Dave O'Connor

@daveocskys.bsky.social

Bumbling engineer/neuroscientist. Postdoc @ MSSM. Opinions are my own.

Very excited to share this one 🧠✨ Our work on longitudinal multimodal imaging in awake mice is officially out! We combined wide-field calcium imaging and fMRI to investigate brain-wide function across brain states and aging. A milestone long in the making. ~See related emojis 🐭🔬☕️🧲🧠

Imaging Neuroscience@imagingneurosci.bsky.social · 2w ago

New paper in Imaging Neuroscience by Francesca Mandino, Evelyn M.R. Lake, et al: Biphasic acclimation for simultaneous wide-field fluorescent Ca2+ imaging and fMRI of awake mice doi.org/10.1162/IMAG...

Substantial improvements in research interpretability & reproducibility are often hard. Sometimes the improvements are easy. (The underlying idea is older & easy, but convincing people is sometimes the hard part) I'm happy to have contributed to this easy and now widely accessible improvement.

Paul Taylor@afni-pt.bsky.social · last mo.

Have you ever felt like something was missing from your #fmri results? Have you been worried about potential reproducibility issues? Well, this new @natmethods.nature.com article with 40+ coauthors shows how the simple change to transparent thresholding helps both. Go Figure! rdcu.be/B4tikBETdQZa

A comparison of old and new thresholding approaches for fMRI data. The newer, transparent thresholding allows for interpreting context, more complete modeling, a reduction of biases and an increase in meaningful content. This all leads to more accurate interpretations and improved reproducibility evaluations.

Just to have something to do on my blog, I wrote out some advice that I find myself often giving to junior scholars and PhD standings re how to think about journals' prestige and reputation when deciding how to place one's publications. sootyempiric.blogspot.com/2026/08/jour...

Journal Prestige Advice for Graduate Students

I don't have time to blog much nowadays, but I want to keep this place active. One recurring use for the site is to outline to things th...

sootyempiric.blogspot.com

now that we know how the new season of Reacher is (excellent), a thread about why you should watch What If A Man Was Large, The Show, in the form of a Q&A

So glad to finally share work years in the making! What started with fMRI effect size benchmarks ended up showing that conventional study planning detects ~half of expected brain effects, suggesting more distributed processes than the lit shows (+ new methods for mass univ effect/power estimation)

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I wrote an perspectives piece relevant to the structural atlasing endeavors. Structural atlases are not the end of the story. This perspective calls for models that take into account the flexible functional organization within this fixed architecture. www.frontiersin.org/journals/neu...

Frontiers | Structure–function relationships across scales: implications for atlases

Neuroscience aims to understand how the structural and functional organization of the brain relates to behavior. Structural studies at the cellular level est...

frontiersin.org

This paper had a pretty shocking headline result (40% of voxels!), so I dug into it, and I think it is wrong. Essentially: they compare two noisy measures and find that about 40% of voxels have different sign between the two. I think this is just noise!

Eiko Fried@eikofried.bsky.social · 9mo ago

Would love to hear expert views on this paper. It appears to show that the operationalization of brain activity the field has relied on for 3 decades—the BOLD response—is not actually a sensible measure of brain activity. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Launched in 2023, Imaging Neuroscience is now firmly established, with full indexing (PubMed, etc.) and 700 papers to date. We're very happy to announce that we are able to reduce the APC to $1400. Huge thanks to all authors, reviewers, editorial team+board, and MIT Press.

Are interoception and mental health linked? Many assume so, with interoception even described as a psychiatric “p-factor.” But in our latest preprint, we were surprised to find little evidence for such a connection. www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1... 🧵 Thread with our reflections on the matter 👇

Interoceptive Ability is Unrelated to Mental Health Symptoms: Evidence From a Large Scale Multi-Domain Psychophysical Investigation

Interoception-the sensing and perception of the internal viscera-is widely cast as a transdiagnostic mechanism linking brain-body interaction to mental illness. Prevailing models propose that altered ...

medrxiv.org

This New Yorker piece about the Irish Famine has several paragraphs I found literally jaw-dropping (positive). This is a book review!! Good god!!!

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