and was made possible by collaborations with the labs of Levi Wood and @sloanlab.bsky.social
Preprint is here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

This work points towards a promising, non-invasive path for building resilience to stress and stress-related neuropsychiatric disorders. This study was made possible via generous support from the @brightfocus.bsky.social, @alzassociation.bsky.social‬, and the NIH

Tina’s idea turned out to be true, and we were surprised to find that 10Hz sensory stimulation was the most beneficial in males, while 40Hz was the most beneficial in females. This is a fundamentally new approach to mitigate the damaging effects of chronic stress.

Tina’s insight was based putting together separate fields showing, on the one hand that chronic stress causes damage via maladaptive neuroimmune responses and on the other hand that sensory stimulation alters neuroimmune function in unstressed conditions.

Can we experience stress without the damaging effects? Here, we find that non-invasive sensory stimulation at the right frequency induces stress resilience. Tina started this project with a creative idea: can we use sensory stimulation to prevent the damaging effects of chronic stress?

and by funding from the CART foundation, the NIH, the NSF, the BrightFocus foundation, and the Alzheimer’s Association. The paper is here: doi.org/10.1063/5.02...

These insights enable stimulation “tuning” to target specific functions. This work also highlights how flicker stimulation has multiple biological effects and we think such a multipotent therapeutic approach is required for neurodegenerative diseases. This study was made possible by Levi Wood’s lab

The paper is here: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I can be your sponsor

No but I'd love to know how it goes. 😬

Steph pioneered this new take on prospective codes including this complex behavior. The paper would not have been possible without the help of Danielle Cushing. Link for the smart PDF: rdcu.be/enokS

These findings clarify long-standing debates about whether these codes steer behavior towards upcoming choices or represent all possible paths.

Finally, we find that hippocampal representations of the new future goal increased more when animals needed to adapt their behavior more in response to the new information. This shows that the degree of adaptation needed is a key overlooked variable regulating prospective codes.

This shows for the first time that prospective codes are actively modulated by new task-relevant information.

In hippocampus, we found that new, pivotal information causes non-local representations of both possible goal locations to rapidly increase, simulating both possible outcomes. In prefrontal cortex we found that pivotal information causes choice codes to rapidly switch to represent the new choice.

To do this, Steph developed a new behavioral paradigm in which we leverage a dynamic, virtual-reality environment to precisely control the introduction of new information while animal’s choices are evolving in a memory-based decision-making task.