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Reposted by Matthias Nau

Tobias Navarro Schröder @vitalcurrent.bsky.social · 2d

www.nature.com/articles/s41... linking creativity and brain health 😍 (+socioeconomic status perhaps)

Creative experiences and brain clocks - Nature Communications

Creative experiences such as dance, music, drawing, and strategy video games might preserve brain health. The authors show that regular practice or short training in these activities is linked to brains that look younger and work more efficiently.

www.nature.com

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Reposted by Matthias Nau

Kevin J. CREATURE @kevinjkircher.com · 4d

Sometimes I think about how from 1935-1975ish, Bell Labs produced an insane amount of revolutionary science and technology, including 11 Nobel Prizes, the transistor, UNIX, C, the laser, the solar cell, information theory, etc. The secret? Provide scientists with ample, steady, no-strings funding.

sites.stat.columbia.edu

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Matthias Nau @matthiasnau.bsky.social · 5d

Nice demo by Mark Lescroart @neuromdl.bsky.social on EPI imaging of a single #fMRI slice. Great for teaching! :)
vimeo.com/143701608?fl...

fMRI_EPI_KspaceAcquisition_short

This is a demonstration of how a single slice of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data is collected. Before this makes any sense, you will need to understand…

vimeo.com

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Reposted by Matthias Nau

Sam Schwarzkopf @sampendu.bsky.social · 5d

Long time in the making: our preprint of survey study on the diversity with how people seem to experience #mentalimagery. Suggests #aphantasia should be redefined as absence of depictive thought, not merely "not seeing". Some more take home msg:
#psychskysci #neuroscience

doi.org/10.1101/2025...

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Matthias Nau @matthiasnau.bsky.social · 6d

Important new resource for all Hippocampus lovers!👌👇

Boris Bernhardt @borismontreal.bsky.social · 6d

🚨 New paper in Nature Methods:
HippoMaps: multiscale cartography of the human hippocampus

Open-source tools & data to explore structure and function of the 🍤🧠 (histology, in/ex vivo MRI, iEEG)

Led by @jordandekraker.bsky.social

docs: hippomaps.readthedocs.io
paper: doi.org/10.1038/s415...

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Reposted by Matthias Nau

Jorge Morales @jorge-morales.bsky.social · 7d

Imagine an apple 🍎. Is your mental image more like a picture or more like a thought? In a new preprint led by Morgan McCarty—our lab's wonderful RA—we develop a new approach to this old cognitive science question and find that LLMs excel at tasks thought to be solvable only via visual imagery. 🧵

Artificial Phantasia: Evidence for Propositional Reasoning-Based Mental Imagery in Large Language Models

This study offers a novel approach for benchmarking complex cognitive behavior in artificial systems. Almost universally, Large Language Models (LLMs) perform best on tasks which may be included in th...

arxiv.org

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Reposted by Matthias Nau

Zoe Drayson @zoedrayson.bsky.social · 15d

When a typo in your Google search leads to new and exciting philosophical positions

AI Overview: "Dental realism"refers to the philosophical debate about whether teeth exist independently of human perception, a concept rooted in metaphysical realism. While realism asserts an objective reality for teeth, idealist philosophies contend that teeth's existence is tied to our consciousness and perception. Philosophers use this idea, for example, to discuss the ethics of tooth extraction, examining whether a procedure impacts a real entity or merely a subjective experience.

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The Transmitter @thetransmitter.bsky.social · 12d

A method for capturing neuronal activity using fMRI excited the neuroimaging field but couldn’t be replicated. Today, the authors of the original paper retracted their work.

By @callimcflurry.bsky.social

#neuroskyence

www.thetransmitter.org/retraction/a...

Authors retract Science paper on controversial fMRI method

Several MRI artifacts contribute to the neuronal activity signal picked up by the method, according to a preprint the authors posted this month.

www.thetransmitter.org

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Matthias Nau @matthiasnau.bsky.social · 13d

Amazing news! Congratulations Ondrej!!

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Matthias Nau @matthiasnau.bsky.social · 13d

Looking for cognition? It's right in front of your nose. Well, above it! 👀

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Matthias Nau @matthiasnau.bsky.social · 13d

Incredible study by Raut et al.: by tracking a single measure (pupil size), you can model slow, large-scale dynamics in neuronal calcium, metabolism, and brain blood oxygen through a shared latent space! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

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Reposted by Matthias Nau

clykken.bsky.social @clykken.bsky.social · 13d

1/8
How can the brain create countless unique memories using a single, universal metric of space? We’ve been waiting for the answer to this for two decades!
Read it here:
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

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Matthias Nau @matthiasnau.bsky.social · 14d

Very cool and strong effect for me!
It reminded me of this amazing fovea visualizer that I saw on the other platform a few years ago. Open it, make full screen, and see the extent of your fovea! 👀 www.shadertoy.com/view/4dsXzM

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Matthias Nau @matthiasnau.bsky.social · 14d

Excited to talk about #OpenMReye and lessons learned from creating open neuroscience tools at the National #OpenScience Week in Amsterdam today!

If you're around, join us at 4 PM in the O2 Auditorium for the talks and to meet the community @oscamsterdam.bsky.social!
docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Spotlight on Open Science - National Open Science Week at Amsterdam UMC

Dear Amsterdam UMC colleagues, To celebrate the National Open Science Week, which is supported by the Network of Open Science Communities in the Netherlands, we would like to invite you to talks of lo...

docs.google.com

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Reposted by Matthias Nau

Gang Chen @gangchen6.bsky.social · 18d

Data only shows associations. Turning those into claims about mechanism or causation? That requires a Rosetta Stone of prior knowledge + theory. Resting-state fMRI is purely observational; correlation is its currency. From this, plenty of "theoretical toys" about brain function can be built...

bioRxiv Neuroscience @biorxiv-neursci.bsky.social · 18d

Resting-State fMRI and the Risk of Overinterpretation: Noise, Mechanisms, and a Missing Rosetta Stone https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.16.676611v1

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Matthias Nau @matthiasnau.bsky.social · 19d

Finally, Huan Luo discussed how to dissociate content from structure of experiences, and how eye movements may signal these factors during retrieval. mgv.pku.edu.cn/english/peop... 4/4

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Matthias Nau @matthiasnau.bsky.social · 19d

Second, Eva Berlot showed how to use language models to study gaze behavior, and explored why we make eye movements even in non-visual tasks. www.predictivebrainlab.com/people/eva-b... 3/4

Eva Berlot

E-mail Address[email protected]

www.predictivebrainlab.com

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Matthias Nau @matthiasnau.bsky.social · 19d

First, Leda Cosmides discussed what it means to be rational. psych.ucsb.edu/people/facul...

"From an evolutionary biology perspective, the problem is not that our thinking is irrational. It's how psychologists defined rationality and tested for its presence" 2/4

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Matthias Nau @matthiasnau.bsky.social · 19d

Multiple great talks in our department @vuamsterdam.bsky.social & @ibbamsterdam.bsky.social over the past week! A short thread! 🧵 1/4

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Reposted by Matthias Nau

Yuki Kamitani @ykamit.bsky.social · 20d

Our article is out in Annual Review of Vision Science: “Visual Image Reconstruction from Brain Activity via Latent Representation”
We trace the path from early brain decoding to modern NeuroAI, highlight progress & pitfalls, and discuss future directions www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

Visual Image Reconstruction from Brain Activity via Latent Representation | Annual Reviews

Visual image reconstruction, the decoding of perceptual content from brain activity into images, has advanced significantly with the integration of deep neural networks (DNNs) and generative models. T...

www.annualreviews.org

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Matthias Nau @matthiasnau.bsky.social · 20d

Haha, exactly!

Matthias Nau @matthiasnau.bsky.social · 21d

Thanks @thetransmitter.bsky.social & @franciscorr25.bsky.social for featuring my lab in the "Liftoff" series!

The Transmitter @thetransmitter.bsky.social · 21d

In this month’s “Liftoff,” @matthiasnau.bsky.social talks about the importance of making quick decisions as a PI, and @kmcostalab.com shares how lab members being mad at a PI can sometimes be a good thing.

By @franciscorr25.bsky.social

#neuroskyence

www.thetransmitter.org/liftoff-new-...

Liftoff: New lab alerts

Learn about early-career scientists starting their own labs.

www.thetransmitter.org

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Reposted by Matthias Nau

Buddhika Bellana @buddhikabellana.bsky.social · Sep 5

How might stories shed light on brain function? Check out this opinion piece by @alexbarnett.bsky.social and I about the DMN and "situation models" -- our understanding of the current "state of affairs" in a story (or even experience).

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

On the left: an illustration from Brooke's 1904 rendition of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, where Little bear discovers their favourite chair is broken 😲. On the right, a sketch of what a corresponding "situation model" might contain.

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Reposted by Matthias Nau

Alex Barnett @alexbarnett.bsky.social · 21d

New preprint! My stellar undergrad, June Kim, & @charan-neuro.bsky.social find that intersubject pattern similarity at encoding (especially in posteromedial cortex) relates to shared/differing content between Ss at recall (measured using topic modeling) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Natural language processing captures memory content associated with shared neural patterns at encoding

People can experience the same event yet form distinct memories shaped by individual interpretations. Prior research shows that multivariate activity patterns in the Default Mode Network (DMN) are cor...

www.biorxiv.org

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Reposted by Matthias Nau

Mariam Aly @mariamaly.bsky.social · 22d

How do we update our predictions when our environment changes?

The hippocampus rapidly integrates previously distinct sequences to support updated predictions.

Proud of this work with Hannah Tarder-Stoll & @chrisbaldassano.bsky.social!

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

The Hippocampus Rapidly Integrates Sequence Representations During Novel Multistep Predictions

Memories for temporally extended sequences can be used adaptively to predict future events on multiple timescales, a function that relies on the hippocampus. For such predictions to be useful, they sh...

www.biorxiv.org

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