back in the MEG after a break, doing the very last measurements. 🌟 surrounded by retrofuturistic objects, e.g., the MEG phantom: in the usual physics fashion, the human head is approximated by a water-filled sphere. electric fields can be generated inside the sphere to test source localization.

old school cool figure: Georgopoulous et al. (1988), example of population coding of movement direction. (or a retro space simulator? 🙃)

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ ⬆ brain rhythms ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ Subscribe: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:yy2mduwa64cqkfbwu7xc65w4/feed/aaap7fylawwqy

sometimes I am asked which is the best book/resource for starting out with EEG/MEG. I think my pick would be this one! 'MEG-EEG primer' academic.oup.com/book/46874 beautiful illustrations throughout & the side-by-side discussion of EEG & MEG makes a lot of sense.

weekend project: built an LED action potential 💡

Friday @ MEG lab diary entry: new high score in this head position deviation game, <0.8mm ➡️ a good day! 🟢🌟🟢

very useful to see work in this direction, trying to figure out the cellular contributions to 1/f-activity. at the moment, it's sometimes frustrating to read studies in the vein of: 'we found differences in this 1 number and it means this 1 thing', there's not enough evidence for that. 🙃

Randolph Helfrich@randolph-helfrich.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Does aperiodic activity index neural excitability? Single-unit and LFP recordings during optogenetic interneuron suppression show that aperiodic activity scales with firing, but it depends on context and oscillatory power. New preprint with @juliaveit.bsky.social. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

intracranial EEG artifact: if an electrode is located over a blood vessel, you can occasionally see some nice rhythms. sadly, these are not neural rhythms, but reflect the pulsation of the blood vessel, which moves the electrode around slightly. can also be seen in non-invasive EEG occasionally.

we have a themed bathroom on the ground floor of the institute 🙂 (designed by our fantastic graphic designer Claudia Kernberger)

Really happy for my awesome colleague Jiajie Zou! He is now leaving us for a postdoc at the MPI for Biological Cybernetics. Tübingen folks, please give him a warm welcome, aka invites for talks and such. 🙂

New paper that merits a read (Im totally unbiased...not). Simple, straightforward, impactful message. Prediction a la LLM is nice. Constituent-constrained prediction is nicer. @jiajiezou.bsky.social and Nai Ding show brain, behavioral, MEG, ECoG data. www.nature.com/articles/s41... #neuroskyence

Mon-Thu: reformat figure legends for the 17th time and other equally exciting tasks, mild questioning of life choices. Friday!: look at the brain in real time! 🤩🙂

the median number of authors on a research paper who are familiar with the underlying code: 1 it generally feels like that number will decrease even further, honestly a quite scary development. 😕⬇️

Anna-Lena Eckert@eckertal.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Sadly, applications to the Advanced Python summer school have dropped significantly over the past 2 years. Plus, there'll be no external funding for the 1st time in *17 years*. Likely all because of GenAI - but programming skills still matter🔥 Deadline May 3, please help by sharing: aspp.school

"delta" activity across species 🙃

PLOS Biology@plosbiology.org · 4mo ago

Do animals have a favored tempo for communicating with each other? This study reveals a hotspot of 0.5-4 Hz for #communication across distinct species & modalities, hypothesizing that this may driven by biophysical commonalities of the receivers' #neurons @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/4ccWuhh

more MEG artefacts: the tram runs in ~200 meter distance from the MEG lab here. even though the MEG sensors are shielded by a few tons of metal, they still pick up the railway traction power signal (at 16.67 Hz in Germany), a demo of their high sensitivity.

my face when reviewing a paper and the authors have descended into the supplementary material of one of my papers for method specifics. 🌟

a man with a mustache is saying `` i 'm really proud of you ''

ALT: a man with a mustache is saying `` i 'm really proud of you ''

media.tenor.com

BIDS is definitely one of the absolute best things that happened to human neuroscience in the last years! extremely cool to see more and more expansions.

Matthias Nau@matthiasnau.bsky.social · 4mo ago

#BIDS has been extended to #EyeTracking data! There is now a standard for organizing and sharing eye tracking, covering gaze position, pupil size, meta data, messages, and more. Great news for #OpenScience! 🎉 Martin Szinte et al: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

a while ago, I made this feed for neuroscience/cognitive science summer schools. after some tuning, it generally manages to find cool events. 🙂 bsky.app/profile/did:...

artefacts in MEG: here, the participant forgot to remove a belt with a metal buckle. the buckle moves when breathing, introducing low frequency artefacts. taking off the belt solves resolves this. 🙂

I honestly didn't expect it, but all MEG experiments after the winter break went super smoothly so far. spending every Friday looking at traces & 90s-style interfaces. 🙂

George Opie did the actual hard work on this, but I am happy to have contributed with some opinions from my oscillation armchair. 🙂〰️ the broader question is whether macroscale electrophysiological signals allow inference about underlying physiology & I am definitely optimistic about that.

Imaging Neuroscience@imagingneurosci.bsky.social · 5mo ago

New paper in Imaging Neuroscience by George M. Opie, Ulf Ziemann, et al: Diazepam alters the shape of alpha oscillations recorded from human cortex using EEG doi.org/10.1162/IMAG...

I am interested in network effects in social media & post activity related to recent conferences may be an indicator of this. therefore, I counted bluesky vs. X/twitter posts mentioning #cosyne2026 hashtags, with more bluesky posts this time around.

time-frequency representation of human electrocorticography data. 🌊 one axis shows frequency, the other time. the high peaks correspond to a prominent alpha rhythm at 10 Hz which appears and subsides during the experiment.

booked the MEG again to do some final data collection after winter break, always very fun to be there. 🙂 (also: my last MEG experiment ever? 🥲) & love our pretty recruitment poster (designed by Claudia Kernberger)

always very cool to see developmental transitions! reminds me of the large-scale burst type signals of human preterm babies; which become decorrelated after a while. interesting to see this general type of dynamics in young rats. 🙂

Matteo Guardamagna@matteoguardamagna.bsky.social · 5mo ago

4/7 This emergence is abrupt. Between P9 and P11, network activity transitions from synchronized bursts to desynchronized dynamics, driven by a pronounced increase in inhibitory connectivity.

woodcut illustration of the brain. 🧶 artist: Aoki Shukuya book: Kaishi Hen, anatomical atlas published in Kyoto in 1772.

I learned a lot from Christoph & Paolo when doing TMS-EEG experiments back then. all this methods knowledge now condensed here! 🌟 thanks to TMS-EEG, I feel that phase effects for sensorimotor mu-rhythms are now nicely established. (in contrast to visual alpha, which imho still needs work)

CIMeC_UniTrento@cimecunitrento.bsky.social · 5mo ago

1/3 📄🧠 New paper out in Nature Protocols! Featuring Prof. @paolobelardinelli.bsky.social (CIMeC, UniTrento) with Christoph Zrenner & Ulf Ziemann: “Oscillatory brain state-dependent stimulation with TMS combined with EEG”.

brain prize recipients over the years. I remembered that I made this plot last year for a bias watch project (yes, because of that 2013–2018 period 🙃). the prize for this year will be announced later this afternoon, let's see. 🔮

oscillatory bursts in unexpected places 🙃 (even with harmonics!)

Nature@nature.com · 5mo ago

When shoes slide across a floor, wave-like deformations of the sole can generate squeaking go.nature.com/4saI6Lp

beautiful plots! & structural changes clearly have implications for the strong changes in electrophysiological activity across development. one aspect that I find tricky: in the HBN dataset, ~70% of participants have a neurodevelopmental disorder, which is not discussed here.

Audrey Luo@audreycluo.bsky.social · 5mo ago

We think of white matter as the highways of the brain. But when we followed development along those highways, we were surprised. The journey is more complex than we thought. My final PhD paper, “Two Axes of White Matter Development”, is now out in @natcomms.nature.com! 🛣️🧠✨ 🔗 bit.ly/wm2axes

wow! @ data analysis archaeology I want to see the LFP for this. 🙃

DANDI Archive@dandiarchive.org · 5mo ago

Mission: record hippocampal place cells in zero gravity Crew: 3 rats with electrode arrays Vehicle: Space Shuttle Columbia Status: data now publicly available on DANDI, 28 years later The ratstronauts' mission is finally complete. 🐀🚀 h/t NASA about.dandiarchive.org/blog/2026/02...