Great article and I completely agree. If we want to study the interesting thing about the brain ("intelligence") we need to study it doing hard tasks, not easy ones that can be solved with a single neuron or even none. Yes it makes the analysis harder but that's the challenge.

Yeah but for some reason that’s not enough anymore I think. Like Nash could never publish his 1-page PNAS paper today without +50 pages of supplementary material. It seems like we’re making our papers broader instead of deeper because deeper science is too focused for “the broad audience”

Based on my experience with publishing and communicating what I do, a main hurdle is “fast science”. Editors don’t have time to figure out what’s happening in technical papers, people don’t have time to sit through 15 minutes of intro, … Somehow we’re TikTokizing our research not to get left behind?

Diffusion MRI (dMRI) is a powerful tool to study white matter maturation. In our new preprint, we process and distribute a new resource of >24,000 ABCD dMRI scans using open source tools! We then evaluate how methods shape inferences about development.

🔗 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Stimulation of the human periaqueductal gray induces threat bradycardia: a case report The ability to recognize and anticipate potential danger is crucial for survival across species. The midbrain periaqueductal gray (PAG) is implicated in regulating threat-anticipatory responses, in...

🧠 Congrats @felixklaassen.bsky.social with this unique DBS case study targeting the midbrain PAG. Direct PAG stimulation (and not a bordering control region) induces threat-specific bradycardia ❤️ @devoogdld.bsky.social @anneloeshulsman.bsky.social & co-authors www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Excited to share a new review by @kocherlab.bsky.social and me:

Nature-inspired neuroscience

We discuss diverse sensory systems and behaviors across the animal kingdom and argue for their integration into neuroscience. New tools in diverse systems are making this possible ✨

tinyurl.com/y5y9du27

‘Overdue’ debate unfurls over neuroimaging method After a January paper questioned the validity of an approach called lesion network mapping, its users are pressure testing their results.

A wave of new papers discuss the merits and limitations of lesion network mapping. #neuroskyence

By @avaskham.bsky.social

www.thetransmitter.org/brain-imagin...

Comparative anatomy of brain metabolism in human and macaque (and other species). The dichotomy between glucose as fuel and glucose for tissue building is conserved across species. @moohebatpe.bsky.social and @misicbata.bsky.social

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

1/6 Our paper is out today in Nature Communications!

From the SFB/TRR 289 Treatment Expectation @sfb-trr-289.bsky.social we show that temporal expectations shape somatosensory perception - for both painful heat AND non-painful cold stimuli.

To accompany my textbook (Computational Foundations of Cognitive Neuroscience) and the class I taught this semester, I'm open-sourcing my lectures slides:
gershmanlab.com/lectures.html
I'll continue to update these as I improve them.

The Genomic Code: the genome instantiates a generative model of the organism How does the genome encode the form of the organism? What is the nature of this genomic code? Inspired by recent work in machine learning and neuroscience, we propose that the genome encodes a generat...

The Genomic Code: the genome instantiates a generative model of the organism www.cell.com/trends/genet... - really delighted to see this in print in @cp-trendsgenetics.bsky.social! 😊

The supply of blood to brain tissue is thought to depend on the overall neural activity in that tissue, and this dependence is thought to differ across brain regions and across brain states. However, studies supporting these views have measured neural activity as a bulk quantity and related it to blood supply following disparate events in different regions. Here we measure fluctuations in neuronal activity and blood volume across the mouse brain, and find that their relationship is consistent across brain states and brain regions but differs in two opposing brainwide neural populations. Functional ultrasound imaging (fUSI) revealed that whisking, a marker of arousal, is associated with brainwide fluctuations in blood volume. Simultaneous fUSI and Neuropixels recordings showed that neurons that increase activity with whisking have distinct haemodynamic response functions compared with those that decrease activity. Their summed contributions predicted blood volume across states.Brainwide Neuropixels recordings revealed that these opposing populations coexist in the entire brain. Their differing contributions to blood volume largely explain the apparent differences in blood volume fluctuations across regions. The mouse brain thus contains two neural populations with opposite relations to brain state and distinct relationships to blood supply, which together account for brainwide fluctuations in blood volume.

How does blood flow relate to brain activity? We discovered that it reflects two neural populations affected oppositely by arousal. Together, they explain neurovascular coupling in all brain regions and brain states!

Out today in Nature: rdcu.be/fdC2A

@uclbrainscience.bsky.social

Medial temporal lobe encodes cognitive maps of real-world social networks | PNAS Humans routinely solve social problems by navigating densely interconnected networks—gossiping strategically, brokering across cliques, and coordin...

Now out in PNAS with @jaeyoungson.bsky.social, Alice Xia, @apaxon.bsky.social & @orielf.bsky.social. Medial temporal lobe encodes predictive representations of people's real-world social networks which afford them key advantages in social navigation. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... 🧵

Complexity Thoughts: Issue #80 Unraveling complexity: building knowledge, one paper at a time

#ComplexityThoughts is read by 3,400+ readers!

This week, I’ve been mapping recent results in complexity science across disciplines, from biochemistry to neuroscience, from evolution to human behavior

#80 👉 open.substack.com/pub/manlius/...

Available as a “deep-dive” 🎧 on Spotify & Apple

Last reminder: This is happening this Thursday.

I’m very glad to be speaking next week at the AI-Phi session at Sony CSL Paris (@sonycsl-paris.bsky.social).

In this Causerie session, I’ll talk about how what we see as valuable can change depending on our goals, and why this matters for learning and decision-making in both humans and AI.

Hi folks, reminder that this is happening next Thursday.

Structure-function coupling in the human brainstem www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.04...

Wanna infer causal interactions during brief, transient neural events? 🧠⚡

Many methods struggle with such non-stationarities, but we got a robust solution for you! 📦

My recent publication with @cmc-lab.bsky.social 🥳: TranCIT: Transient Causal Interaction Toolbox

📜 JOSS: bsky.app/profile/joss...

If Dante were writing today, I suspect he would place social media somewhere in Malebolge, the eighth circle of the Inferno, among the fraudulent.

In this #ComplexityThoughts I discuss the architecture of attention and the content creator economy: manlius.substack.com/p/the-infern...

Null models for lesion network mapping - Nature Neuroscience Van den Heuvel et al. show that lesion-network mapping (LNM)-derived circuits converge across disorders and argue that this convergence reflects a fundamental methodological limitation of LNM. We eval...

The LNM debate keeps developing.

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

@andrewzalesky.bsky.social @natneuro.nature.com #neuroskyence

Our new paper on brain networks engaged during imagining is out now in Neuron!

Here is a download link (free for 50 days):
authors.elsevier.com/c/1msNE3BtfH...

Congratulations to Nate Anderson for leading this work @rementurus.bsky.social

🧵

I’d pay for a Gao Gang podcast

a close up of an orange and white cat with its mouth open ALT: a close up of an orange and white cat with its mouth open

Why don’t we merge and you two talk at the same time so we see who wins

For more than a century, the study of brain lesions has been central to understanding cognitive processes and normal brain function (e.g., Broca’s studies).

However, what electrophysiological signatures emerge following a brain lesion?

You might like this one actually @rdgao.bsky.social @roxana-zeraati.bsky.social @mattiachini.bsky.social

G'day connection makers. On **April 16th**, we're hosting Georg Northoff telling us about intrinsic timescales. If it sounds interesting, here's the link to register: cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/meeting/regi...

Brain Flows A pioneering theory of how brain network flows compose the neural symphonies that make us who we are

Inspired by Edinburgh’s legacy of big ideas (e.g., Hume), on a train leaving the city, I crafted a proposal for a book about big ideas in network neuroscience—how brain activity flows generate representations that together compose our minds. The rest is history, and this new book: shorturl.at/3p100

Stimulus-Driven Leakage in Naturalistic Neuroimaging: "It results in spurious predictive performance due to overfitting to repeated signals, even in the presence of independent noise." www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... uh-oh

Convergent transcriptomic and connectomic controllers of information integration and its anaesthetic breakdown across mammalian brains - Nature Human Behaviour Luppi et al. identify transcriptomic and connectomic controllers of information integration and its breakdown induced by anaesthesia in humans, macaques, marmosets and mice.

What makes brains (un)conscious? We provide new answers—and a universal mammalian blueprint for information processing—in a cross-species study of humans, macaques, marmosets & mice. Exploring convergent breakdown of integration in:

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

Led by @loopyluppi.bsky.social