Responses in near-threshold paradigms are not just sensory evidence. Expectation and history play a role in decisions. This paper models these two sources of bias using a hierarchical drift diffusion model. Cool!🥳 I wonder how long the history-related beta state persists after next stimulus arrives.

Carina Forster@carinafo.bsky.social · 2d ago

Two paths to bias! We used neurally-informed drift diffusion models to pull apart explicit vs. implicit perceptual bias and found that pre-stimulus beta power mediates how the last choice biases the next, but only in stable probability environments, now published: 🔗 link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Two paths to bias! We used neurally-informed drift diffusion models to pull apart explicit vs. implicit perceptual bias and found that pre-stimulus beta power mediates how the last choice biases the next, but only in stable probability environments, now published: 🔗 link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Two Paths to Bias: Distinct Influences of Stimulus Probability and Previous Choice on Drift Diffusion Parameters - Computational Brain & Behavior

Perceptual decisions are shaped by prior information and choice history, yet their distinct computational implementations remain unclear. Here, we jointly model these sources of bias using hierarchica...

link.springer.com

#brainrhymes With eye moves and blinks Brain with world interacts, And the thoughts that it thinks Are in eye motor acts. Blinks, saccades, or slow rolls, Or fast shifts of the gaze, All those acts can expose Underlying brain states.

Pyramidal neurons in layer V of visual cortex have apical dendrite that extends to layer I. This study found that cutting it selectively affects neurons preferring large stimuli. The authors propose that L5 neurons receive excitatory input from a larger visual region via the apical dendrite. Cool!🤩

Anyi Liu@anyiliu.bsky.social · last wk.

Pyramidal cells in the cortex send a long apical dendrite to layer 1. What is its role? What happens when it's gone? ✂️ A causal spatial role for apical dendrites in the cortex Out today with @kenneth-harris.bsky.social, @carandinilab.net and @fedrossi.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

from: theconversation.com/an-ai-lab-sa... #neuroscience #neuroskyence #consci #philsci 🧪

An AI lab says chatbots have what may be a key feature of consciousness. Are they right? And what now?

Anthropic says there is something lurking inside Claude that looks a lot like the ‘global workspace’ one influential theory of consciousness depends on.

theconversation.com

Lower alpha and upper alpha ERD during visual processing have distinct 1) relations to laminar BOLD signal and 2) engagement with features of a stimulus. Fascinating!🤩 I wonder about the relation between laminar BOLD and pre-stimulus alpha power, and whether it also relates to stimulus features.

CoPhy team@cophy.bsky.social · last wk.

Our revised eLife paper on laminar alpha/gamma activity (fMRI-EEG) is out! 🎉 Congratulations to Tommy Clausner and René Scheeringa for their incredible work elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre...

I read another book. "Neuronal Noise" by M. Rudolph-Lilith and A. Destexhe. It's fairly technical but really interesting🥰. Read my summary (also somewhat technical) here www.alinastudenova.com/home/blog/bo...

Alina Studenova - neuronal-noise

As a scientist, I regularly deal with problems regarding signal-to-noise ratio. The signal that I’m interested in is always accompanied by noise, and depending on the signal of interest, the contribut...

alinastudenova.com

Blinks and saccades have both onsets and offsets. Typical saccade duration is ~45 ms; blink duration is ~245 ms. Using mobile EEG and eye-tracking, this study found that ERPs are different for onset and offset. Cool!👏 Now I know that in my data, using a VEOG electrode, I see a blink-onset ERP.

bioRxiv Neuroscience@biorxiv-neursci.bsky.social · 2w ago

Exploring Neural Signatures of Self-Initiated Saccadic and Blink Events in the Real World https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.07.13.737665v1

1. We—@eduede.bsky.social, @mjcrockett.bsky.social, Kevin Gross, and I—have a new preprint on the arXiv today, based on ideas that emerged during an @sfiscience.bsky.social workshop in November 2024: The unintended consequences of large language models as a labor-augmenting technology in science.

The unintended consequences of large language models as a labor-augmenting technology in science

As a labor-augmenting technology, large language models (LLMs) have the potential to accelerate scientific activity across the research pipeline. But even if LLMs perform on par with human experts at ...

arxiv.org

Are you a sleep researcher? Then we're interested in your opinion on preregistrations! Help advance the field by filling out this short (5-minute) survey redcap.link/1zg4tezm (Any career stage, doesn't matter if you've preregistered before or not, we need you. Please share!)

Baseline pupil size ↑↑ baseline LC activity Baseline-subtracted evoked pupil response ↑↑ baseline-subtracted evoked LC response Baseline LC activity ↑↓ evoked LC activity Then: baseline-subtracted evoked pupil responses ↑↓ baseline LC activity? No! This paper tested and failed to find. Nice study!👏

bioRxiv Neuroscience@biorxiv-neursci.bsky.social · 2w ago

Limitations of pupil diameter as a proxy for modes of locus coeruleus activity https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.07.14.738598v1

V. helpful information! Recently, I declined a review of the manuscript of which I had a suspicion. It felt unfair to invest my time when the authors decided not to invest theirs.

Ben Williamson@benpatrickwill.bsky.social · 3w ago

The anatomy of an AI-supported academic article is becoming more apparent. I desk reviewed ~70 manuscripts this week for our journal. Reckon 20ish had significant AI assistance. On top of hundreds of others recently I'm starting to see patterns. Are other editors are seeing the same or similar? 1/

I WISH this were true. We increasingly demand rapid progress, steady output and cookie cutter research plans. Students now expect this. Countries with long PhD programs can protect exploration and intellectual growth. Not the UK. And from what I can tell, other countries are moving in our direction.

Itai Yanai@itaiyanai.bsky.social · 3w ago

The PhD is the best point in time to try very dangerous ideas or to try things that don't work. – @odedrechavi.bsky.social, on the Night Science Podcast

So I took this blink thing seriously and decided to check a somatosensory stimulation dataset. And look, people do blink more before undetected trials. Oddly, they also blink more right after the stimulus that was felt. After that, they blink again at 2 s because of the prompt. Cool!🤩 #brainmovies

I have been wondering for a while: How do I get additional cognitive/behavioral variables without additional effort? This paper addresses my demand. Spontaneous blinks! The paper shows that spontaneous blinks correlate with attention and memory performance. Nice!👏 I record EOG signals anyway.

Şahcan Özdemir@sahcan.bsky.social · 3w ago

Preprint alert! 🚀 Spontaneous eye blinks are often treated as EEG artefacts. We show they can serve as temporal markers of internal attention, aligning with moments of attentional focusing in working memory. Check it out:

New paper in Science Advances! We show that congenital blindness reduces myelination in the human visual cortex, challenging the long-standing idea that thicker visual cortex in blind people mainly reflects disrupted pruning. (1/4) doi.org/10.1126/scia...

Congenital blindness reduces myelination in human visual cortex

Altered myelin and microstructure in congenital blindness illuminate how sensory experience guides human brain development.

doi.org

#brainrhymes Everybody everyday Sleep and eat, and on the way, But also, whether want or not, they play. There are a lot of daily games, For some, to open counter race, For some, to win an argument or other chase.

Interventions in LLMs are aimed at steering the model's responses in a certain way. This paper proposes an intervention method that changes the behavior of an LLM by modifying only about 0.01% of its neurons. Nice!👏 Of course, only open-source (open-weights) LLMs were investigated.

Explainable AI Berlin@xai-berlin.bsky.social · 4w ago

🚨 New preprint alert! Distributed Sparse Interventions (DSI), a method to steer LLM behavior by intervening on as few as 8-64 neurons (as little as 0.01% of a model!), instead of whole layers or directions in activation space. 🔗 arxiv.org/abs/2607.07128

To be fair, Anthropic didn't say Claude is conscious. But I'm missing on the point why the found J-space is a global workspace and not just massive working memory?

Stanislas Dehaene@standehaene.bsky.social · last mo.

The global neuronal workspace (GNW) is currently the best documented neuroscience mechanism by which conscious processing arises in the human brain — and now Anthropic researchers have discovered a similar workspace inside their large language model ! www.anthropic.com/research/glo...

In near-threshold research, we determine individual detection threshold by testing a range of stimulus intensities and fitting a sigmoid (psychometric curve). Here, I simulated effect of the slope: it affects trial-by-trial consistency in detection and reliability of initial estimation. #brainmovies

Some neurons fire during certain phases of LFP oscillations, while some fire more when LFP oscillates at certain frequencies. V. cool!🤩 I appreciated the discussion about causality: do oscillations in LFP cause increased spiking, or does the change in spiking cause changes in the spectrum of LFP?

PLOS Biology@plosbiology.org · last mo.

This Primer explores a @plosbiology.org study showing that #neuronal firing is selectively tuned to oscillatory frequency, complementary to phase tuning, suggesting an additional dimension in how #brain rhythms may organize neural activity 🧪 Paper: plos.io/44odgVM Primer: plos.io/4eJ6bUI

📘 The OHBM 2026 Abstract Book is now available! Relive the science of #OHBM2026 by exploring the full collection of abstracts presented at this year’s Annual Meeting in Bordeaux. 🔗Access the Abstract Book here: humanbrainmapping.org/aperture-neu...

Diffusion-weighted MRI across multiple time points. Mean diffusivity was found to change in real time during learning. Nice!👏 But how much of this is microstructural remodeling? It's all water movement, and recently I learned that glymphatic-related processes may contribute to diffusion MRI signal.

bioRxiv Neuroscience@biorxiv-neursci.bsky.social · last mo.

Learning sculpts microstructure in real time: evidence from dense temporal sampling of diffusion MRI https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.06.24.734293v1

My search for the theory of consciousness with the fewest problems led me to the higher-order thought (HOT) theory. I read the book “Consciousness: Essays from a Higher-Order Perspective” by Peter Carruthers. Nope, search will continue. Read my opinion here www.alinastudenova.com/home/blog/bo...

Alina Studenova - consciousness-essays-from-a-higher-order-perspective

In a recent thread on BlueSky, a question was posed: “Do we experience the dreams as they unfold or do we only experience them as we remember?” Undoubtedly, the same question can be asked of our awake...

alinastudenova.com

OHBM 2026 Photo Recap 📸 Thank you to every attendee, presenter, volunteer, exhibitor, sponsor, and partner who made this year's Annual Meeting such a success. Take a look back at some of our favorite moments and we'll see you in Toronto for #OHBM2027! #OHBM2026 #Neuroimaging #BrainResearch

It was my first #OHBM2026, certainly not the last😍😍😍 Great section of talks, amazing posters, lovely people! Thanks a lot to the organizers!

Today's keynote at #OHBM2026 is Dr. Vitória Piai about language. Language is not my jam, but Dr. Piai addressed several common issues that I was able to relate.☺️ For instance, the abstraction problem: "no two instances of 'the same' biological mechanism are physically identical".🤔

A career advice at #OHBM2026 from Dr. Vince Calhoun. It seems to me that it is not just academy career advice but in general life advice.👍 Among other points: - paper is a progress report not a final monument - you are more than your last result - luck favors the prepared

Highlight of today at #OHBM2026 is symposium on voluntary movements and sense of agency, honoring Mark Hallett's work. In particular, the focus is on disorders of movement, such as functional neurological disorders, distonia and Parkinson’s disease tremor.

Highlight of today at #OHBM2026 is symposium on voluntary movements and sense of agency, honoring Mark Hallett's work. In particular, the focus is on disorders of movement, such as functional neurological disorders, distonia and Parkinson’s disease tremor.