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Nov 27, 2024 | 
thetransmitter.org | Anne West |Megan Peters |Robert C. Froemke |Steve Ramirez
Answers have been edited for length and clarity. What paper changed your life? Histone demethylation mediated by the nuclear amine oxidase homolog LSD1. Shi Y., Lan F., Matson C., Mulligan P., Whetstine J.R., Cole P.A., Casero R.A. and Yang S. Cell (2004)In this paper, Yang Shi and his colleagues reported the first histone demethylase—an enzyme that removes methyl groups from chromatin to regulate DNA transcription—which they named lysine-specific demethylase 1 (LSD1).
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Oct 16, 2024 | 
thetransmitter.org | Megan Peters |Robert C. Froemke |Steve Ramirez |Jason Shepherd
Answers have been edited for length and clarity. What paper changed your life?: Spontaneous cortical activity reveals hallmarks of an optimal internal model of the environment. Berkes P., Orbán G., Lengyel M. and Fiser J. Science (2011)Many dominant opinions in neuroscience hold that, when it comes to perception, the brain operates by performing something that looks like Bayesian inference.
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Sep 17, 2024 | 
thetransmitter.org | Robert C. Froemke |Steve Ramirez |Jill Adams |Angie Voyles Askham
Answers have been edited for length and clarity. What paper changed your life?: Response of hippocampal synapses to natural stimulation patterns. L.E. Dobrunz and C.F. Stevens Neuron (1999)Lynn Dobrunz and Charles Stevens described how natural stimulus patterns from in-vivo recordings can trigger synaptic plasticity when applied to hippocampal slices in vitro.
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Aug 9, 2024 | 
thetransmitter.org | Sydney Wyatt |Angie Voyles Askham |Sarah DeWeerdt |Steve Ramirez
Contributing writerThe Transmitter Share this article: Tags: Neuroanatomy, Evolution, Vision As a boy, Harvey Karten attended the Manhattan Talmudical Academy, a boarding school in the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York City. He didn’t much like the all-boys academy, according to Joe Karten, Harvey’s eldest son, and he especially disdained the religion courses, where he had to study long swaths of text.
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Aug 8, 2024 | 
thetransmitter.org | Sydney Wyatt |Sarah DeWeerdt |Alla Katsnelson |Steve Ramirez
Contributing writer The Transmitter Sydney Wyatt is a freelance health and science journalist in New York City. She specializes in neuroscience, psychology, medicine, mental health and health policy. She spent two years in Oregon’s capital city covering health care inequities for a USA Today network paper. She earned her B.S. in neuroscience from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and her M.S. in journalism from Boston University.
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Aug 8, 2024 | 
thetransmitter.org | Sarah DeWeerdt |Jill Adams |Chloe Williams |Steve Ramirez
A 15-item test could strengthen research on early behavioral interventions for autism by enabling head-to-head comparisons of different approaches. In a proof-of-principle study, the measure, known as the Brief Observation of Social Communication Change (BOSCC), picked up social communication improvements among participants in two of the three interventions, using data from previously published trials.
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Aug 6, 2024 | 
thetransmitter.org | Jill Adams |Chloe Williams |Steve Ramirez |Joshua R. Sanes
Here is a roundup of autism-related news and research spotted around the web for the week of 5 August. Contributing writer Share this article: Tags: Spectrum, Autism, Science and society, Spotted Recessive, rare, inherited variants in noncoding regions of the genome contribute to autism. Spectrum covered previous work from the same laboratory in 2016.
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Aug 6, 2024 | 
thetransmitter.org | Steve Ramirez |Joshua R. Sanes |Jill Adams |Brady Huggett
Answers have been edited for length and clarity. What paper changed your life?: Selective erasure of a fear memory. Han J.H., Kushner S.A., Yiu A.P., Hsiang H.L., Buch T., Waisman A., Bontempi B., Neve R.L., Frankland P.W., Josselyn S.A. Science (2009)Sheena Josselyn [a contributing editor for The Transmitter] and her colleagues described how they could erase fear memories in mice by ablating a small subpopulation of cells in the amygdala.
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Jul 30, 2024 | 
thetransmitter.org | Katie Moisse |Sarah DeWeerdt |Steve Ramirez |Jill Adams
Monkeys can memorize a sequence of images and then toggle between them in their minds, a new study has found. Each mental move is associated with a tiny burst of brain activity that could be the neural representation of a thought, the study authors say. The study is the first to find evidence that an animal creates cognitive maps based on experience and later uses them exclusively, without any sensory input, to navigate a new task.
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Jul 16, 2024 | 
thetransmitter.org | Steve Ramirez |Sydney Wyatt |Sarah DeWeerdt |Alla Katsnelson
Steve Ramirez is assistant professor of psychological and brain sciences at Boston University and a former junior fellow at Harvard University. He received his B.A. in neuroscience from Boston University and began researching learning and memory in Howard Eichenbaum’s lab. He went on to receive his Ph.D. in neuroscience in Susumu Tonegawa’s lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where his work focused on artificially modulating memories in the rodent brain.
