior during withdrawal. On the surface, nothing looked different. Total presses, %correct, etc. - all indistinguishable from controls.

Me moving to North Carolina after spending my life in Colorado and southern California: "So glad I don't have to worry about droughts now that I'm in the famously wet southeast" Durham:

iconic

Alternatively:

6/ Optogenetic suppression of M2→DMS during actions, but not before or after, prevented use of recent experience. That timing showed the circuit mattered when history had to be converted into action

5/ M2's projection into dorsal medial striatum (M2→DMS) carried a narrower signal: recent lever pressing + checking behavior.

4/ The brain cared about these variables too. Lesions and Ca2+ imaging showed secondary motor cortex (M2) represented recent actions, checking behavior, reward, and elapsed time, a much richer representation of history than we usually include in simple trial-by-trial models.

3/ This gave us rich experiential variables to model. Prior experience wasn't just action + reward: checking behavior and elapsed time scaled how much recent history mattered And mice who used that experience performed better

2/ While constrained tasks are useful, animals have evolved to use diverse sources of info to guide their behavior. We tried to move a small step in this direction by creating an un-cued, self-paced, self-guided lever hold down task

love a green lynx spider

Flowers of Gordon Neural Mechanisms of Acoustic Communication. #nmac2026 Left: Lady's Slipper Orchid Right: Painted Trillium

Lovely to be in Maine for Gordon Neural Mechanisms of Acoustic Communication! @nmac2026.bsky.social #nmac2026 And the bus ride to the conference venue was a huge nostalgia trip for my Appalachian Trail thru hike. Drove right through some of the coolest sections in the White mtns