Yuval Nir
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labnir.bsky.social
Yuval Nir
@labnir.bsky.social
@imperialbrains.bsky.social Proud and delighted to wish our own Barak Hadad good luck! Barak just joined the lab of Nir Grossman at @imperialbrains.bsky.social London to take #temporal interference (TI) to new levels. Good luck Barak! Looking forward to your amazing scientific discoveries
February 8, 2026 at 2:36 PM
Proud to share that our own @nmatosevich.bsky.social just received the Rotschild Fellowship to study how breathing and breathlessness interact to modulate emotions and arousal, at the Kevin Yackle lab @ucsfhealth.bsky.social . Good luck Noa! Looking forward to your amazing scientific discoveries
February 8, 2026 at 2:30 PM
A Conserved Locus Coeruleus fMRI Signature of Brain-State Transitions across Sleep, Anesthesia, and Wakefulness:

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
www.biorxiv.org
February 8, 2026 at 1:28 PM
Entrained cortical delta–spindle activity, not periodic synchrony, prevents arousal by NREM thalamic bursts

www.nature.com/articles/s42...
Entrained cortical delta–spindle activity, not periodic synchrony, prevents arousal by NREM thalamic bursts - Communications Biology
Thalamic bursts can awaken the cortex during wakefulness. Contrary to in-vitro–based assumptions, in-vivo NREM thalamic bursts lack rhythmic synchronization, and their failure to awaken the cortex ref...
www.nature.com
January 27, 2026 at 11:57 AM
Reposted by Yuval Nir
Episodic memory consolidation by reactivation of human concept neurons during sleep reflects contents, not sequence of events https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.01.10.698827v1
January 11, 2026 at 8:16 AM
Sleep-dependent infraslow rhythms are evolutionarily conserved across reptiles and mammals

www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Sleep-dependent infraslow rhythms are evolutionarily conserved across reptiles and mammals - Nature Neuroscience
Bergel et al. show that an infraslow rhythm connecting the brain and body during sleep is shared by lizards, mammals and birds, revealing an ancestral process and reshaping our understanding of the ev...
www.nature.com
January 1, 2026 at 6:56 PM
Sleep and digital health in autism and other neurodevelopmental conditions:
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Happy new year to all !
An open science resource for accelerating scalable digital health research in autism and other neurodevelopmental conditions - Nature Neuroscience
This paper describes the Simons Sleep Project, an open resource designed to accelerate research into the sleep and daily behaviors of autistic children using synchronized recordings from multiple wear...
www.nature.com
December 31, 2025 at 6:36 AM
A hippocampal ‘sharp-wave sleep’ state that is dissociable from cortical sleep

www.nature.com/articles/s41...
A hippocampal ‘sharp-wave sleep’ state that is dissociable from cortical sleep - Nature Neuroscience
Through continuous multiday recordings in rats, the authors reveal that hippocampal sharp waves reflect sleep need and define a homeostatically regulated sleep state that enables the hippocampus to di...
www.nature.com
December 14, 2025 at 9:07 PM
VTA dopaminergic neuronal activity during NREM sleep is modulated by learning and facilitates motor memory consolidation | Science Advances www.science.org/doi/full/10....
VTA dopaminergic neuronal activity during NREM sleep is modulated by learning and facilitates motor memory consolidation
Activity of VTA dopaminergic neurons during NREM sleep facilitates motor memory consolidation and is coordinated with spindles.
www.science.org
December 6, 2025 at 8:11 PM
The Mind's Eye: A quest from vision to consciousness - Symposium in honor of Rafi Malach
Incredible lineup assembled celebrating the career of an amazing scientist
Join us on December 14-15 at the Weizmann Institute !
November 30, 2025 at 5:51 AM
Interesting! Simultaneous stomach-brain electrophysiology reveals dynamic coupling in human sleep:

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Simultaneous stomach-brain electrophysiology reveals dynamic coupling in human sleep
Sleep involves continuous communication between the brain and body, yet the dynamics of peripheral signals during human sleep remain poorly understood. Here we tested whether gastric electrophysiology...
www.biorxiv.org
November 18, 2025 at 10:31 AM
Attentional failures after sleep deprivation are locked to joint neurovascular, pupil and cerebrospinal fluid flow dynamics

www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Attentional failures after sleep deprivation are locked to joint neurovascular, pupil and cerebrospinal fluid flow dynamics - Nature Neuroscience
Yang et al. show that moments of failed attention we experience after sleep deprivation reflect brief ‘sleep-like’ episodes in the brain, corresponding to a brain- and body-wide event with altered bra...
www.nature.com
November 2, 2025 at 6:00 AM
Head-direction cells as a neural compass in bats navigating outdoors on a remote oceanic island | Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Head-direction cells as a neural compass in bats navigating outdoors on a remote oceanic island
Animals and humans rely on their navigation skills to survive. However, spatial neurons in the brain’s “navigation circuit” had not previously been studied under real-world conditions. We conducted an...
www.science.org
October 18, 2025 at 7:45 PM
Convergent Control of NREM Sleep and Anesthesia by Prefrontal Layer 5 Extratelencephalic Neurons:

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Convergent Control of NREM Sleep and Anesthesia by Prefrontal Layer 5 Extratelencephalic Neurons
The cortical mechanisms that actively suppress consciousness remain poorly understood. Here, we identify a specific subset of prefrontal cortical (PFC) neurons preferentially active under anesthesia w...
www.biorxiv.org
October 18, 2025 at 7:16 AM
Proud and delighted to deliver the keynote presentation at “Sleep Down Under 2025” Adelaide, organized by the Australasian Sleep Association #SleepDownUnder
October 9, 2025 at 4:27 AM
Arousal as a universal embedding for spatiotemporal brain dynamics:

www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Arousal as a universal embedding for spatiotemporal brain dynamics - Nature
Reframing of arousal as a latent dynamical system can reconstruct multidimensional measurements of large-scale spatiotemporal brain dynamics on the timescale of seconds in mice.
www.nature.com
September 25, 2025 at 2:05 PM
Reposted by Yuval Nir
Excited to share our latest paper - now out in @science.org - we showed how oxytocin modulates maternally-directed behavior in young mice (P15).
September 12, 2025 at 3:21 PM
🚨 New paper alert! 🚨(1/6)

Excited to share our work, out now in Science Advances

We show that a rapid norepinephrine surge along a brainstem pathway (LC→PRN) is a key driver of sound-evoked awakenings
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
An early surge of norepinephrine along brainstem pathways drives sensory-evoked awakening
The locus coeruleus has a specialized pathway to the brainstem that controls sound-evoked awakening from sleep.
www.science.org
September 10, 2025 at 6:30 PM
Aperiodic EEG Activity Provides a Linear, Bidirectional, and Spatially Uniform Marker of Subjective and Objective Vigilance in Humans, Both Within and Across States www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Aperiodic EEG Activity Provides a Linear, Bidirectional, and Spatially Uniform Marker of Subjective and Objective Vigilance in Humans, Both Within and Across States
Vigilance is increasingly conceived as a continuum, ranging from full alertness to deep sleep. Despite its fundamental role in cognition, behaviour, and health, reliable physiological markers of vigil...
www.biorxiv.org
September 9, 2025 at 10:16 AM
Sleep-like slow waves during wakefulness uncover a malignant form of Parkinson’s disease www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...
Sleep-like slow waves during wakefulness uncover a malignant form of Parkinson’s disease
Slow waves during sleep are fundamental for neural homeostasis, metabolic regulation, and waste clearance, and are known to be altered in neurodegenerative diseases. Sleep-like slow waves (SLSW) have ...
www.medrxiv.org
September 9, 2025 at 10:16 AM
Rate and noise in human amygdala drive increased exploration in aversive learning:

Congratulations to my colleagues Rony Paz, Ido Strauss, Firas Fahoum for landing this exciting paper in Nature!

rdcu.be/eCJLb
Rate and noise in human amygdala drive increased exploration in aversive learning
Nature - Human exploration is driven by two distinct neural mechanisms, a valence-independent rate signal and a valence-dependent global noise signal.
rdcu.be
September 6, 2025 at 9:07 PM