Out now in @natmed.nature.com: we pooled self-reported pain data from 6M+ people in 118 countries across the lifespan. Most pain types climb steeply before 55, women report more pain, and late-life pain is highest in low-HDI regions. Led by @mattfillingim.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Global and regional reference curves for pain across the lifespan in 6.1 million individuals in 118 countries - Nature Medicine

Global age- and sex-specific reference curves for 11 pain sites, from 6.1 million people in 118 countries, found higher late-life pain in the lowest Human Development Index (HDI) countries and provide...

nature.com

Medial PFC interacts with the hippocampus to retrieve context-congruent memories.. but HOW?? was what started this. Simulating mPFC-HIP🧠, we designed an RNN🤖 that retrieves memories similar in context, on top of self-attention. It learns to retrieve like humans faster! arxiv.org/abs/2609.37791

A neural network that maintains and retrieves memories based on context

Every day, people continuously infer situational context and adjust the way they understand and remember the world. Context, signaled by the prefrontal cortex, is known to modulate working memory and ...

arxiv.org

42 new #fmri tutorials to accompany our new book Elements of fMRI, with @fMRIstats. Run code in both #python and #matlab in your browser to explore. 7 sections, from conceptual foundations to machine learning and AI. torwager.github.io/elements-of-...

New in Nat Mach Intell: interoception—monitoring and regulating internal bodily states—may be the missing ingredient for AI agents that stay autonomous and adaptive over long time horizons as environments change. doi.org/10.1038/s422... #AI #Neuroscience with @sungwoo.bsky.social and COMBINE lab

Life-inspired interoceptive artificial intelligence for autonomous and adaptive agents - Nature Machine Intelligence

Lee, Oh et al. propose interoception as a biologically inspired framework for building more autonomous and adaptive AI agents, learning from living organisms to build autonomous and adaptive intellige...

doi.org

Our paper is now out in @nathumbehav.nature.com! By periodically probing ongoing thoughts during resting-state fMRI, we found that these rich and idiosyncratic thoughts can be decoded from brain network dynamics and help explain links between functional brain architecture and everyday behavior.

Nature Human Behaviour@nathumbehav.nature.com · last mo.

Ongoing thoughts at rest reflect functional brain organization and behaviour

Really delighted to get copies of our new book, Elements of Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging. A labor of love over the past 10 years, along with @fmristats. Available for pre-order: mitpress.mit.edu/978026204504...

The Naturalistic Cognitive Computational Neuroscience Lab is launching at UT Austin and is looking for founding members at all levels, including lab manager, PhD students, and postdocs! #NeuroJobs We will study human brain🧠 and memory & attention, using fMRI and modeling. thesonglab.github.io

Pain biomarkers can't prove or disprove someone's pain, but that doesn't make them futile. My comment in Nat Neurosci argues for a pluralistic, bio-psycho-social approach: biomarkers as complementary channels, not replacements for patient voice. doi.org/10.1038/s415...

🎊New Lab Alert! I'll be starting at the 🧡University of Texas at Austin🧡 this August! More info to come. thesonglab.github.io I send my deep gratitude to my mentors, Monica @monicarosenb.bsky.social, YC @ycleong.bsky.social, ShiNung @shinung.bsky.social & Zach @zreagh.bsky.social, for everything.

Brain maps differ between people, but whether encoded information also differs depends on where you look. In some regions different layouts encode the same information, and representations converge like in artificial neural networks (ANNs). New preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

I always assumed that brain function had to line up with cytoarchitectonics. It turns out I was wrong. Human cortex, especially PFC, is tiled by chains of functional patches that subdivide and interlink architectonic areas into parallel processing streams. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Excited to share my first-author paper now out in @natcomms.nature.com (www.nature.com/articles/s41...)! Here, we asked whether verbal narratives about social interactions activate the same brain areas as audiovisual presentations, and whether they overlap with theory of mind (ToM). (1/11)

Very happy that this paper from our lab is now out in @pnas.org! What happens when the *same* person experiences the *same* information with a *different* interpretation? Nearly the whole 🧠—well, at least nearly all association cortex—changes how it represents that information! tinyurl.com/p8chj2j7

Attention fluctuates over time and across contexts—how is this reflected in the brain?🧠 Fitting a dynamical systems model to fMRI data, we show that the geometry of neural dynamics along the attractor landscape reflects changes in attention. Out in @natcomms.nature.com www.nature.com/articles/s41...

New paper in Nature Neuroscience! We developed personalized fMRI-based predictive models tracking ongoing spontaneous pain in chronic pain patients—trained on 6+ months of densely sampled data. A true team effort. Deeply grateful to our participants! doi.org/10.1038/s41593-026-02221-3

Patterns of brain-wide associations reflect socioeconomics https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2025.12.10.693206v1

The brain computes by processing information over time through interactions between connectivity and dynamics that are hard to model. Here we infer these interactions from data and find they better predict cognitive performance! www.nature.com/articles/s41... w/ @lindenmp.bsky.social

How does the brain🧠 make causal inferences and use memories to understand narratives🎬? We built an RNN🤖 with key-value episodic memory that learns causal relationships between events and retrieves memories like humans do! Preprint www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... w/ @qlu.bsky.social, Tan Nguyen &👇

A neural network with episodic memory learns causal relationships between narrative events

Humans reflect on past memories to make sense of an ongoing event. Past work has shown that people retrieve causally related past events during comprehension, but the exact process by which this causa...

biorxiv.org

Preprint⭐ Our attention changes over time and differs across contexts—which is reflected in the brain🧠 Fitting a dynamical systems model to fMRI data, we find that the geometry of neural dynamics along the attractor landscape reflects such changes in attention! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Geometry of neural dynamics along the cortical attractor landscape reflects changes in attention

The brain is a complex dynamical system whose activity reflects changes in internal states, such as attention. While prior work has shown that large-scale brain activity reflects attention, the mechan...

biorxiv.org

Precision Functional Mapping of Imagined and Experienced Pain https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.08.06.668906v1

Alert!!!! “An Action Networks Model for Pain” We propose a new model for chronic pain — and highlight two functionally connected cortical networks that could revolutionize how we treat it. 👉 thread below 🧵 osf.io/preprints/ps...

Big year for our lab at #OHBM2025! Thrilled to present an exciting mix of posters, talks, and lots of brainy fun 🧠🤓 Come check us out! We’d love to connect! @cognizelab.bsky.social @ohbmofficial.bsky.social #OHBM #OHBM2025 #Neuroimaging

Does your favorite song actually relieve pain? We looked into the brain to find out. 🧠🎶❓ Come check out Poster #0780 (Wed/Thur) at #OHBM2025! In collaboration with McGill University — Elise Desbarats & Prof. Mathieu Roy.

🧠📖 New paper out! How does the brain make sense of a story? Combining behavioral data, #fMRI, and #LLMs, our study explores how distinct hippocampal-cortical systems support the #encoding and #sequencing of #narrative events during ongoing comprehension. www.nature.com/articles/s42...

Hippocampal systems for event encoding and sequencing during ongoing narrative comprehension - Communications Biology

Distinct hippocampal-cortical systems support the encoding and sequencing of narrative events during ongoing comprehension, revealing how episodic memory integrates past and present information into c...

nature.com

Our new @NatureHumBehav paper shows why we need a holistic pain biomarker framework. ML on blood tests, brain/bone imaging & genetics predicts clinical diagnoses but falls short on subjective pain. Adding psychosocial (mood, sleep, stress) boosts both. shorturl.at/vxxeO

Biological markers and psychosocial factors predict chronic pain conditions - Nature Human Behaviour

Fillingim et al. show that biological and psychosocial factors jointly predict conditions associated with chronic pain.

shorturl.at

Dreaming of a dataset that tracks mood, sleep & activity to better understand affective instability (AI)…AND paired with advanced MRI? 🤯 Check out our new bioRxiv preprint for a 13–23 y/o community sample (n=10 and growing!) with multi-echo fMRI, EMA & actigraphy: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Hi, I’m very pleased to share my social memory project with my PI Won Mok Shim and amazing collaborators @myoo.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41... How does the hippocampus integrate multiple cognitive processes for memory encoding and retrieval?🧠 Here’s what we found⬇️:

Coordinated representations for naturalistic memory encoding and retrieval in hippocampal neural subspaces - Nature Communications

In this study, the authors show that novelty encoding aligns with memory formation in the hippocampus but not with memory retrieval, and that hippocampal components involved in each process reflect it...

nature.com

This paper is magical.

Science News@scinews.bsky.social · 2y ago

Three must read papers for PhD students. #scisky #PhD #science #research #academicsky 1. The importance of stupidity in scientific research Open Access journals.biologists.com/jcs/article/...

1/ 🧵 Free resources for scientists 💡 Covering research skills, careers, #SciComm, leadership, activism and more, everything in this thread appears on our Learning Resources page, with tips for researchers and academics at any career stage. #AcademicChatter #ECRChat https://buff.ly/4f8vIpk

Learning resources for scientists · eLife

A collections of articles that provide practical resources and guidance for researchers and academics

buff.ly

😄The final version of my first Ph.D. project is published in PLOS Biology. We showed the spatiotemporal profile of how the brain mediates cue-stimulus integration in pain, interpreting the findings in terms of cortical hierarchy from association to sensorimotor systems. plos.io/4fsaanu

Spatiotemporal integration of contextual and sensory information within the cortical hierarchy in human pain experience

When we experience pain, the sensory input is modulated by contextual information. This neuroimaging study shows how expectation and sensory input are integrated in the human brain during pain percept...

plos.io