Delighted to share our discoveries about one of the brain's neurotransmitter systems:
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Together with colleagues at the @alleninstitute.org, we have learned a lot about a tiny cluster of neurons in the brainstem locus coeruleus (LC) that releases norepinephrine (NE). 1
This is perfect 😄
Participants with major depressive disorder (MDD) show lower fiber fraction and higher hindered fraction in the cingulum bundle. We observed differences in the cingulum bundle with decreased fiber fraction (tmax=4.68, k=38, pFWE<.001), indicating reduced axonal integrity (left) and increased hindered fraction (tmax=4.74, k=32, pFWE<.001), suggesting edema (right) in participants with MDD vs. healthy control participants (HCP). These changes indicate increased white matter inflammation in participants with MDD. In voxels showing differences between HCP and MDD groups, the reliability of fiber fraction and hindered fraction was high (lower insets).
Can your brain's white matter proxies of inflammation re-identify you like a fingerprint? Turns out: yes, and we used this to psychometrically evaluate diffusion basis spectrum imaging and to detect depression-related changes in the cingulate bundle.
#neuroskyence 🩺
www.medrxiv.org/content/10.6...
🎉 Excited to share our publication in PNAS! 🎉
What happens when our stream of consciousness turns towards the body? Our fMRI study of 536 individuals finds that 'body-wandering' is associated with patterns of brain connectivity, physiology, affect, and mental health:
www.pnas.org/doi/full/10....
1/8 New preprint alert!
How are signals from the heart encoded in the brain?
What could be the functional implications of cardioception?
We found that neurons in the posterior insular cortex are precisely tuned to heartbeats, and that this cardio-insular coupling supports emotion coding in mice.
Graphical abstract showing three panels. Left panel, "Multiorgan Interoception Measures," depicts a translucent human body silhouette with anatomically rendered heart (red) and lungs (blue), accompanied by schematic icons for three psychophysical tasks: the Respiratory Resistance Sensitivity Task (RRST), Heart Rate Discrimination Task (HRDT), and an auditory control condition. N = 241 participants. Center panel, "Psychophysical Modelling and Individual Differences," shows a fan of overlapping sigmoid psychometric curves in blue-to-red gradient representing individual variation in perceptual threshold (α) and precision (β), a hierarchical Bayesian model diagram, and icons for metacognitive bias and M-Ratio efficiency. Right panel, "Key Finding: No Cross-Modal Relationship," displays a scatterplot of cardiac versus respiratory sensitivity with a flat regression line (r ≈ 0, BF₀₁ > 6), a compact Bayes Factor heatmap with mostly blue null-supporting cells and one orange cell indicating that subjective confidence is shared across modalities (r = 0.51***). Takeaway: interoceptive ability is modality-specific.
Is there a single "interoceptive sense"? Our new study in
@commspsychol.nature.com says: probably not. In 241 participants, cardiac and respiratory interoception were completely uncorrelated — only subjective confidence was shared across domains. www.nature.com/articles/s44... #psychscisky 🧪
New @bodybrainbehaviour.bsky.social preprint, and this is a big one for the lab: @teresaberther.bsky.social did the deepest of dives into #gut-brain coupling with MEG and HD gastrography.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
A brief 🧵on our first trip into this corner of #brain-body #neuroskyence:
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www.data4life.care/en/about-us/...
SAA is offering a total of three travel scholarships of 750€ (within-continent travel) and three travel scholarships 1500€ (across continent travel) each for active participation in the #SAA2026 conference. Submit your application by 15 April. More info: ambulatory-assessment.org/call-for-app...
Germany does not lack talent, and it does not lack funding. But we are trapping 21st-century minds inside 19th-century academic hierarchies. We are asking brilliant young scientists to build the future of the German economy, but refusing to give them the lab space, the job security, or the scientific independence to actually do it. If we want to reclaim our place as an industrial superpower, we have to stop the rat race of trying to keep every technology and structure alive that made us successful in the 20th century. Instead, we must fix our system that pushes our most ambitious scientists away. The money is there. The talent can be there. Now, we also need the courage to fix what’s broken.
“we are trapping 21st-century minds inside 19th-century academic hierarchies.” This essay gets a lot right about problems with German science. I would add that the hierarchies and precarious contracts lead also to systemic abuse and scientific misconduct. open.substack.com/pub/realimag...
🚨 New preprint alert! 🚨 Transdiagnostic latent factor models of psychopathology are widely assumed to improve brain-behaviour associations. So we decided to test this directly and found that they don't. A short 🧵
Link: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
1/10
What a brilliant commentary by @glassybrain.bsky.social on our paper- it’s been exciting to work w @hugofleming.bsky.social on how metabolic processes might influence learning computations & mental health… and as every scientist knows, validating that at least one other person is interested too ;)
In work recently out in Affective Science we investigated how accurately people can forecast their emotions in everyday life. Study 1 focused on forecasts for specific time periods (tomorrow, next week). Study 2 focused on forecasts for daily unpleasant events. link.springer.com/article/10.1...
Hey liebe Community, ihr kennt doch sicher den @realscientists.de Account, auf dem jede Woche ein toller Mensch sich und die eigene Forschung vorstellt. Wenn ihr Lust habt, dort einer großen & diversen Zielgruppe für eine Woche eure Arbeit zu präsentieren, meldet euch bei @jensfoell.de per DM. 🧠🫶
Great perspective piece on open-ended questions in ESM data by @bringmannlaura.bsky.social and colleagues that came out of this year's #MITNB meeting!
Really pleased to see this commentary from @glassybrain.bsky.social on our paper. She situates our findings within the immunometabolic depression framework and points to some cool directions for future work, including longitudinal designs and measuring insulin resistance more directly. Take a look!
Was great fun to dive deep into your work and the literature in general! Feels like there's lots of exciting new avenues on the horizon with new methods that make real-time monitoring of body, brain, and behavioural domains less burdensome for people!
Thanks to Deanna Barch for the opportunity to write this and @akuehnel.bsky.social for her thoughts on the first draft! And check out @hugofleming.bsky.social's paper for an exciting blend of computational psychiatry & real-time metabolic monitoring: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Thoroughly enjoyed writing a commentary on a great paper by @hugofleming.bsky.social et al for @biologicalpsych.bsky.social:GOS, focusing on how to further explore metabolic contributions to learning and feeling using real-time data and interventional designs:
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
#MSCA success rates now below 10%, yet the work that goes into writing this application is immense. Beyond the obvious increase in funding we need to find ways to lighten the time investment as well. Thousands of researchers spend weeks if not months working on this.
Have you been interested in any of the set theory stuff I've been doing recently? Wondered at all how you can get in on the fun? Here's an R package @nicolasleenaerts.bsky.social and I built called 'setweaver.' This vignette should get you up and running. Yay :)
cran.r-project.org/web/packages...
1/7 Can infants recognise the world around them? 👶🧠 As part of the FOUNDCOG project, we scanned 134 awake infants using fMRI. Published today in Nature Neuroscience, our research reveals 2-month-old infants already possess complex visual representations in VVC that align with DNNs.
How does metabolic learning shape human behaviour? In our recent study www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti..., we found that it shapes flavour preferences but, surprisingly, not action. Thread 🧵
What is the brain for? Active inference is widely discussed as a unifying framework for understanding brain function, yet its empirical status remains debated. Our review identifies core predictions across the action-perception cycle and evaluates their empirical support: osf.io/preprints/ps...
Someone read this + noted a coding error to determine the 3-day mean correlations. Now updated with the new code + submitted a revision to bioRxiv.
On one hand, induced a moderate shame spiral.
On the other, super appreciative to see how I hope these open-science practices will work in action!
New preprint with Nicolai Wolpert and Catherine Tallon-Baudry !
Reaction times across three distinct perceptual tasks (total N = 90) varied with the electrical rhythm of the stomach.
#neuroskyence
New preprint from my postdoc with @tobiasuhauser.bsky.social at the MPC!
TL;DR: there is a strong recency bias in information gathering and it is attenuated in people on the #OCD spectrum - a possible mechanism for #indecisiveness 🤔
Paper here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Thread below...
New in Nature Neuroscience: We developed a flexible model that reveals how animals learn tasks—uncovering stages, sudden insights, and gradual improvements unique to each animal.
Learning isn't monotonic, and our model captures that complexity 🐭📊
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Thanks to everyone who was there!
It really is fantastic to know that 70(!) people are interested in storytelling to explain science! 💙 😱
Missed the talk? Don't worry, I recorded it (in German): youtu.be/hUY098T9p-k
Thanks to @psycomm.bsky.social for allowing me to be one of the first talks! ✨
I’m very happy to share the latest from my lab published in @Nature
Hippocampal neurons that initially encode reward shift their tuning over the course of days to precede or predict reward.
Full text here:
rdcu.be/eY5nh
