Matthias Nau
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matthiasnau.bsky.social
Matthias Nau
@matthiasnau.bsky.social
Cognitive Neuroscientist | Assistant Prof at VU Amsterdam | Active vision, memory, imagery | Multi-task studies, fMRI, eye tracking | https://matthiasnau.com
Reposted by Matthias Nau
"The inevitability and superfluousness of cell types in spatial cognition". Intuitive cell types are found in random artificial networks using the same selection criteria neuroscientists use with actual data. elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre... 1/2
elifesciences.org
November 25, 2025 at 7:29 PM
Reposted by Matthias Nau
New preprint alert!

Cognitive maps are flexible, dynamic, (re)constructed representations

#psychscisky #neuroskyence #cognition #philsky 🧪
OSF
osf.io
November 26, 2025 at 6:11 PM
Amazing work and must-read paper by @nickhedger.bsky.social and @tknapen.bsky.social et al.! Fun fact: this was my favorite talk at #SfN2023, now finally out! Congrats Tomas and team!

Vicarious body maps bridge vision and touch in the human brain. @nature.com
New today in @Nature: your visual cortex contains touch-based body maps. bit.ly/VisualBodyMaps
Your brain transforms what you see into first-person, body-referenced codes: A previously unknown bridge between vision and touch.
November 26, 2025 at 7:29 PM
Reposted by Matthias Nau
Just published my "Programming for Psychologists" course! 👩‍💻 github.com/Naubody/prog...

Designed for Psychology & Cognitive Neuroscience Master's students starting their programming journey at @vuamsterdam.bsky.social.

Feel free to share! Feedback welcome!
November 24, 2025 at 1:14 PM
Just published my "Programming for Psychologists" course! 👩‍💻 github.com/Naubody/prog...

Designed for Psychology & Cognitive Neuroscience Master's students starting their programming journey at @vuamsterdam.bsky.social.

Feel free to share! Feedback welcome!
November 24, 2025 at 1:14 PM
Reposted by Matthias Nau
Our new paper is out in Nature Communications! nature.com/articles/s41...

We combined psychophysics, 7T fMRI, and computational modeling of vision with placebo, 5mg, and 10mg psilocybin, in the same group of participants, to clarify the computational mechanisms of psychedelics. 🧵
November 23, 2025 at 10:26 PM
Truly honored and grateful to receive the Rising Star in Neuroscience Award! 🎉 Huge thanks to @thetransmitter.bsky.social for this wonderful recognition, and congratulations to all the other amazing awardees! 🎊😍
November 18, 2025 at 1:40 PM
Reposted by Matthias Nau
Excited to share my first first-author paper in Nature Methods!🤩

A quest to solve fMRI–EEG interference revealed a hidden strength in the usually discarded “dummy” scans. That spark became SASS-fMRI — boosting sensitivity and enabling silent, flexible experiments.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Stimulus-modulated approach to steady state (SASS): a flexible paradigm for event-related fMRI - Nature Methods
Stimulus-modulated approach to steady state (SASS) is an acquisition scheme for event-related fMRI that generates data with high temporal signal-to-noise ratios interspaced with acquisition-free perio...
www.nature.com
November 13, 2025 at 11:48 AM
Reposted by Matthias Nau
Delighted to share our new preprint!

We show that rhythmic light stimulation produces multiplexed oscillatory responses at fundamental and harmonic frequencies that are spatially, temporally, and functionally distinct.

Read on for the details [1/6]

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
#neuroskyence
Rhythmic light stimulation elicits multiple concurrent neural responses that separably shape human perception
Rhythmic light stimulation offers solutions to innumerable cognitive and neurological disorders. However, like any neuromodulatory technique, responses to rhythmic light stimulation are highly variabl...
www.biorxiv.org
November 7, 2025 at 11:55 AM
What a great figure! What we call “fixation” is really a complex pattern of fixational eye movements, several captured beautifully in this single shot. Love it! 👀 #EyeTracking
www.nature.com/articles/nrn...
November 7, 2025 at 8:50 AM
Reposted by Matthias Nau
This is 🤯

All publicly available. Looks like an amazing new histology-based human probabilistic atlas and parcellation tool.

#neuroskyence #mri #brainmapping

A probabilistic histological atlas of the human brain for MRI segmentation | Nature share.google/5AD0iW7pxgb4...
A probabilistic histological atlas of the human brain for MRI segmentation - Nature
NextBrain is an open source, probabilistic atlas of the entire human brain, assembled using artificial-intelligence-enabled registration and segmentation methods to reconstruct the multimodal serial h...
share.google
November 6, 2025 at 5:35 AM
Reposted by Matthias Nau
Please repost! I am looking for a PhD candidate in the area of Computational Cognitive Neuroscience to start in early 2026.

The position is funded as part of the Excellence Cluster "The Adaptive Mind" at @jlugiessen.bsky.social.

Please apply here until Nov 25:
www.uni-giessen.de/de/ueber-uns...
November 4, 2025 at 1:57 PM
Reposted by Matthias Nau
A brain injury was reported in a trial using ultrasound, framed as low-intensity TUS. Kim Butts Pauly and I reviewed the case and disagreed with how it's presented. Key acoustic data are missing.
Case: doi.org/10.1016/j.br...
Letters: www.elsa-fouragnan.com/blog | web.stanford.edu/~kimbutts/Le...
Brain Injury During Focused Ultrasound Neuromodulation for Substance Use Disorder
www.sciencedirect.com
November 3, 2025 at 11:39 AM
Reposted by Matthias Nau
Introducing CorText: a framework that fuses brain data directly into a large language model, allowing for interactive neural readout using natural language.

tl;dr: you can now chat with a brain scan 🧠💬

1/n
November 3, 2025 at 3:17 PM
Reposted by Matthias Nau
Kicked off my course "Programming for Psychologists" again, starting with a lecture on *Mindset*.

The first exercise is writing out a peanut butter jam sandwich recipe 🥜🥪. Fun way to learn about imperative vs. declarative instructions, top-down design etc.

Maybe useful for others too? 1/3
October 28, 2025 at 11:14 AM
Reposted by Matthias Nau
First neurons didn’t appear overnight. We trace their roots to ancient secretory cells - showing how lifestyle & behavior shaped the evolution of first synapses.🧠🌊 #Evolution #Neuroscience

Our latest in @natrevneuro.nature.com
Link: rdcu.be/eMX3E

@jeffcolgren.bsky.social @msarscentre.bsky.social
The evolutionary origins of synaptic proteins and their changing roles in different organisms across evolution
Nature Reviews Neuroscience - Recent studies have shed further light on the evolutionary origins of chemical synapses, In this Review, Colgren and Burkhardt explore how ancient proteins were...
rdcu.be
October 27, 2025 at 6:48 PM
Reposted by Matthias Nau
🚀 We’re hiring - Join our lab 🚀

🔍 Hiring: PhD (75% TV-L) & Postdoc (100% TV-L)
🧠 fMRI, VR, EEG, modelling

We combine a range of cognitive neuroscience methods to study flexible behaviour.

📅 Start: Feb 2026 or later | ⏳ Apply by Nov 3!

More details:
tinyurl.com/ms3a9ajt

#CognitiveNeuroscience
October 27, 2025 at 11:57 AM
Great render of the beautiful drosophila hemibrain! 👇
When #HHMIJanelia released the #Drosophila hemibrain in 2020, rendering all cell types at once with full shading/shadows was too hard, so the video showed them region by region. Technology has since advanced, and I went back and rendered them all together. I like how it shows the internal structure.
October 27, 2025 at 9:32 AM
Reposted by Matthias Nau
This is such a fun idea! A cross-decoding perception-imagery challenge 🤩 Looking forward to seeing what comes out (and maybe having a sneaky go myself when I should be doing admin...)!
How well do classifiers trained on visual activity actually transfer to non-visual reactivation?

#Decoding studies often rely on training in one (visual) condition and applying it to another (e.g. rest-reactivation). However: How well does this work? Show us what makes it work and win up to 1000$!
IMAGINE-decoding-challenge
Predict which words participants were hearing, based upon brain activity recordings of visually seeing these items?
www.kaggle.com
October 24, 2025 at 11:42 AM
Current trends in European Research funding... 😵‍💫 erc.europa.eu/news-events/...
October 23, 2025 at 1:24 PM
Reposted by Matthias Nau
@dotproduct.bsky.social's first first author paper is finally out in @sfnjournals.bsky.social! Her findings show that content-specific predictions fluctuate with alpha frequencies, suggesting a more specific role for alpha oscillations than we may have thought. With @jhaarsma.bsky.social. 🧠🟦 🧠🤖
Contents of visual predictions oscillate at alpha frequencies
Predictions of future events have a major impact on how we process sensory signals. However, it remains unclear how the brain keeps predictions online in anticipation of future inputs. Here, we combin...
www.jneurosci.org
October 21, 2025 at 11:05 AM
Reposted by Matthias Nau
✨My first first-author paper is out✨
Entorhinal grid-like codes for visual space during memory formation in @natcomms.nature.com ➡️ rdcu.be/eLRm2
Big thanks to everyone ‪@isabellacwagner.bsky.social‬, @tobiasstaudigl.bsky.social, @olejensen.bsky.social, @doellerlab.bsky.social, @clauslamm.bsky.social
Entorhinal grid-like codes for visual space during memory formation
Nature Communications - Eye movements during scene viewing are tied to grid-like codes in the entorhinal cortex. Grid signals are specific to later remembered scenes, covary with activity in...
rdcu.be
October 20, 2025 at 4:42 PM