Very happy to see another paper for my PhD with @BrechtLab published in its final form at @JNeurophysiol https://journals.physiology.org/doi/full/10.1152/jn.00518.2019?af=R

The paper is a much better version than the preprint, it has multipoint analysis on egocentric bearing, homing task related analysis, its also restructured.

Instead of writing about the content of the paper. I will do a small thread on para-scientific issues related to this paper.

I started this project right in the middle of my PhD. It was first project after having contributed as a co-first on a previous paper. I wanted to have a solo project and develop it from beginning to end.

Indeed I got what I wanted. It was a lot of work doing all of this alone. But it was a great learning experience. It also prepared me technically for what was to come next. I was also very supported by the people in my lab and from what I learned from the people at @tenss_ed

I used this project as a test bed for our first wirefree recordings. It turns out that grid cells have the perfect receptive field for making sure you have your camera and ephys well synchronized. It was easy to be confident in the pipeline after seeing such beautiful grids.

It was a complicated paper to write, stemming from a beautiful idea or intention: trying to find a home related signal in the brain. In the end the paper became about dealing with some robust negative results with other interesting postive results and a lot of discussion.

We really could have reframed this paper to show only the positive results we found, the grid cell node shifts. But we were convinced after looking at the data, that our original idea about a strong home signal in MEC/PaS wasn’t supported. So we couldn’t look past that.

It was an even more complicated paper to publish. I first submitted this paper in October 2018! The first journal that reviewed it took 6 months till it came back rejected with 1 reviewer and a comment that second reviewer “could not submit formal comments”.

I should have posted a preprint. It was my mistake! Six months later, I did just that.

The rejection and the long waits on this paper allowed me to have time to work on another project. Rats playing Hide and Seek with humans, which ended up being the red bow of my doctoral work and also stemmed some spinoff work that is to come. All in all, a blessing in disguise.

In Hide and seek I could enjoy working collaboratively again. I was a ready for a project that this time heavily required the wirefree recordings.

Overall, frustrations and all, Im happy to finally have the paper in the literature. I‘m grateful with the process at JNP , the comments from reviewers there and also grateful to comments from previous reviewers and editors in other journals. It made the paper better with time.

I’m also super thankful for the support of Michael and my friends at the brecht lab.

Just to be clear. We did not find an effect on cells driven by the valence of the home. We didn’t find an evident home signal. Which doesn’t mean its not there somewhere. Its a paper that is hard to sintentize with a few tweets. It’s better to read it. Like most papers. :)