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Luke Sjulson

@lukesjulson.bsky.social

4K followers 2.3K following 400 posts

MD/PhD neuroscientist/psychiatrist. Decision-making, addiction, multi-region ephys and imaging in vivo, novel optical methods for spatial transcriptomics https://sjulsonlab.org

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Luke Sjulson @lukesjulson.bsky.social · Dec 13

Neuroscience students asked us to teach a PRACTICAL course on experimental methods, and it is now on YouTube!

Please like and repost to help us get the word out!

www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...

Lecture 1: Signals and data acquisition
Focusing on hardware, digital/analog I/O, synchronization
🧵

Neuroscience methods - YouTube

Nanocourse: Approaches to Study Neural Circuits This course was taught by Anita Autry, Tiago Gonçalves, and Luke Sjulson at Albert Einstein College of Medici...

www.youtube.com

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Luke Sjulson @lukesjulson.bsky.social · 6h

Nolan was the developer of the SNT TMS protocol, the most promising new treatment for depression there is. It’s a real tragedy

Owen Muir, M.D., DFAACAP (he/him) @owenmuir.bsky.social · 3d

A eulogy for my friend Nolan Williams.

open.substack.com/pub/thefront...

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Michael Okun @michaelokun.bsky.social · 18h

RIP Dr. Nolan R. Williams (1983-2025) professor at Stanford. He was a pioneer in the treatment of depression and a friend. I read this Substack eulogy on him this morning, and I thought it really captured both the man and his brilliance.
thefrontierpsychiatrists.substack.com/p/a-eulogy-f...

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Nicole Rust @nicolecrust.bsky.social · 11h

A thought-provoking piece in Nature Neuroscience by many neuroscience colleagues: "Science must break its silence to rebuild public trust". Lots to think about here.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Public engagement: building common ground
How can we help to bridge this divide? Simply producing more excep tional science will not be enough to rebuild public trust. Rather, we must adopt a new model that recognizes communication and advocacy as core pillars of science, on a par with rigor and reproducibility. Public engagement efforts should be valued for faculty promotions, much like obtaining grants and publishing our findings in scientific journals. Researchers should be recognized and rewarded for activities such as giving public talks, working with local schools, engaging with policy makers, developing social media campaigns and platforms or writing accessible articles for general audiences. Developing these skills must be an integral part of scientific training, reinforcing the notion that the responsibility to champion science lies with us. Courses that teach graduate students and postdocs to communicate complex ideas clearly, to use social media effectively and to advocate for evidencebased policies must be deemed critical and supported by our universities. These efforts should not be viewed as distractions from research but woven into the fabric of what we do as scientists. Rebuilding public trust requires a cultural paradigm shift: scientists must see themselves not just as producers of knowledge, but also as its ambassadors and translators. Such a fundamental change will occur only if it is embraced by our scientific leaders and institutions, emphasizing the critical role of public engagement for science to succeed.

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Luke Sjulson @lukesjulson.bsky.social · 4d

The basis of synaptic transmission was worked out at the frog neuromuscular junction, and most of what we know about ion channels used frog eggs as a heterologous expression system

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Luke Sjulson @lukesjulson.bsky.social · 4d

The mechanistic basis of action potentials in squid axons by Hodgkin and Huxley is pretty much the basis of neuroscience and cardiology

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Luke Sjulson @lukesjulson.bsky.social · 4d

sounds really interesting, thanks!

Luke Sjulson @lukesjulson.bsky.social · 4d

Thanks, I'll check it out. As a molecular biologist, I find Gallistel's ideas about molecular memory storage to be beyond ludicrous, and I haven't dug deeper into his stuff because of that. But I know that's a little unfair because it's not his area, and I should probably give him another chance

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Luke Sjulson @lukesjulson.bsky.social · 4d

Thanks. This is really interesting, but I am having trouble wrapping my mind around it. Do you have any ideas for a model that could explain this?

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Luke Sjulson @lukesjulson.bsky.social · 4d

This might be a dumb question, but if T is longer than I, could the animal be forming an association with the cue in the next trial instead of the current one?

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Kieran Healy @kjhealy.co · 4d

White House staff should just make and show him an AI-generated video where he wins, fly him to Duluth and tell him it’s Oslo, and dare the New York Times to say anything more than “Experts disagree about whether Mr Trump was awarded the Nobel Prize”.

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Dan Levenstein @dlevenstein.bsky.social · 4d

So I get that a Neuroscientist Couldn’t Understand a Microprocessor, and TBH I’m ok with that. But could a neuroscientist understand a deep RNN? Because that seems like a more pressing issue.

*assuming you think the brain operates through the parallel activity of many connected input/output units

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Luke Sjulson @lukesjulson.bsky.social · 4d

💯and I’m surprised by how many people that insight seems to have escaped. I have a lot of respect for Konrad, but I was baffled by the superficiality of the argument

Luke Sjulson @lukesjulson.bsky.social · 4d

Awesome news, congrats!

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Luke Sjulson @lukesjulson.bsky.social · 5d

Anyone interested in optics needs to check out this wild story of how those gigantic photomultiplier tubes were made:
www.hamamatsu.com/jp/en/why-ha...

Luke Sjulson @lukesjulson.bsky.social · 6d

Look at the size of this photomultiplier tube in the Nobel Prize museum. Imagine doing two photon imaging with one of those!

Luke Sjulson @lukesjulson.bsky.social · 6d

@tdverstynen.bsky.social check this out www.hamamatsu.com/jp/en/why-ha...

Development of 20-inch PMTs:Why Hamamatsu? | Hamamatsu Photonics

www.hamamatsu.com

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Luke Sjulson @lukesjulson.bsky.social · 6d

I love that you saw that and also immediately recognized the need to photograph it

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Luke Sjulson @lukesjulson.bsky.social · 6d

at the time

Luke Sjulson @lukesjulson.bsky.social · 6d

that was available at the time. In some cases the clinician makes an obvious error, but in a case like this where the correct diagnosis was made and it's a choice between two different treatment options, there can be a lot of gray area, and wrong-in-retrospect does not necessarily mean it was wrong

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Luke Sjulson @lukesjulson.bsky.social · 6d

I'm glad to hear that your mom is doing well. Without knowing anything about the specific details of your mom's case, I would say that in situations like this Monday morning quarterbacking is easy, and it's not always clear cut what the "right" and "wrong" choices were with the information

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Luke Sjulson @lukesjulson.bsky.social · 6d

Yeah, clinicians (including myself) are wrong sometimes, no question. Medicine is intrinsically hard, and it isn’t easy to stay up to date. That doesn’t mean that professional clinicians don’t have knowledge and insight that laypeople don’t

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Luke Sjulson @lukesjulson.bsky.social · 6d

Often the worst examples are people who’ve experienced an illness first hand and think they understand the entire scope of that illness better than professional clinicians

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Luke Sjulson @lukesjulson.bsky.social · 6d

You’re right, and I think a key difference is that professionals see thousands of people, and laypeople (even those with direct personal experience) tend to overgeneralize from small N examples and underestimate the complexity and heterogeneity of mental illness

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Dr. Jonathan N. Stea @jonathanstea.bsky.social · 6d

It can be very easy for people who have never professionally sat with people (and their families) who experience the devastation of mental illness to pontificate about its existence and treatment from an armchair.

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Luke Sjulson @lukesjulson.bsky.social · 6d

I think everyone in my lab wants to do that with the entire building we’re in

Luke Sjulson @lukesjulson.bsky.social · 6d

I think so. But I’m not sure that PMTs have changed that much since then, other than GaAsP electrodes

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