The international team of collaborators:
@venkateshness.bsky.social
Tim Nest @annapasca.bsky.social Jeremy Brunel, @yjmantilla.bsky.social @hyruuk.bsky.social @sdmuthu.bsky.social @robincarhartharris.bsky.social Giulia Lioi @nicolasfarrugia.bsky.social (Brest) @karimjerbi.bsky.social (MTL)

But there is a lot more to unpack in the paper! (incl #complexity metrics, effect of #music, link to phenomenology + more!).

📄 👉 shorturl.at/suhPU

Venkatesh’s PhD work is co-supervised by Nico Farrugia @nicolasfarrugia.bsky.social and Giulia Lioi

✨ Key result #2:

Under LSD, the Higuchi fractal dimension (HFD) of MEG time series increases, indicating greater scale-invariant temporal complexity in neural dynamics.
(The spatial maps of these changes overlap with areas showing significant flattening of the 1/f slope!)

✨ Key result #1:

LSD speeds up brain rhythms

Across the cortex, intrinsic alpha & beta #oscillations shift to faster frequencies.

👉 What often looks like reduced spectral power is largely explained by shifts in peak frequency, not just a loss of rhythmic structure.

🚨 Preprint alert!

🧠 What happens to the brain under LSD?

Using #MEG & Machine Learning, our latest study led by PhD candidate @venkateshness.bsky.social reveals that LSD speeds up neural oscillations and boosts brain fractality.

📄 👉 shorturl.at/suhPU

Some highlights below 🧵1/n

Cognitive and Computational Lab (CoCo Lab) at University of Montreal / although this picture was not taken in Montreal 😄😉

Quick note from the CoCo Lab:
As a lab director, currently mentoring students from Venezuela & Iran, I’m reminded how heavy things can be for international students when events back home bring uncertainty & concern for loved ones.
This is a moment for solidarity, simple check-ins & mutual support.

Meditation induces shifts in neural oscillations, brain complexity, and critical dynamics: novel insights from MEG Abstract. While the beneficial impacts of meditation are increasingly acknowledged, its underlying neural mechanisms remain poorly understood. We examined

🚨 New article in #NCONSC

Meditation induces shifts in neural oscillations, brain complexity, and critical dynamics: novel insights from MEG
academic.oup.com/nc/article/2...

@karimjerbi.bsky.social

#consciousness
🧠🧪

Creative talent: has AI knocked humans out? Can artificial intelligence rival human creativity? A large-scale study compares 100,000 humans with leading generative AI models.

#AI Good news ... for now. "Even the best AI systems still fall short of the levels reached by the most creative humans," according to our @karimjerbi.bsky.social & @yoshuabengio.bsky.social. #ScientificReports @natureportfolio.nature.com
nouvelles.umontreal.ca/en/article/2...

Divergent creativity in humans and large language models - Scientific Reports Scientific Reports - Divergent creativity in humans and large language models

This research was conducted by the amazing Antoine Bellemare & Francois Lespinasse and in collab with Jay Olson + Yoshua Bengio @yoshuabengio.bsky.social + Yann Harel + Philipp Thölke & Kory Mathewson!

Full article
👇

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Creative talent: has AI knocked humans out? Can artificial intelligence rival human creativity? A large-scale study compares 100,000 humans with leading generative AI models.

📣 Out Today!

Have AI systems surpassed human-level creativity ?

Excited to share that our large-scale study comparing the #creativity of #LLMs to 100,000 humans was published today in Nature’s Scientific Reports.

Curious? 👀

nouvelles.umontreal.ca/en/article/2...

A high-level teaser of our recent paper on the impact of Samatha + Vipassana #meditation on the brain! 🧠 🧘

Work led by @annapasca.bsky.social
- fantastic collaboration with @lauramrz.bsky.social Vittorio Pizzella Antonino Raffone @robertoguidotti.bsky.social @jordanobyrne.bsky.social + many more!

Dream x Engineering Symposium A gathering of world leaders in sleep and dream science exploring how we can influence dreaming with precision to improve well-being, accelerate learning, and treat clinical conditions.

Analyses by our “dream team” 😁Arthur Dehgan, @arnaghosh.bsky.social & Anirudha Kemtur, with EEG data from collab with Dr P Ruby & Dr Eichenlaub.

The symp is supported/organized by @medialab.bsky.social
@umontreal-en.bsky.social
@reseausommeil.bsky.social
+ Dust Systems

dxe.framer.website

✈️ Heading to #Boston today for the #DREAM #ENGINEERING Symposium this weekend at the @medialab.bsky.social an inspiring mix of scientists, multimedia artists & filmmakers!

👉 I’ll present a teaser of our unpublished work on the neural basis of dream recall, combining sleep #EEG 🧠💤 and #AI.

1/2🧵

Ida Momennejad - "Studying Play: What Games Reveal About Minds and Machines" YouTube video by MAIN Conference

It was a pleasure to share our work on how studying play helps us understand natural intelligence & develop AI at the MAIN conference, organized by @karimjerbi.bsky.social & other amazing scientists.

Studying Play:
What Games Reveal About Minds and Machines

1/n
www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyTn...

Thank you so much @neuroai.bsky.social for the amazing talk you gave!! This and your previous contributions to MAIN have been extremely inspiring! The whole session chaired by @lune-bellec.bsky.social and Yann Harel was fantastic!

The fourth and last Keynote of MAIN 2025!

Alison Gopnik
@alisongopnik.bsky.social
(University of California, Berkeley)

👉 Empowerment Gain as Causal Learning, Causal Learning as Empowerment Gain: A bridge between Bayesian causal hypothesis testing and reinforcement learning.

Very cool talk by Richard Naud (University of Ottawa) @ #MAIN2025

“Modular Organization of Electrical Fluctuations in the Mouse Brain”

@neuronaud.bsky.social

🔴 Live: Our MAIN 2025 Keynote #3

Yoshua Bengio
@yoshuabengio.bsky.social

(Université de Montréal & Mila) 

“Scientist AI: disentangling agency and causal understanding”

#AI #Neuroscience #AIsafety #MAIN2025

👉 Very cool talk by Lune Bellec @lune-bellec.bsky.social (Université de Montréal & Mila) in the videogaming session on Day 1 of MAIN 2025:

"AI Models of Human Brain and Behaviour During Naturalistic Videogame Play" 

#videogaming #AI #fMRI

#MAIN2025

Looks like everybody has disappeared for lunch 👻 …

Next up after lunch will be Ida Momennejad @neuroai.bsky.social

#Montreal #Neuroscience #AI

🔴 Live: Panel discussion #1: @ MAIN2025

The future of Neuroscience - The role of AI ? 

with Andreas Tolias, Siva Reddy, Joao Sacramento, Ching Fang + Eva Portelance

Moderated by Patrick Mineault @patrickmineault.bsky.social

@andreastolias.bsky.social

Our first Keynote lecture of this year’s MAIN 2025…..🥁

Andreas Tolias(Stanford, CA, USA)
@andreastolias.bsky.social

"Foundation models and digital twins of the brain"

#Foundationmodels #MAIN2025 #Neuroscience #AI

🔴 Live : Talk #4 @ MAIN2025

Siva Reddy (McGill & Mila)

“The role of memory in long chain-of-thought reasoning”

👉 main2025.org

#MAIN2025

Montreal AI & Neuroscience 2025 started this morning! 🧠X🤖

www.main2025.org

#MAIN2025
#NeuroAI
#Neuroscience
#AI

Live : Talk #3 at #MAIN2025

Joao Sacramento (Google):

“Emergent temporal abstractions in autoregressive models enable hierarchical reinforcement learning”

#RL #NeuroAI

🌐 Our submission "Reclaiming #Creativity: Cultural Rights, #AI, and the Future of Human Expression", with Antoine Bellemare, Suzanne Kite, @karimjerbi.bsky.social, has been positively received by the #UN Human Rights Office and cited their report for the UN General Assembly!

The crucial role of chaos in our brain’s most extraordinary functions That the human mind treads a delicate line between order and disorder is a radical idea that’s gaining traction - and is changing our understanding of intelligence, consciousness and creativity

#NEUROSCIENCE “Criticality offers a powerful framework for understanding #brain function and dysfunction,” says UdeM's Karim Jerbi. He's in the cover story of this week's @newscientist.com. #psychology #chaos
www.newscientist.com/article/2493...

Zero-shot counting with a dual-stream neural network model How does the brain represent the structure of a visual scene (the relations among items, e.g., the cardinality) independent of scene contents (the objects in the scene, e.g., item identity)? Thompson et al. propose a dual-stream neural network model based on the parallel pathways of the primate visual system.

Very cool looking paper out today from Jess Thompson and Chris Summerfield, showing how to get rapid (zero-shot) generalization in counting behaviour with a dual stream deep network:

www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...

🧠📈 #NeuroAI

Merci @lune-bellec.bsky.social & @tyrellturing.bsky.social 🙏😎

Thnx Erdem!