🧠 New opportunity for a combined PhD+Graduate Teaching Assistant position, see especially @tomdonoghue.bsky.social's and mine project on spectral parameterization models across cognitive contexts: www.jobs.manchester.ac.uk/Job/JobDetai...

Graduate Teaching Assistant:Oxford Road

jobs.manchester.ac.uk

Update: I just got into NYC for a visit back here, and jokes on me I guess, as I would now gladly take the Manchester level of smokey-air over the current version of the North East's version...

Tom Donoghue@tomdonoghue.bsky.social · 3w ago

The last three places I've lived (San Diego, New York City, and now Manchester) have all had days that go "Surprise! What looked like a bit of cloud is actually wildfire smoke!", and hot take perhaps (literally, if not figuratively), but I am not a fan. Or I need a fan. With a filter. Not that kind.

The last three places I've lived (San Diego, New York City, and now Manchester) have all had days that go "Surprise! What looked like a bit of cloud is actually wildfire smoke!", and hot take perhaps (literally, if not figuratively), but I am not a fan. Or I need a fan. With a filter. Not that kind.

Our paper "Neural timescales from a computational perspective" is finally out in @natneuro.nature.com: www.nature.com/articles/s41... We discuss how computational models and methods can distill empirical observations on neural timescales into quantitative, testable theories of brain computation.

Neural timescales from a computational perspective - Nature Neuroscience

This review integrates computational approaches to provide a unified view on how data analysis methods, biophysical mechanistic models and machine learning approaches can help to uncover the origins a...

nature.com

I’ve officially resigned as Associate Editor for Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience. It used to be a reputable journal, but became a case study in how forced automation destroys academic integrity. 👇

In 2011, my interests in cognitive neuroscience converged on one stubborn intuition: it made no sense that how the brain learns and how it pays attention should be two fundamentally different processes.

Ignacio Saez, PhD@ignaciosaezphd.bsky.social · 2mo ago

How does your brain filter out the noise and focus enough to learn efficiently? In our newest preprint, we use intracranial recordings + computational modeling to explore how selective attention shapes learning and state representations in the human brain 🧠 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 1/🧵

Fun discovery from the old EEG literature - the first proposal to call slow waves "delta" was a suggestion to use this name as a useful brief description "until their true nature be discovered" (in 1936). Oops - guess we're still working that one, new name coming any day now 😅

Delighted to share our new publication in @apertureohbm.bsky.social - the "Human Single-Neuron Pipeline" for managing human single-neuron research projects! It's an open-source resource of new & existing tools & resources curated for HSN projects: hsnpipeline.github.io

Aperture Neuro@apertureohbm.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Donoghue et al. introduce the Human Single-Neuron Pipeline, an open source processing pipeline for collecting and analyzing human single-neuron data: doi.org/10.52294/001... @ohbmossig.bsky.social @ohbmofficial.bsky.social #OpenDatasets #SpecialIssues

In early observations of REM sleep in EEG they thought the change in pattern was a technical issue and "fixed it" by taping the amplifier, waking the person up! Such an interesting anecdote of how wild it must of been to get started with EEG, with so little prior knowledge / expectations!

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...

TIL that Gibbs & Grass, who first applied Fourier transforms to EEG recordings, then spent several years examining over 1700 EEG recordings (!!) and concluded that frequency analyses are no good for clinical recordings 😅 Their paper on this is worth a read: www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1...

🧵 New preprint led by @bingbrunton.bsky.social, @elliottabe.bsky.social, @lawrencehu.bsky.social We gave a worm brain control of a fly body and it walked What did we learn? Nothing, other than deep reinforcement learning is effective We call it the digital sphinx www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Three years into the AI era, educators say they face a major crisis. Bosses and clients replacing tutoring jobs with AI. Replacing *athletic coaching* with AI. Many students now cannot grasp why they would *not* use AI for schoolwork. And worse. The 5th installment of AI Killed My Job—educators:

"If AI is writing the work and AI is reading the work, do we even need to be there at all?" Education workers reveal a growing crisis on campus and off

AI Killed My Job: Educators.

bloodinthemachine.com

📚 Reading Women in Cognitive Science 📚 “Recommendations for readings are welcome, especially in the history of cognitive science (prior to 1950s, and the older the better).” irisvanrooijcogsci.com/2026/02/15/%...

📚 Reading Women in Cognitive Science 📚

Occasionally, I make threads on social media about papers and books that I read. It helps me focus and process deeper when I share highlights and thoughts with others. In this blogpost, I compile a…

irisvanrooijcogsci.com

“Collection of Handwritten Letters from Children in Detention Center” sounds like an exhibit in the Holocaust Museum.

ProPublica@propublica.org · 6mo ago

1/ ProPublica collected handwritten letters in mid-January from children held at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center, the same facility where 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos was taken. Hundreds of kids are still detained. We’ll let the children’s words speak for themselves. 🧵

If I know you use this I will literally never cite your work again, because there is literally no way to trust it or you

Carl T. Bergstrom@carlbergstrom.com · 6mo ago

“The idea is to put ChatGPT front and center inside software that scientists use to write up their work in much the same way that chatbots are now embedded into popular programming editors. It’s vibe coding, but for science.”

Ripple oscillations are central for memory and sleep. But ripple detection in humans remains challenging. Here we introduce a simulation approach in @natcomms.nature.com as common ripple detectors mainly pick up 1/f noise and not genuine oscillations 👇 www.nature.com/articles/s41... #neuroskyence

Aperiodic 1/f noise drives ripple activity in humans - Nature Communications

How aperiodic 1/f noise drives ripple activity in human brain and impacts on ripple detections is not fully understood. Here authors show that ripple detections should be driven by the 1/f noise, whic...

nature.com

Had a blast hosting @tomdonoghue.bsky.social at our lab in Santiago. We went full aperiodic mode, with @gnboncompte.bsky.social . Very cool collab ideas!! Thanks Tom!!

Aperiodic activity reflects pathological waveforms in epilepsy (and not necessarily hyper-excitability or altered E/I-balance). The 1/f slope goes up *or* down as function of waveforms during seizures. New work by Laura Heidiri and Frank van Schalkwijk from the lab: www.jneurosci.org/content/45/5...

Aperiodic Activity Reflects Pathologic Waveform Shapes in Focal Epilepsy

Epilepsy constitutes a clinically manifest excitability disorder that is characterized by aberrant electrophysiological activity in the electroencephalogram (EEG). The correct identification of the se...

jneurosci.org

Another new paper from the lab: Predictive theories like the SR imply that navigators who navigate differently should have cognitive maps which differ in predictable ways. Here we show that this holds in mouse hippocampal CA1. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Environmental representations in mouse hippocampal CA1 reflect the predictive structure of navigation

Predictive theories of cognitive mapping propose that these representations encode the predictive relationships among contents as experienced by the n…

sciencedirect.com

Finally got the job ad—looking for 2 PhD students to start spring next year: www.gao-unit.com/join-us/ If comp neuro, ML, and AI4Neuro is your thing, or you just nerd out over brain recordings, apply! I'm at neurips. DM me here / on the conference app or email if you want to meet 🏖️🌮

📜🎉 Our project on aperiodic neural activity during sleep, led by the wonderful @mosameen.bsky.social, is now published! This project shows how time-resolved measures of aperiodic neural activity track changes of sleep stages + lots of other analyses in iEEG & EEG! www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Temporally resolved analyses of aperiodic features track neural dynamics during sleep - Communications Psychology

Sleep involves dynamic changes in brain activity that unfold over time, reflected in the brain’s aperiodic EEG patterns. Incorporating the spectral ‘knee’—a bend in the EEG power spectrum—reveals stag...

nature.com

I'm blown away to see our 2020 spectral parameterization (fooof) paper is the 2nd most cited neuroscience paper of 2020 🤯 What an adventure it's been - now ~10 years on & ~8500 km from where I first started on the project, and still enthralled by the work! www.thetransmitter.org/publishing/w...

What are the most-cited neuroscience papers from the past 30 years?

Highly cited papers reflect the surge in artificial-intelligence research in the field and other technical advances, plus prizewinning work on analgesics, the fusiform face area and ion channels.

thetransmitter.org

📣 🧠 We have a new PhD studentship at @fbmh-uom.bsky.social with Caroline Lea-Carnall & @tomdonoghue.bsky.social: Dopamine, brain networks & plasticity research. Computational modelling + multimodal neuroimaging: tinyurl.com/yr58xj8v Application deadline Nov 15th!

(Bicentenary) Modelling the effects of dopaminergic neuromodulation on brain state and function at The University of Manchester on FindAPhD.com

PhD Project - (Bicentenary) Modelling the effects of dopaminergic neuromodulation on brain state and function at The University of Manchester, listed on FindAPhD.com

tinyurl.com

📜🎉 I'm happy to share that my review of clinical research investigating aperiodic neural activity is now published! It examines 177 reports of aperiodic activity in clinical disorders summarizing findings, discussion topics, & making some recommendations! onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

A Systematic Review of Aperiodic Neural Activity in Clinical Investigations

This systematic literature review examines aperiodic neural activity in clinical disorders, summarizing current findings and discussion topics. One-hundred seventy-seven reports from across 38 distin...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

📜 New preprint led by the wonderful Weijia Zhang on place cells: specifically if & how different methodological approaches used across human & rodent datasets may relate to differences in identified populations and implications for cross-species spatial cognition! Check it out here:

Weijia Z@weijiazh.bsky.social · 10mo ago

🚀 New Preprint from our team: comparing place cells across species! Disentangling methods from biology provides a roadmap for cross-species insights into spatial coding 🌍 👉 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

I've been waiting some years to make this joke and now it’s real: I conned somebody into giving me a faculty job! I’m starting as a W1 Tenure-Track Professor at Goethe University Frankfurt in a week (lol), in the Faculty of CS and Math and I'm recruiting PhD students 🤗

a man wearing a white shirt and tie smiles in front of a window

ALT: a man wearing a white shirt and tie smiles in front of a window

media.tenor.com

🚨 NEW: Climate change is already causing 30,000 deaths per year - a global annual economic loss of $100-350B USD - but the true damage is probably 10x higher. Out TODAY in Nature Climate Change: the first systematic look at the science of "health impact attribution" 🔓 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Mahmoud Khalil on exile, liberation and Ice detention: ‘It was a clear act of cruelty’

Mahmoud Khalil on exile, liberation and Ice detention: ‘It was a clear act of cruelty’

His grandparents survived the Nakba and he fled Assad’s Syria. Khalil is no stranger to political persecution, but not even Trump’s crackdown can silence him

theguardian.com