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Ole Goltermann

@olegolt.bsky.social

220 followers 340 following 28 posts

Doctoral Researcher @isnlab.bsky.social | part of @mps-cognition.bsky.social | previously @mpicbs.bsky.social‬, @mpi-nl.bsky.social‬ & @univie.ac.at‬ https://cognition.maxplanckschools.org/en/doctoral-candidates/ole-goltermann

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Ole Goltermann @olegolt.bsky.social · Jul 22

Serious concerns about a new cortical biomarker for pain sensitivity

jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

We (with @tspisak.bsky.social, @christianbuchel.bsky.social) published a commentary on Chowdhury, Bi et al. (2025, JAMA Neurology) raising serious concerns about their reported results.

👇 1/13

Concern About Predictive Performance of a Pain Sensitivity Biomarker

To the Editor Chowdhury et al1 evaluated a biomarker for pain sensitivity, combining peak alpha frequency and corticomotor excitability. The authors report outstanding performance (validation set area...

jamanetwork.com

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Melanie Mitchell @melaniemitchell.bsky.social · 7d

In 2016 Hinton predicted that AI would replace all radiologists in five years. Ten years later, why hasn't it happened? This post is a great explainer.

www.understandingai.org/p/ai-isnt-re...

AI isn't replacing radiologists

Radiology combines digital images, clear benchmarks, and repeatable tasks. But demand for human radiologists is at an all-time high.

www.understandingai.org

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Danielle Hewitt @dhewitt.bsky.social · 2d

Ever thought about how to make your research more inclusive? 🧠✨

We worked with members of the public and patient contributors to understand what makes it harder for people to take part in research — from accessibility and scheduling to lab environments and communication. (🧵 1/3)

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Simon Fisher @profsimonfisher.bsky.social · 12d

New analysis of a 1-million yr old fossil skull captured worldwide media attention this week, with many headlines saying it requires a complete rewrite/rethink of human evolution. This is an intriguing study & it's brilliant to see so much public enthusiasm for deciphering our origins, but....1/n 🧪

Image shows just two example headlines from prominent media outlets earlier this week, heralding a newly published discovery that supposedly "rewrites human evolution". Left side, from the BBC: "Million-year-old skull rewrites human evolution, scientists claim"; right side, from the New York Post: "1M-year-old skull discovery could change everything we know about human evolution".

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Boris Bernhardt @borismontreal.bsky.social · 7d

🚨 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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Ondrej Zika @ondrejzika.bsky.social · 7d

🚨 PhD/Postdoc alert 👇

If you are interested in doing a PhD/Postdoc in computational psychiatry (starting Sept 2026), do get in touch by October 4th at [email protected] :)

Any inquiries are welcome. To apply, please attach your CV, half page motivation and half page research statements.

Ondrej Zika @ondrejzika.bsky.social · 14d

🚨 I am over the moon 🌓 to announce that I am joining University College Dublin @ucddublin.bsky.social as an Assistant Professor this fall to start the Uncertain Mind (UMI) lab 💫

I am looking for PhD/Postdoc candidates to join (more below 👇 ). Please RT as the deadline is pretty soon 🙏

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IGOR DGPs @igor-dgps.bsky.social · 9d

🔍 Have we solved the replication crisis?

Join us for an IGOR panel discussion on the state of Open Science in biological psychology more than a decade after the crisis first hit.

📅 Friday, 10 Oct | 10:00–11:00 CET
💻 Online (contact us for the link)

#OpenScience #neuroskyence #academicsky

[1/3]

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G. Willow Wilson @gwillow.me · 10d

I mean yes this is funny, but the fact that these unconstitutional stormtroopers are so directionless that they literally stand around waiting for random nonwhite delivery guys to bike past them is just pathetic. No mandate, no mission, no clue. Just racism.

Steve Marmel @marmel.bsky.social · 10d

ICE attempted
and failed to disappear a food delivery guy.
It needed to be scored.

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Reposted by Ole Goltermann

Zach Rosenthal @zachrosenthal.bsky.social · 14d

Super proud of this collaboration with rockstar Ryan Raut - born out of playing in the sandbox in our last year of grad school! Multi-scale brain activity can be predicted from a simple measure of arousal like pupil diameter. Out with linear causality, in with dynamic systems to explain neurobiology

Arousal as a universal embedding for spatiotemporal brain dynamics - Nature

Reframing of arousal as a latent dynamical system can reconstruct multidimensional measurements of large-scale spatiotemporal brain dynamics on the timescale of seconds in mice.

www.nature.com

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Michael Gaebler @michaelgaebler.com · 14d

In some way, it's trivial:

The #brain & the rest of the #body (e.g. the #heart) are coupled.

Yet, we spelled it out
w/ A. Villringer & V. Nikulin for current scientists (below)
w/ @martager.bsky.social @agatapatyczek.bsky.social @el-rei.bsky.social for future scientists bsky.app/profile/mart...

Trends in Neurosciences @cp-trendsneuro.bsky.social · 15d

'Brain–body states as a link between cardiovascular and mental health'

by Arno Villringer, Vadim Nikulin & Michael Gaebler @mbe-lab.bsky.social @michaelgaebler.com @mpicbs.bsky.social sky.social

www.cell.com/trends/neuro...

Villringer et al. Figure 1. Conceptual framework for brain–body states

Villringer et al. Figure 2 Brain–body micro-, meso-, and macro-states can be distinguished on the basis of their duration and reversibility

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Ravi Menon, Ph.D. @northernthrux.bsky.social · 13d

Science is self correcting. Finally!

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 · 14d

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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Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · 27d

"We are told that AI is inevitable, that we must adapt or be left behind. But universities are not tech companies. Our role is to foster critical thinking, not to follow industry trends uncritically." www.ru.nl/en/research/...

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Kris Jensen @kristorpjensen.bsky.social · 15d

I’m super excited to finally put my recent work with @behrenstimb.bsky.social on bioRxiv, where we develop a new mechanistic theory of how PFC structures adaptive behaviour using attractor dynamics in space and time!

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

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Ondrej Zika @ondrejzika.bsky.social · 14d

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Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · Sep 6

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n

Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or
even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in
the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or
apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we
are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not
considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This
is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse
and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece,
we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology
industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to
relevant work to further inform our colleagues.

Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI
(black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are
in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are
both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and
Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf.
Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al.
2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).

Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms
are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.

Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles

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Mariam Aly @mariamaly.bsky.social · Sep 8

Are you an early career researcher (undergrad to postdoc) who could use advice about navigating peer review? Are you stuck on a manuscript submission or revision? Have general questions about peer review?

Schedule a 30-min chat with any member of @reviewerzero.bsky.social! We'd love to help 😊

Formative And Interactive Review (FAIR)

🌱 Formative And Interactive Review (FAIR) 🌱 Reviewer Zero's Formative and Interactive Review (FAIR) draft feedback program is designed for early career researchers (ECRs) to receive feedback on a draf...

www.reviewerzero.net

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Reposted by Ole Goltermann

Julia M. Rohrer @dingdingpeng.the100.ci · Aug 25

This is in a certain sense the follow-up to a blog post I wrote 3 years ago (!) after I had looked into the topic for a paper with Felix Elwert, who is thus once again to blame for large chunks of my output.

www.the100.ci/2022/05/27/%...

✨ Unleash your inner stats sparkle ✨ with this very non-technical introduction to marginal effects

Update August 2025: There's now a manuscript by Vincent Arel-Bundock and me providing a more thorough introduction to marginaleffects, Models as prediction machines: How to convert confusing coefficie...

www.the100.ci

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Reposted by Ole Goltermann

Nico Schuck @nicoschuck.bsky.social · Aug 22

Delighted to share our work on replay and successor representations! We find replay during very short task pauses in human visual cortex that is linked to learning SRs & happens when learning is implicit. Study led by @lnnrtwttkhn.bsky.social

#compneuro #neuroskyence

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Replay in the human visual cortex during brief task pauses is linked to implicit learning of successor representations | PNAS

Humans can implicitly learn about multistep sequential relationships between events in the environment from their statistical co-occurrence. Theore...

www.pnas.org

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Reposted by Ole Goltermann

Hunter Schone @hunterschone.bsky.social · Aug 21

Now out in @natneuro.nature.com

What happens to the brain’s body map when a body-part is removed?

Scanning patients before and up to 5 yrs after arm amputation, we discovered the brain’s body map is strikingly preserved despite amputation

www.nature.com/articles/s41593-025-02037-7

🧵1/18

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Miriam Klein-Flügge 🧠 @mkflugge.bsky.social · Aug 20

We are super excited about the first human transcranial ultrasound study from our lab which is now on BiorXiv, showing the amygdala‘s role in processing ambiguous emotions and showing TUS changed resting-state connectivity and metabolite concentrations (GABA) in the amygdala - a huge team effort! 🥳🙏🏼

Johannes Algermissen @johalgermissen.bsky.social · Aug 20

Very happy to share my first preprint from @oxexppsy.bsky.social @oxneuro.bsky.social ! We (me + co-first authors @lilweb.bsky.social @mirunarascu.bsky.social + PI @mkflugge.bsky.social + many others) used transcranial focused ultrasound stimulation (TUS/tFUS/LIFU) of the human amygdala ... (1/15)

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Paul Steinfath @paulsteinfath.bsky.social · Aug 13

Could the diversity of findings in heartbeat-evoked response (HER) research be due to variability in methods?

In our new preprint my co-first authors, Maria Azanova and @willenjoy.bsky.social, and me systematically reviewed 132 M/EEG HER studies and found:

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Ravi Menon, Ph.D. @northernthrux.bsky.social · Aug 19

Please repost. The Centre for Functional and Metabolic Mapping is looking for a Preclinical MRI physicist (9.4T and 15.2T Bruker Advance Neo). You will join a team of 14 dedicated staff in Canada's National Ultra-high field MRI platform who also operate 3T and 7T human scanners in the same facility.

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Esther Kuehn @estherkuehn.bsky.social · Aug 11

Thanks to all (co)authors & reviewers for their contribution to this study on #layer specific changes in #sensory #cortex across the #lifespan in #humans & #mice now out in @natneuro.nature.com Here is a short summary of our findings 1/6

DZNE research center @dzne.science · Aug 11

🧠 The human brain ages less than thought and in layers – at least in the area of the cortex responsible for the sense of touch. See study @natneuro.nature.com by @estherkuehn.bsky.social and colleagues at DZNE, @hih-tuebingen.bsky.social and @uni-magdeburg.de:

👉 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Layer-specific changes in sensory cortex across the lifespan in mice and humans - Nature Neuroscience

The principal layer architecture of the sensory cortex is altered with aging. The authors show that overall thinning of the primary somatosensory cortex is driven by deep layer degeneration but that l...

www.nature.com

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Reposted by Ole Goltermann

PAIN @painthejournal.bsky.social · Aug 12

May et al. find that the relationship between peak alpha frequency and pain does not generalize to brief experimental pain calling for a systematic exploration across different pain types. Learn more in #PAIN bit.ly/3Hmxszm

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Maarten van Smeden @maartenvsmeden.bsky.social · Aug 11

NEW PREPRINT

Explainable AI refers to an extremely popular group of approaches that aim to open "black box" AI models. But what can we see when we open the black AI box? We use Galit Shmueli's framework (to describe, predict or explain) to evaluate

arxiv.org/abs/2508.05753

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