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Rubén Herzog

@rherzoga.bsky.social

92 followers 84 following 18 posts

Computational Neuroscientist with interests in consciousness and complexity

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Reposted by Rubén Herzog

Thomas Andrillon @thomasandrillon.bsky.social · Aug 14

💤🧠🧪 New article! 🧪🧠💤

After years of effort led by @qualiastructure.bsky.social (Nao Tsuchiya and William Wong), Jenny Windt, Katja Valli, Valdas Noreika and @rherzoga.bsky.social, the Dream database is now published in @natcomms.nature.com

**A dream EEG and mentation database**
rdcu.be/eAwni

Illustration from Ana Yael
https://www.anayael.com/

Reposted by Rubén Herzog

Consciousness - tlab @qualiastructure.bsky.social · Aug 14

Dream start for database that aims to improve our understanding of conscious experience in sleep

Free link to the paper in Nature Communication is rdcu.be/eAwni !

A dream EEG and mentation database

Nature Communications - The authors present a multicenter database to investigate the neural correlates of dreaming, including physiological, behavioral and experiential data. This database could...

Rubén Herzog @rherzoga.bsky.social · Aug 14

PS: @nature.com @natureportfolio.nature.com should really improve their editorial system to extract authors and affiliations from the submitted document. Adding 53 authors one-by-one, their emails and affiliations can be annoying. Do I really need to do this in the AI era?
Just saying...

Rubén Herzog @rherzoga.bsky.social · Aug 14

Congrats and thanks to the whole team: 53 authors across 37 institutes across the world. Speciall thanks to William Wong, @naotsuchiya.bsky.social and @thomasandrillon.bsky.social !

Rubén Herzog @rherzoga.bsky.social · Aug 14

We propose that a 'covert wake' mechanism may underly NREM dreams, where both wake and deep sleep brain dynamics coexist, enabling consciouss experience.

Rubén Herzog @rherzoga.bsky.social · Aug 14

As a proof of concept, we demonstrated that dream experience can be detected from EEG signals both in REM and NREM sleep. Also, dream experience during NREM is associated with increased wake-like EEG activity embedded into slow wave activity.

Rubén Herzog @rherzoga.bsky.social · Aug 14

The work provides an open and ever growing database with multicentric neural recordings of participants while sleeping and dreaming, in addition to sleep staging and phenomenological reports.

Database
👇
monash.edu/dream-database

Rubén Herzog @rherzoga.bsky.social · Aug 14

📜[PUBLICATION ALERT]📜

I had the honour to be co-first author of this huge effort to advance dream science and our understanding of conscious experience during sleep.

In Nature Communications rdcu.be/eAwni. @naotsuchiya.bsky.social @thomasandrillon.bsky.social

#sleep
#dreams
#EEG

A dream EEG and mentation database

Nature Communications - The authors present a multicenter database to investigate the neural correlates of dreaming, including physiological, behavioral and experiential data. This database could...

Rubén Herzog @rherzoga.bsky.social · Jul 20

Take-home: The next generation of brain mode discovery methods should explicitly optimize for synergy preservation. Leveraging synergy yields a more parsimounious and informative low-dimensional representation that retains a key qualitative property of large-scale brain dynamics: #synergy

9/9

Rubén Herzog @rherzoga.bsky.social · Jul 20

Bonus track: Global signal regression enhances the discovery of synergistic interactions by reducing common sources of redundancy. See also www.nature.com/articles/s42...!

8/9

Rubén Herzog @rherzoga.bsky.social · Jul 20

Main result: Autoencoders achieved the lowest reconstruction error while uniquely preserving synergistic interactions across all modes. PCA ranked second preserving neither synergy nor redundancy. The rest retained some synergy, but with higher reconstruction errors.

7/9

Rubén Herzog @rherzoga.bsky.social · Jul 20

A systematic comparison: We derived low‑dimensional brain modes using PCA, diffusion maps, Laplacian eigenmodes, Yeo 7 resting‑state network (RSN) averaging, and a nonlinear autoencoder. Each method was constrained to 7 modes, aligning with the 7 @bttyeo.bsky.social RSNs.

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Rubén Herzog @rherzoga.bsky.social · Jul 20

We leverage #informationtheory to detect synergistic high-order interactions in resting‑state #fMRI. Synergistic interactions were consistently present across parcellations with different number of regions, prompting the question: do different DR methods also preserve synergy?

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Rubén Herzog @rherzoga.bsky.social · Jul 20

Dimensionality reduction methods aim to compress brain data mainly by minimizing redundancy. But what if we can go further by preserving and leveraging high-order synergistic interactions between brain modes? More information could be encoded within the same reduced space.

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Rubén Herzog @rherzoga.bsky.social · Jul 20

Dimensionality reduction of brain dynamics should be evaluated not only by reconstruction error or explained variance, but also by whether it preserves key qualitative properties of large-scale dynamics such as synergy.

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Rubén Herzog @rherzoga.bsky.social · Jul 20

Proposal: A complementary criterion for dimensionality reduction (DR) of brain dynamics (" #brainmodes ") based on preserving synergy. #Synergy is a recently characterized, still understudied property of the brain.

Synergy is information in the whole system that is not in the parts alone.

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Rubén Herzog @rherzoga.bsky.social · Jul 20

📜🧠[PREPRINT RELEASE]🧠📜

I'm very happy to share our new preprint: “The synergistic interactions of low-dimensional brain modes.”

Thanks to Vohryzek, Luppi, Geli, Geli, Kringelbach, Tagliazucchi, Deco & Sanz-Perl !

DOI: doi.org/10.1101/2025...

See below!
#neuroscience
#brain
#synergy

1/9

The synergistic interactions of low-dimensional brain modes

Neuroimaging techniques produce vast amounts of data, capturing brain activity in a high-dimensional space. However, brain dynamics are consistently shown to reside in a rather lower-dimensional space...

Reposted by Rubén Herzog

Borjan (Boki) Milinković @neuromorphicboki.bsky.social · Jul 20

📜🪇[PUBLISHED]: NEW PREPRINT!🪇📜

I am incredibly excited to announce that we have published our paper on how "Dynamical independence reveals anaesthetic specific fragmentation of emergent structure in neural dynamics"
[email protected] @anilseth.bsky.social Barnett, Carter

Strap in!
1/n

Dynamical independence reveals anaesthetic specific fragmentation of emergent structure in neural dynamics

Conscious experience depends on the coordinated activity of neural processes that span multiple scales--from synapses to whole-brain dynamics. A recently introduced measure, dynamical independence, id...

www.biorxiv.org

Reposted by Rubén Herzog

marilyngatica.bsky.social @marilyngatica.bsky.social · Jun 5

📢 New preprint alert!

With an incredible crew: Carlos Coronel
@rherzoga.bsky.social & Matteo Neri
We propose a computational framework for diversity-sensitive brain health combining:
• Brain clocks
• High-order interactions
• 🧠 Whole-brain modeling

👇👇👇
www.authorea.com/users/825533...

Reposted by Rubén Herzog

Arthur Le Coz @arthurlecoz.bsky.social · May 28

🚨New preprint out! 🚨

We investigated the EEG signatures of Idiopathic Hypersomnia (IH) with long sleep time using fine-grained EEG analysis in PSG recordings.

Here’s what we found 👇
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

(Illustration from nicolasdecat.com)

(1/12)

Reposted by Rubén Herzog

Borjan (Boki) Milinković @neuromorphicboki.bsky.social · May 14

🎉 FINALLY PUBLISHED! 🎉

We outline how to capture the #emergent dynamical structure in #biophysical neural models.

coauthored with a team dear to my heart; @thomasandrillon.bsky.social, @anilseth.bsky.social, Lionel Barnett, and Olivia Carter.

journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...

Reposted by Rubén Herzog

Simons Computational Neuroscience Imbizo @imbizo.bsky.social · May 1

Want to spend 3 weeks in South Africa for an unforgettable summer school experience? Imbizo 2026 (imbizo.africa) student applications are OPEN! Lectures, new friends, and Noordhoek beach await. Apply by July 1!

More info and apply: imbizo.africa/apply/

#Imbizo2026 #CompNeuro

Reposted by Rubén Herzog

Thomas Andrillon @thomasandrillon.bsky.social · Apr 24

With immense pleasure, here is our #TICS opinion paper on "mind blanking"!
@cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social

**Where is my mind?**
A neurocognitive investigation of mind blanking
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

With Jenny Windt, @antoinelutz.bsky.social and @ademertzi.bsky.social

ScienceDirect.com | Science, health and medical journals, full text articles and books.

authors.elsevier.com

Rubén Herzog @rherzoga.bsky.social · Apr 10

Registration is open until April 25. No abstract is needed, but we encourage to submit (even with preliminary work 😉)

More info at ifisc.uib-csic.es/en/events/co...

Registration HERE:
forms.gle/eQhWYyC3mjd6...

Hope to see you there ☀️

Embracing Complexity: Principled and Practical Approaches to Emergence

We are pleased to invite you to the Workshop titled

ifisc.uib-csic.es

Rubén Herzog @rherzoga.bsky.social · Apr 10

📢 Registration extension📢

Join us in the Embracing Complexity Workshop: Principled and Practical Approaches to Emergence!

The workshop is scheduled for June 23-27 2025 at the Institute for Cross-Disciplinary Physics and Complex Systems in Palma de Mallorca, Spain 🇪🇸

#emergence #complexity
👇👇👇

Embracing Complexity: Principled and Practical Approaches to Emergence

We are pleased to invite you to the Workshop titled

ifisc.uib-csic.es