We are very lucky to have you join us!! 🥳🥳🥳

Awww, thanks Vinny - means a lot coming from you 🙏🏼

Johannes summarised our findings super well in his post, so please read his summary or the paper if you want to know the details 😊

I am super proud of the whole team, especially the three first authors @johalgermissen.bsky.social @mirunarascu.bsky.social and @lilweb.bsky.social

We are very excited about this work 🥳 This is the 1st human TUS study from our lab (Motivation, Decision and NeuroStimulation @ox.ac.uk @oxcin.bsky.social), and the ability to non-invasively and precisely target deep brain regions opens up a vast, largely unexplored space in human neuroscience.

🧠 Focused ultrasound changes emotional processing 🔊

In a new study published in Neuron today, we stimulated the human amygdala using transcranial ultrasound stimulation (TUS) and show it plays a causal role in detecting and resolving emotional ambiguity.

Fantastic position for a Research Lab Manager in EP - please pass this on to anyone interested and apply by Friday!

Had a brilliant day at the Mechanistic Basis of Foraging conference in Birmingham so far - presenting @johalgermissen.bsky.social’s work and listening to many great speakers 🥳🧠🐠

Super important post for people in transcranial ultrasound neurostim - please read👇🏼

Exterior view of the Life and Mind building

NEW: The Life and Mind Building is now open 🎉

Home to @biology.ox.ac.uk, @oxexppsy.bsky.social and @ineosoxford.bsky.social, the building will bring together 1,400+ researchers and students to tackle global challenges – from mental health to climate change.

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Very proud of @sankalpgarud.bsky.social for this heroic effort studying human affiliation decisions which is now out in @pnas.org 🥳 Check out the thread below for quick summary of what we found 👇

🚨Registration for Mechanistic Basis of Foraging 2025 closes October 20th 🚨

Speakers
@mkflugge.bsky.social @aaronbornstein.bsky.social @benhayden.bsky.social @ellileadbeater.bsky.social
@davidrobbe.bsky.social @dlbarack.bsky.social @becketebs.bsky.social

uobevents.eventsair.com/the-mechanis...

🚨We believe this is a major step forward in how we study hippocampus function in healthy humans.

Using novel behavioral tasks, fMRI, RL & RNN modeling, and transcranial ultrasound stimulation (TUS), we demonstrate the causal role of hippocampus in relational structure learning.

Thx to our amazing coauthors and collaborators @efouragnan.bsky.social @mkwittmann.bsky.social @robincleveland.bsky.social @timdenboer.bsky.social, Matthew Rushworth, Will Clarke, Elly Martin, Brad Treeby, and Michael Gray without whom this work would not have been possible!! 🤩

We are super excited about the first human transcranial ultrasound study from our lab which is now on BiorXiv, showing the amygdala‘s role in processing ambiguous emotions and showing TUS changed resting-state connectivity and metabolite concentrations (GABA) in the amygdala - a huge team effort! 🥳🙏🏼

UCL – University College London UCL is consistently ranked as one of the top ten universities in the world (QS World University Rankings 2010-2022) and is No.2 in the UK for research power (Research Excellence Framework 2021).

📢 Job announcement: Two (!) 3-year postdoc jobs in our lab at UCL 📢

🧠💫🔊 We are looking for postdocs interested in the abstract mechanisms underlying social cognition. Modelling, fMRI and non-invasive ultrasound, a new deep-brain stimulation method.

Please RT

www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...

I am delighted to announce registration and abstract submission is open for "The Mechanistic Basis of Foraging 2025" to be held at the Edgbaston Park Hotel, University of Birmingham, UK on 3-5th November 2025. uobevents.eventsair.com/the-mechanis...

I had an absolutely amazing and inspiring time during my first visit to Nijmegen @dondersinst.bsky.social this week! Thanks so much @lennartverhagen.bsky.social for the invite and for all the many great discussions about transcranial ultrasound 🥳🥳🥳

Profile picture of Karla Miller

As well as a new name, OxCIN also has a brand new Director: Karla Miller! @fmrib-karla.bsky.social We are grateful for 10 years of superb leadership by Heidi Johansen-Berg @heidijoberg.bsky.social and excited to see the new ideas Karla will bring. More about Karla: oxcin.ox.ac.uk/people/karla...

OxCIN logo

We're excited to announce that WIN is now the Oxford University Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging: OxCIN! Our mission: developing and deploying neuroimaging and related technology to solve big challenges in basic neuroscience and brain health. oxcin.ox.ac.uk/about/vision

How mood-related physiological states bias economic decisions - Communications Psychology Brief inductions of happiness versus sadness bias unrelated economic choices towards more rewarded but more costly options. This choice bias is predicted by a mood proxy reconstructed from physiologic...

I don’t dare to tell you how many years this took, but the project that I started as a MSc intern and kept working on throughout my PhD is now finally published: www.nature.com/articles/s44... [1/9]

Basis functions for complex social decisions in dorsomedial frontal cortex - Nature A study combining group decision-making tasks with fMRI shows that the brain’s dorsomedial prefrontal cortex uses basis functions, similar to those in the visual, motor and spatial domains, to re...

New paper from our lab now in @nature.com . We show that our brains use basis functions or "building blocks" to navigate social interactions. Rather than tracking every individual separately, social information is compressed into patterns that can be flexibly combined. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Had a really fun time today at our local primary school with 9-10 year-olds as part of Brain Awareness Week. I was pretty impressed with their models showing how learning strengthens synapses 🥳☺️

I'm thrilled to share our study, on the longitudinal impact of diet quality and waist-to-hip ratio (WHR) on 🧠 brain health in ageing, which has now been published in JAMA Network Open! - supervised by @sanasuri.bsky.social @oxxpat.bsky.social & @mkflugge.bsky.social jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

Given more and more people are transitioning over to Bluesky these days, I thought it might be worth re-sharing this transcranial focused ultrasound starter pack for those who haven't seen it yet: go.bsky.app/EjjWSUy

I would love to add you if you work in this field! Please let me know 😀

Sorry, got distracted looking for all the authors here and inadvertently left out Sorcha Hamilton and Luke Priestley - too many brilliant authors 😂 🙈

Hailey looked at switches between reward- and threat-oriented behaviour using 7T neuroimaging and found a network involving habenula, dorsal raphe nucleus (DRN), anterior cingulate cortex, and anterior insula
cortex mediated these transitions. Hope you find it interesting! ☺️

New paper out in @pnas.org today with lovely colleagues including Hailey Trier, Nima Khalighinejad, @caro-harbison.bsky.social, @marklaubach.bsky.social, Jacquie Scholl & Matthew Rushworth (most not on BlueSky yet!) 

www.pnas.org/doi/epub/10....

🙋‍♀️

Thanks so much to @thepsychologist.bsky.social and Cath Harmer for being amazing examiners.

Thanks so much and 🙋‍♀️