Thanks, Cedric! 🙏🏽

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

Way to go @noemirubau.bsky.social and team! This study is going to yield such important and much-needed data!

#neuroskyence #PsychSciSky #neuroimaging

Happening Tuesday and Wednesday. Links for the online videocast can be found here: bit.ly/4bYlbxw

BREAKING NEWS: Otter receives some really good scritches.

Are you interested in detecting brain changes in individuals with higher precision over shorter intervals?

Check out our new paper in Nature Communications. With Randy Buckner, @jingnandu.bsky.social, and others.

Link - doi.org/10.1038/s414...

🚨🚨New work just out by the truly stellar Will Snyder - revealing rare and common genetic influences on complexity of human cortical folding !! 🚨🚨

👀 Will’s thread ⬇️ for deets, and to follow on @willsnyder.bsky.social

Huge congrats to Will & thnx to fabulous collaborators who made this possible.

my local park is full of hundreds of snow sculptures and someone has been adding museum labels

Painting featuring a basket of plumbs on a table surface in a dark interior

Louise Moillon (c. 1610–1696) French painter in the Baroque era. One of the best still life painters of her time, she was trained by her father as she was unable to attend academies as a woman- who were thought to lack the ability required for artists #WomensArt

Dark blue hexagon, with a light blue frame. Features a brain facing the left, with the front half as a wire-frame mesh of light blue, and the back half with several polygon segments of different colours. Below is written "ggseg" in light blue.

The ggseg ecosystem finally has a proper home! 🧠

For those who don't know, ggseg is an R package ecosystem for visualizing brain atlas data. Think ggplot2, but for brains.

#rstats #neuroimaging #openscience

Not sure if this is plot-driven enough for what you are after, but I’m currently reading The Book of Ebenezer Le Page and absolutely loving it! Something tells me you’d really like it (especially the world observations and humor) if not read already.

Frances Featherstone (British Artist, born 1976)
"A Portal to another World", 2025.
Oil on Canvas, 75 × 60 cm.
Private Collection.

#art #painting #artist #BlueSkyArt

Statistical Machine Learning post doc positions, w/ Oxford BDI-Novartis Collaboration for AI in Medicine, working on building causal predictive models for MS using a massive clinical trials MRI dataset. Join us on this unique collaboration!
my.corehr.com/pls/uoxrecru...
my.corehr.com/pls/uoxrecru...

… but the perfect year to start IV phenobarbital.

Painting with stylised lake side landscape in reds, blues and purples, with relection of hills in still water

Georgia O’Keeffe,
Lake George Reflection, 1922
#Womensart

Thats the road you walked to get to your awesomeness now ! So plenty good has come already. :-)

a young boy with braces on his teeth is looking at the camera . ALT: a young boy with braces on his teeth is looking at the camera .

You mean like Stank Face Ew ?

Yeah - sure !

🤣👌🏽
It did make me wonder though whether you could get this consistency by active inference responding to some e.g. specific low-level V1/2 micro-circuit changes from the drug

Paper accepted! 😊 "Reframing the Free Will Debate: The Universe is Not Deterministic" will appear in Synthese. Final version available here: arxiv.org/abs/2503.19672 - with Henry Potter and George Ellis

Thanks. Would love to discuss it with you! Maybe we could have a chat once you’re back from the meeting ? Not quite as nice as in person after session, but still …

Thanks so much @tollkuhn.bsky.social ! So wish i could have been there with you all as initially planned (pre travel-ban). Happy they get to hear all of your fab talks in person at least. 🤩

So, gonadal type (testes vs. ovaries) and sex chromosome complement (XY vs. XX) represent two strong candidate drivers of phenotypic sex differences in mammals. But how well can these factors explain sex differences in the brain and how much does each contribute to a given difference?

…

Gonadal and sex chromosomal contributions to sex differences in mammalian brain organization Sex differences in brain development may contribute to well-known sex differences in behavior and neuropsychiatric risk - making it important to comprehensively map and mechanistically annotate normat...

How do gonads and sex chromosomes contribute to regional sex differences in the brain? 🤔

Our new preprint summarizes >5 years of work on this question, combining structural neuroimaging and snRNAseq within a sample of >850 mice.

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

Thread below …

✊🏽

Thanks so much! Hope you like it when you dig in. 🙏🏽

Thanks, Kevin! We had a blast doing it.

Fractionation of sex differences in human cortical anatomy Humans show reproducible sex differences in regional cortical volume (CV), but it remains unclear how these arise from underlying sex-biases in the two biologically dissociable determinants of CV: sur...

Not causal study design like in mice (obvs), but there is also some circumstantial evidence that they could in humans too …

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

So sorry Becca. It sucks. Im right there not-ACNPing with you (except due to DHHS ban last week on ACNP travel for NIH IRP folks)

Fin (phew!). Would love to know what you all think …

5. Finally, this project touches on the controversial topic of sex differences in the brain. Although we do this in mice, our shared biology makes the findings relevant to humans – where we can’t forget the entwining of sex and gender, and the wonderful diversity that comes from that ...