Updated June 10, 2025
On January 8, 2025, neuroscience lost one of its founding fathers, Floyd E. Bloom, MD. Floyd, who helped establish neuroscience as a recognized multidisciplinary field, was President of the Society for Neuroscience (1976–1977), Editor in Chief of Science (1995–2000), President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2002–2003), President of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology (1989) and an ambassador for neuroscience to the broader science community.
After graduating from the Washington University School of Medicine in 1960, Floyd launched his research career as a Research Associate at the NIMH facility at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital using the electrophysiological technique of microiontophoresis to study neurotransmitter function. He then moved to Yale as a postdoctoral fellow and then Assistant and Associate Professor, during which time he co-authored, with Jack Cooper and Bob Roth, the "bible" of neuropharmacology, The Biochemical Basis of Neuropharmacology. In 1968 he returned to Washington, DC to become Chief of the Lab of Neuropharmacology at NIMH, St. Elizabeth's. Floyd's lab at NIMH pioneered a multidisciplinary approach to neural circuitry that combined anatomical, physiological, and pharmacological tools to fully characterize and biochemically code identified brain circuits. In 1971, the year the Society for Neuroscience was founded, he, Barry Hoffer, and George (Bob) Siggins published a trio of articles documenting the anatomy, electrophysiology, and second-messenger impact of noradrenergic synapses between locus-coeruleus axons and cerebellar Purkinje cells. This work helped launch a new paradigm that linked neurotransmitter identity, synaptic function, and neuroanatomy to identified circuits, an approach that would be a dominant force in neuroscience for the next few decades.
Floyd moved to the Salk Institute in 1975 to establish the Arthur Vining Davis Center for Behavioral Neurobiology. The years at Salk established the Bloom Lab as a leading force for interdisciplinary neuroscience. In 1977, Floyd was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, becoming one of its youngest members at 40 years of age. In 1983, Floyd and his team moved down the street to the Scripps Research Institute. With the expansion of space, there was also an expansion of the scientific enterprise, and independent faculty members occupied labs in five areas of focus: cellular neurobiology and neurohistology, neurophysiology, neurochemistry, and behavioral pharmacology, as well as a new emphasis on region-specific gene expression patterns and novel neuropeptides. While at Scripps, Floyd’s role as a scientific statesman expanded further when he became Editor-in-Chief at Science, where he ushered in multiple innovations and expanded the journal’s standing at the apex of scientific publishing.
Floyd won numerous awards throughout his career, including the Walsh McDermott Medal, the Janssen Award in the Basic Sciences, the Pasarow Award in Neuropsychiatry, the Hermann van Helmholtz Award, the Paul Hoch Distinguished Service Award and the Sarnat Award for Mental Health Research. He also was a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine (now the National Academy of Medicine), and he received numerous honorary degrees from major universities.
Although Floyd's direct role as an ambassador for science and his scientific accomplishments were exceptional, he was at least as proud of his profound and far-reaching role as a mentor. His impact as a mentor was celebrated in the Bloom Family Tree that several of his prior trainees assembled in 2005. At that time, the Bloom Family Tree extended across four generations that included 1,000 neuroscientists spread across 60 sites in the United States, 17 in Canada, 1 in Mexico, and 45 sites in 15 countries across Europe and Asia, prompting us to declare that the sun never sets on the Bloom Family Tree! Floyd's impact on how we unravel the profound mysteries of the brain will continue to be felt for many years as the next several generations of his scientific offspring take on new and bigger challenges.
We greatly appreciate the editors of The Journal of Neuroscience commemorating Floyd's scientific legacy through this collection of articles that he co-authored in the Journal through the years. Please note that the thesis work of one of the authors of this Introduction (GAJ) is proudly featured in the collection, a direct reflection of Floyd's enduring mentorship.
—Gary Aston-Jones, Stephen L. Foote, and John H. Morrison
Read more about Dr. Bloom's life in the History of Neuroscience in Autobiography.
Below are a selected collection of JNeurosci publications that broadly span Floyd Bloom's influence in the field over his career.
Research Spotlight
Lucid dreaming is a surreal phenomenon in which people are consciously aware that they are in a dream. Çağatay Demirel, from Donders Center for Cognitive Neuroimaging, Radboud University Medical Center, and colleagues shed light on the neural correlates of lucid dreaming in their study. The researchers used a rigorous processing pipeline as they collected and assembled data from multiple labs to create what is, according to the authors, the largest sample size to date for this field of research. Comparisons of brain activity during lucid dreaming, rapid eye movement sleep, and wakefulness revealed distinct activity patterns for lucid dreaming. These unique patterns reflect shifts in brain region activation and how brain regions communicate that may be linked to changes in perception, memory processing, self-awareness, and cognitive control. According to Demirel, “This research opens the door to a deeper understanding of lucid dreaming as an intricate state of consciousness by pointing to the possibility that conscious experience can arise from within sleep itself. This work offers a perspective that could challenge the traditional binary view of sleep and wakefulness in future research.”
Calcium imaging is widely used to measure neuronal activity, but it is not clear how well it generalizes to new conditions. Rupprecht and colleagues performed calcium imaging with simultaneous measurements of electrical activity (the "ground truth") in dorsal horn spinal cord neurons. They used this ground truth to evaluate and improve models for more accurate spike rate inference. Their results demonstrate how calcium imaging generalizes across CNS regions and enables the more accurate interpretation of calcium signals from the spinal cord.
When remembering visual information — whether maintained from a recent experience or retrieved from long-term memory — the visual cortex is active, suggesting that it plays an important role in visual memory. Woodry and colleagues showed how, compared to perception, visual memories lead to less precise representations in early visual cortical maps, while in high-level maps, precision during perception matched that during memory. They also found that trial-to-trial variability in memory activations was reliably associated with trial-to-trial variability in memory-guided behavior. They conclude that while visual cortex activity plays an important role in visual working and long-term memories, it also limits the precision of memory-guided behavior.
The inferior frontal cortex (IFC) is a critical region for language processing, but its relationship with reading skill remains unclear. Stone and colleagues identified three anatomically distinct, text-selective regions in the IFC in school-aged children. The authors found that these regions are sensitive to both stimulus and task demands, and that better readers showed higher selectivity to text, even in tasks that did not require reading. These findings suggest that text-selective regions within the IFC are sensitive to both stimulus and task, and highlight the critical role of the IFC in reading proficiency.
Most-Discussed Research Published in May
Below are five Early Release articles that generated the most online discussion in May 2025, as measured by Altmetric. Altmetric data is available for all articles published in JNeurosci on the Info & Metrics tab. Learn more about how the Altmetric score is calculated.
A salient, and behaviorally relevant, feature of the human brain is its pronounced cortical folding. However, the links between sulcal anatomy and brain function are still poorly understood – particularly for small, shallow, individually variable sulci in association cortices. Here, focusing on the functional connectivity between individually defined sulci in lateral prefrontal and parietal regions in a pediatric sample, we demonstrate for the first time a link between functional network centrality and sulcal morphology. This result, along with control analyses, provide proof of concept that defining functional brain networks in relation to sulcal anatomy is a promising way forward.
This study tests our phase-modulated plasticity hypothesis, proposing that fine-grained synchrony between lip movements and speech sounds within theta oscillations determines the formation of multisensory speech memories. We assumed that theta synchrony increases chances for the two visual and auditory inputs to arrive at the same theta phase in the hippocampus and to be associated in memory. We found that audiovisual asynchrony impacted neocortical and hippocampal theta oscillations during movie encoding. Furthermore, desynchronizing lip movements and speech sounds relative to the dominant theta oscillation in the movies disrupted subsequent theta reinstatement during memory recall. These findings demonstrate the critical role of neural theta oscillations in audiovisual speech integration and memory replay, offering insights into how we memorize multisensory experiences.
Amygdala regulates social motivation for selective vocal imitation in zebra finches
Social interaction plays a critical role in imitation, particularly in the acquisition of speech and cultural behaviors like dance and song. Although studies in rodents indicate the involvement of the amygdala in social behaviors and social learning, the mechanisms coordinating social behaviors and imitative learning remain poorly understood. Vocal imitation in juvenile songbirds is an ideal model to investigate such mechanisms. Here, we report that lesioning the amygdala in juvenile zebra finches increases overall social motivation but disrupts selective song learning and their preferential approach to the selected tutor. These findings provide new insights into the social function of the amygdala in imitation.
The Functional Anatomy of Nociception: Effective Connectivity in Chronic Pain and Placebo Response
Chronic pain is a widespread and complex healthcare challenge. Cognitive functions such as prediction, expectation, and attention are believed to influence pain perception and placebo responses through top-down information processing in the brain. However, empirical evidence supporting this hypothesis at the brain network level has been lacking. Our study addresses this gap by examining top-down, bottom-up, and recurrent effective connectivity within the brain’s pain processing pathways using resting-state fMRI. We discovered consistent and significant alterations in effective connectivity patterns in chronic pain patients and placebo responders, with the potential to predict individual pain experiences and placebo responses. These findings open new research avenues into the neural mechanisms underlying chronic pain and placebo effects.
Brain Topological Changes in Subjective Cognitive Decline and Associations with Amyloid Stages
Amyloid spreads throughout the cortex in AD. It is unclear whether early amyloid deposition may trigger system-level network reorganization in SCD who are at risk for AD. We examined the brain topology alterations in SCD and its relationship with amyloid deposition at different cortical stages. We found increased node-level topological properties, in the core default mode network region (i.e., the cingulate cortex) in SCD. Increasing regional amyloid load at all stages showed consistent associations with the increasing node-level topological properties of the cingulate cortex in SCD. Our findings suggest that amyloid deposition impacts the system-level network adaptation via the cingulate cortex already at the very early stage and is unlikely to have a local effect in this AD risk population.
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