Vikaas Sohal
vikaassohal.bsky.social
Vikaas Sohal
@vikaassohal.bsky.social
Systems neuroscientist and psychiatrist at UCSF studying how inhibitory circuits and oscillations give rise to the emergent brain functions that underlie cognition and emotion.
Please come by the Sohal lab posters at #SfN2025 to join the discussion about all of our favorite things: cognitive flexibility, gamma oscillations, PFC social encoding, autism mouse models, dopamine, & more!
November 13, 2025 at 7:57 PM
Two preprints up! The first, led by Aarron Phensy, uses red+green voltage indicators to show that prefrontal gamma oscillations dynamically engage various cell types, creating multiple synchrony configurations, each tied to a distinct aspect of cognitive flexibility: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Prefrontal gamma oscillations engage dynamic cell type-specific configurations to support flexible behavior
Cognitive dysfunction in conditions such as schizophrenia involves disrupted communication between the prefrontal cortex (PFC) and mediodorsal thalamus (MD). Parvalbumin interneurons (PVI) are known t...
www.biorxiv.org
August 11, 2025 at 6:58 PM
(more news) New paper just published! Prefrontal representations of social and emotional information generalize across contexts (even though ensembles for socioemotional + contextual information are highly overlapping): www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Context-invariant socioemotional encoding by prefrontal ensembles - Nature Communications
How the ensemble encoding of social and anxiety-related behaviors interacts with encoding of context in the prefrontal cortex of mice is not fully understood. Here authors examine how prefrontal neurons encode socioemotional behaviors in different contexts and reveal that the prefrontal cortex encodes context-invariant representations of these behaviors in parallel with representations of context.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-59575-8?utm_source=rct_congratemailt&utm_[…]m_campaign=oa_20250701&utm_content=10.1038/s41467-025-59575-8
July 1, 2025 at 10:29 PM
New work! Learning is assumed to involve synaptic plasticity, but which specific synapses change to enable higher order cognitive functions? We actually find that cognitive flexibility involves potentiation of long-range GABAergic synapses from prefrontal PV neurons: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Synaptic plasticity of prefrontal long-range inhibition regulates cognitive flexibility
While glutamatergic synaptic plasticity is believed to be a fundamental mechanism mediating learning, the behavioral significance of plasticity at cortical GABAergic synapses remains less well underst...
www.biorxiv.org
June 30, 2025 at 5:55 PM
One more post while I'm at it: my 'Meet-the-Clincian-Expert' @neuronline.sfn.org talk, describing my lab's work plus my career path, is now available on demand: neuronline.sfn.org/scientific-r...
Understanding Complex Systems: Leveraging a Background in Math to Tackle Problems in Psychiatry
<p>This session will describe the speaker&rsquo;s journey from studying math in college to performing some of the first experiments using optogenetics, training as a psychiatrist, and leading a neuros...
neuronline.sfn.org
January 22, 2025 at 6:27 PM
Also while I’m posting on BlueSky for the first time, I want to thank to several folks for hosting me last month on a journey where I got to connect with neuroscience in India. First I got to participate in a great symposium on autism and visit Sourav Banerjee’s lab at the NBRC near Delhi. 1/2
January 22, 2025 at 6:18 PM
New work online! Led by Marc Turner in collaboration with the Rubenstein lab. We studied how disruptions in autism genes alter neural activity to produce abnormal behavior in layer 5 Tbr1 cKO mice, & in the process, found new aspects of PFC socioemotional encoding 1/n www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Loss of the autism associated gene Tbr1 disrupts prediction and encoding by prefrontal ensembles during socioemotional behaviors
Disruptions in many genes linked to autism spectrum disorder (ASD) affect synaptic function and socioemotional behaviors in mice. However, exactly how synaptic dysfunction alters neural activity patte...
www.biorxiv.org
January 22, 2025 at 6:13 PM
Reposted by Vikaas Sohal
Excited to share our new paper out now @natureportfolio.bsky.social, where we identified neural signatures of stress susceptibility and resilience in the amygdala-ventral hippocampal network to enable control of anhedonia!

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December 4, 2024 at 5:46 PM