Same sound, different perception: Do expectations change what you hear?👂🧠 We paired faces w topics and played the same ambiguous speech w different faces. The brain sharpened sensory signals toward predictions and showed gated prediction errors at higher levels. Read @plosbiology.org. Blueprint👇

Sensory sharpening and semantic prediction errors unify competing models of predictive processing in human speech comprehension

Speech comprehension relies on predictive mechanisms, but models disagree on whether the brain prioritizes expected or unexpected information. This study shows that sharpening of sensory representatio...

dx.plos.org

In the #cochlear nucleus, the size of inputs from #auditory #nerve fibers is variable. This study shows that variable input strength enhances rate coding at the expense of temporal precision, potentially creating diverse information streams for #sensory encoding @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/3YCaLMU

It's been great working with the @your.neighborhoodscientist.org team on this article! YNS aim to improve public understanding of science, science policy and scientists, by fostering community conversations. If you can, help them out with a donation! neighborhoodscientist.org/donate.html

Your Neighborhood Scientist@your.neighborhoodscientist.org · 7mo ago

This week, our neighborhood scientist is Dr. Adam Hockley @adhockley.bsky.social ! In his article, he details the road from basic science to clinical outcomes–and why sometimes it’s not quite as linear as you might think. Read his piece below: neighborhoodscientist.org/posts/2026/o...

if you want a long read that involves udders, a hot air balloon, and some extremely dubious data on egg prices, the story I’ve been working on for the last few months where I tried to single-handedly take on every government function myself is now online! www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

I Tried to Be the Government. It Did Not Go Well.

My five-month quest to monitor the weather, track inflation, and inspect milk for harmful microorganisms

theatlantic.com

Excited to share our preprint! We show that primary visual cortex is modulated by global predictability. This effect depended on higher level brain region (area ACa), and better explained classic oddball paradigms better than “local” context effects (i.e., recent stimulus history). 1/3

bioRxiv Neuroscience@biorxiv-neursci.bsky.social · 7mo ago

Global context rapidly shapes sensory responses in V1 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.01.07.698143v1

Our paper is out now in J Neuroscience (currently in "accepted paper" form). We directly record single neurons in human insula, as well as primary auditory cortex, while participants passively listen to simple sounds. @sfnjournals.bsky.social www.jneurosci.org/content/earl... (1/5) 🧠📈🧵👇

The human insula reimagined: Single neurons respond to simple sounds during passive listening

The insula is critical for integrating sensory information from the body with that arising from the environment. Although previous studies suggested that posterior insula is sensitive to sounds, these...

jneurosci.org

Our new preprint is out! We show that deviance detection in auditory cortex conveys the theorised comparison of internal prediction to sensory input. Our data confirm this key assumtion that links theoretical models of sensory processing to experimental data. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Cortical deviance detection represents a canonical difference signal

Context modulates neural processing of sensory stimuli. Neural responses are suppressed to stimuli that are typical in their context and augmented to stimuli that deviate from their context. The latte...

biorxiv.org

My nonprofit @your.neighborhoodscientist.org is looking for scientists to share their stories with us in 2026! Is your New Year's resolution to communicate & interface more with your community as a scientist? Send us a pitch at audrey@neighborhoodscientist.org ! 🧪🧠🇺🇸

Just published my review of neuroscience in 2025, on The Spike. The 10th of these, would you believe? This year we have foundation models, breakthroughs in using light to understand the brain, a gene therapy, and more Enjoy! medium.com/the-spike/20...

2025: A Review of the Year in Neuroscience

Enlightening the brain

medium.com

Does predictive coding work in SPACE or in TIME? Most neuroscientists assume TIME, i.e. neurons predict their future sensory inputs. We show that in visual cortex predictive coding actually works across SPACE, just like the original Rao+Ballard theory #neuroscience www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/...

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...

"Silent neurons individually carry little information... however, we observed that combining the silence of one neuron with temporal firing patterns or firing rate of the other neuron in a pair led to comparable synergy to combining the spiking activity of both neurons" doi.org/10.1002/advs...

Neural Response Reliability as a Marker of the Transition of Neural Codes along Auditory Pathways

Decoding sound from neural activity in mice reveals a striking shift in how the brain encodes sound: from precise but redundant timing codes in early auditory areas to efficient, synergistic rate-bas....

doi.org

Early unilateral auditory deprivation can cause lasting spatial #hearing deficits. @anbuhlk.bsky.social &co show that unilateral #HearingLoss during development (but not adult-onset) impairs binaural #brainstem function & spatial hearing acuity in guinea pigs @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/46njw1P

Sad day for peope who still believe brain areas are the primary organizational units of function in the brain. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A brain-wide map of neural activity during complex behaviour - Nature

The International Brain Laboratory presents a brain-wide electrophysiological map obtained from pooling data from 12 laboratories that performed the same standardized perceptual decision-making task i...

nature.com

music lessons don't make kids smarter, but many people have assumed that music lessons would have near-transfer effects, e.g. improving aspects of auditory perception big new study led by Andrew Oxenham says "nope". music lessons make kids better at music & that's good enough reason to do 'em !

Large-scale multi-site study shows no association between musical training and early auditory neural sound encoding - Nature Communications

Widely cited studies have claimed that musical training is associated with enhanced neural encoding for sound at early stages of the auditory system. Results from this large-scale multisite study do n...

nature.com

First lab outing since the move to NYC.... feeling so lucky to have such a talented and fun group! with Lital Rachmany, @adhockley.bsky.social, me, Molly Hornick, Fumiyasu Imai, and @cgalli-io.bsky.social

Are predictions computed hierarchically, or can they be computed locally? Check out our paper! Congrats, Toshitake Asabuki and @colleenjg.bsky.social ! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

#ICYMI Areas of the brain that help a person differentiate between what is real and what is imaginary have been uncovered in a new study led by @uclpals.bsky.social‬ and @uclqsion.bsky.social‬ researchers.

Brain mechanisms that distinguish imagination from reality discovered

Areas of the brain that help a person differentiate between what is real and what is imaginary have been uncovered in a new study led by UCL researchers.

buff.ly

📣New study in Neuron, featuring modeling insights: "Cell-Specific Dendritic Integration in Cortical GABAergic Interneurons"! It reveals PV & SST interneurons compute differently. This highlights how distinct dendrites enable specialized brain computations! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Distinct dendritic integration strategies control dynamics of inhibition in the neocortex

Dendrites critically influence single-neuron computations, but their role in neocortical GABAergic interneurons (INs) remains poorly understood. We fo…

sciencedirect.com

Here's our new #preprint on triggering of cortical Up states by deviants in the auditory oddball paradigm. Up states are reliably evoked by deviants under anesthesia, explaining the long-latency deviant responses seen in previous studies. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Auditory deviants evoke cortical state changes under anesthesia

Context-dependent sensory processing within the predictive coding framework relies on detecting mismatches between incoming stimuli and internal predictive models. Sensory deviants elicit prediction e...

biorxiv.org

🚀 We are excited to share that bombcell is now available in Python! 🐍 Automatically sort your units into good/MUA/noise/non-somatic using quality metrics and interpretable & adjustable classification thresholds. pip install and play around with our toy dataset: 🔗 github.com/Julie-Fabre/...

GitHub - Julie-Fabre/bombcell: Automated quality control, curation and neuron classification of spike-sorted electrophysiology data

Automated quality control, curation and neuron classification of spike-sorted electrophysiology data - Julie-Fabre/bombcell

github.com

A great catch up today in the Jono's @ Nottingham 🏰

My final day at the @incyl.bsky.social today! I've met so many amazing people here and I'll miss everyone so much 🩵 next step is back to UK for a month of hiking, cycling and camping, then heading to @jordanhamm.bsky.social lab soon! 🗽

Excited to share my PhD paper! In it, we use targeted 2-photon optogenetic stimulation to determine how V1 activity is read-out in a detection task. We found that network influence, not visual coding properties, predicted the impact of ensembles on behavior - contradicting our expectations (1/5).

Neuron@cp-neuron.bsky.social · last yr.

Online now:

1/ Excited to share our new paper just out in Scientific Reports! 🧠🎧 Using intracranial EEG, we show how the human brain automatically encodes patterns in random sounds– without attention or explicit awareness. 🔗 doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Direct brain recordings reveal implicit encoding of structure in random auditory streams - Scientific Reports

Scientific Reports - Direct brain recordings reveal implicit encoding of structure in random auditory streams

doi.org

Exciting work showing an objective test for tinnitus! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Objective autonomic signatures of tinnitus and sound sensitivity disorders

Emotionally evocative sounds elicit pupil dilations and facial movements that index the severity of common hearing disorders.

science.org

How does our brain predict the future? Our review of predictive processing + research program is now on arXiv arxiv.org/abs/2504.09614 50+ neuroscientists distributed across the world worked together to create this unique community project.

Does your research involve comparing experimental conditions? Then our latest publication is for you: We developed generalized contrastive PCA (gcPCA), a tool for comparing high-dimensional datasets. 🧠📊 doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1012747 This tool was born out of necessity, here is the story. 🧵 1/

New preprint with systematic measurements of feature tuning in the mouse auditory system made with robust representation similarity analysis. Validates a range of earlier observations and generalizes beyond that. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Feature-dependent decorrelation of sound representations across the auditory pathway

Early studies on orientation selectivity in the visual cortex have suggested that sensory systems generate new feature representations at specific processing stages. Many observations challenge this v...

biorxiv.org

Thrilled to present our paper out today in @cp-cellreports.bsky.social We asked how prediction errors are generated in the auditory cortex during the oddball paradigm. When blocking top-down prediction signals from mPFC, we saw reduced prediction errors in A1. doi.org/10.1016/j.ce...

Top-down prediction signals from the medial prefrontal cortex govern auditory cortex prediction errors

Hockley et al. investigate how the brain processes auditory stimuli based on predictability. The results show that predictions in the medial prefrontal cortex govern sensory information flow and modul...

cell.com