Out now in #JNeurosci! We used direct recordings and stimulation in human pulvinar to probe its causal role during naming from pictures, and spoken and written descriptions. We found naming-selective responses and stim-induced pure anomia. doi.org/10.1523/JNEU... #NeuroSkyence #iEEG 🧵👇

"Real-time brain-controlled selective hearing enhances speech perception in multi-talker environments" in @natureportfolio.nature.com #NatNeurosci What a Dream Team of authors! #iEEG www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Intracerebral recordings in humans reveal emergence of musical beat representation across the dorsal auditory pathway Outstanding work from @tomaslenc.bsky.social, with Bruno Rossion and collaborators from CHU Nancy. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Feedback welcome #MusicScience #iEEG #neuroscience

🚨New paper🚨 about the link between cue weighting and dimension-selective attention doi.org/10.1016/j.co... from fun times at @audioneurolab.bsky.social @birkbeckpsychology.bsky.social with @ashleysymons.bsky.social Fred Dick, Kazuya Saito, @adamtierney.bsky.social 🧵1/5 #neuroskyence #psychscisky

Neural circuits encode prior knowledge of temporal statistics www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Excited to see this Version Of Record of my work out in @elife.bsky.social! elifesciences.org/articles/106... We investigate the mental representation of geometric shapes in adults and children using fMRI and MEG. Each figure has a video of me explaining the figure: go and read it, or read below.

3rd🚨new paper🚨this year! Here we're looking at the effects of targeted training on how L2 learners weight perceptual cues doi.org/10.1017/S136... @audioneurolab.bsky.social @birkbeckpsychology.bsky.social @ashleysymons.bsky.social, Yaoyao Ruan, Kazuya Saito, Fred Dick, @adamtierney.bsky.social 🧵1/5

🚨New paper🚨about mechanisms underlying individual differences in cue weighting doi.org/10.1162/IMAG... from fun times at @audioneurolab.bsky.social @birkbeckpsychology.bsky.social with @ashleysymons.bsky.social, Kazuya Saito, Fred Dick, and @adamtierney.bsky.social #psychscisky #neuroskyence 🧵1/5

📜🎉 Our project on aperiodic neural activity during sleep, led by the wonderful @mosameen.bsky.social, is now published! This project shows how time-resolved measures of aperiodic neural activity track changes of sleep stages + lots of other analyses in iEEG & EEG! www.nature.com/articles/s44...

🚨New paper🚨 about accented speech perception doi.org/10.1016/j.ba... by brilliant (MSc student at the time!) Amir Ghooch Kanloo accompanied by myself, Kazuya Saito and @adamtierney.bsky.social from fun times at @audioneurolab.bsky.social @birkbeckpsychology.bsky.social 🧵1/5

"The Human Insula Reimagined: Single Neurons Respond to Simple Sounds during Passive Listening" Single neuron activity in the insula #iEEG in #JNeurosci @sfnjournals.bsky.social www.jneurosci.org/content/46/4...

New work from our lab showing the human frontal lobe receives fast, low-level speech information in **parallel** with early speech areas! 🧠🗣️ doi.org/10.1038/s414...

"Human cortical dynamics of auditory word form encoding" by the Chang lab @changlabucsf.bsky.social, published in @cp-neuron.bsky.social www.cell.com/neuron/fullt... #iEEG #ECOG

If you haven't, you should, it's brilliant!

New preprint by Mika Nash and others on how selective attention affects neural tracking of prediction during ecologically valid music listening: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

As it's hiring season again I'm resharing the NeuroJobs feed. Add #NeuroJobs to your post if you're recruiting or looking for an RA, PhD, Postdoc, or faculty position in Neuro or an adjacent field. bsky.app/profile/did:...

Humans largely learn language through speech. In contrast, most LLMs learn from pre-tokenized text. In our #Interspeech2025 paper, we introduce AuriStream: a simple, causal model that learns phoneme, word & semantic information from speech. Poster P6, tomorrow (Aug 19) at 1:30 pm, Foyer 2.2!

My PhD student Yue Li is looking for L1 speakers of Chinese and Spanish for her online English experiment! Please see below for details!

Can you think of examples of books, films, TV shows, etc. featuring earworms or other types of imagined music? Please share them here! musicinmyhead.org/inner-music-...

🎧 Join us for some fun listening tasks! 🧠 Researchers at the University of Manchester want to recruit normal hearing volunteers aged 18-50 who are native English speakers to take part in research, which will help us to understand different aspects of listening in noise. #hearinghealth #research

A ✨bittersweet✨ moment – after 5 years at UCL, my final first-author project with @smfleming.bsky.social is ready to read as a preprint! 🥲

Nice review, but why "controversies"? Evidence isn’t controversial. Like "epiphenomenon," it often just means, "doesn’t fit my hypothesis." That’s ad hominem science. Brain rhythms in cognition -- controversies and future directions arxiv.org/abs/2507.15639 #neuroscience

Delighted to have our newest paper out in #Jneurosci ! We looked at how much a single cell contributes to an auditory-evoked EEG signal. Big thanks to my co-authors Ira Kraemer, Christine Köppl, Catherine Carr and Richard Kempter (all not in Bsky). Here’s how: (1/13) bsky.app/profile/sfnj...

Children are incredible language learning machines. But how do they do it? Our latest paper, just published in TICS, synthesizes decades of evidence to propose four components that must be built into any theory of how children learn language. 1/ www.cell.com/trends/cogni... @mpi-nl.bsky.social

🚨 New preprint 🚨 Prior work has mapped how the brain encodes concepts: If you see fire and smoke, your brain will represent the fire (hot, bright) and smoke (gray, airy). But how do you encode features of the fire-smoke relation? We analyzed fMRI with embeddings extracted from LLMs to find out 🧵

In what way is the frontoparietal network domain general? We show it uses the same neural resources to represent rules in auditory and visual tasks but does so with independent codes doi.org/10.1162/IMAG..., thanks to A Rich, D Moerel, @linateichmann.bsky.social, J Duncan @alexwoolgar.bsky.social

What makes humans similar or different to AI? In a paper out in @natmachintell.nature.com led by @florianmahner.bsky.social & @lukasmut.bsky.social, w/ Umut Güclü, we took a deep look at the factors underlying their representational alignment, with surprising results. www.nature.com/articles/s42...

Music is universal. It varies more within than between societies and can be described by a few key dimensions. That’s because brains operate by using the raw materials of music: oscillations (brainwaves). www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... #neuroscience

a plea to think carefully about surprisal + what it means to understand how we understand >> link.springer.com/article/10.1... brand new paper in Computational Brain and Behaviour with @andreaeyleen.bsky.social at @mpi-nl.bsky.social

🔍 When do neurons encode multiple concepts? We introduce PRISM, a framework for extracting multi-concept feature descriptions to better understand polysemanticity. 📄 Capturing Polysemanticity with PRISM: A Multi-Concept Feature Description Framework arxiv.org/abs/2506.15538 🧵 (1/7)

Out now @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social, w/ @akalt.bsky.social & @drmattdavis.bsky.social. Are sensory sampling rhythms fixed by intrinsically-determined processes, or do they couple to external structure? Here we highlight the incompatibility between these accounts and propose a resolution [1/6]

Excited to announce a new study from my time at the Center for Music in the Brain, Aarhus University, now available on bioRxiv! Inharmonicity enhances brain signals of attentional capture and auditory stream segregation www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... #EEG #neuroscience #neuroskyence

For auditory processing aficionados: new from Y Sun, O Ghitza & G Michalareas tracking rate of periodicity is achievable without sharp acoustic edges or consistent phase alignment to envelope. consistent with assuming distinct processes for phase and rate tracking www.jneurosci.org/content/45/2...

Multidimensional feature tuning in category-selective areas of human visual cortex 🧠👇 New preprint from Leonard E. van Dyck, @martinhebart.bsky.social @kathadobs.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... #neuroskyence

New paper with Chao Zhou in BLC: doi.org/10.1017/S1366728925100114 What makes lexical tones challenging for L2 learners? Previous studies suggest that phonological universals are at play... In our perceptual study, we found little evidence for these universals.

Neural Speech-Tracking During Selective Attention: A Spatially Realistic Audiovisual Study www.eneuro.org/content/earl...

my latest, in Trends in Cognitive Sciences this review lays out what I think the fundamental specializations are for music perception in humans, namely, the hierarchical processing of pitch and rhythm or, how our minds turn vibrating air into music authors.elsevier.com/a/1lG9G_V1r-...

Check out our preprint (linked again here: osf.io/preprints/ps...) where we measured neural sensitivity to changes in semantic space while listening to a podcast. Not only do we look at word-to-word but larger chunks too (2-gram, 5-gram, 10-gram) to examine meaning construction at multiple levels.

1/ Excited to share our new paper just out in Scientific Reports! 🧠🎧 Using intracranial EEG, we show how the human brain automatically encodes patterns in random sounds– without attention or explicit awareness. 🔗 doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Whale vocalizations not only resemble human vowels, but also behave like ones! We previously discovered that sperm whales have analogues to human vowels. In a new preprint, we analyze linguistic behavior of whale vowels.

Once upon a time I couldn't replicate a published finding...and decided to do something about it. Little did I know how long it would take to finish 😭...but here we are. I'm super proud of this paper and grateful to the other 68 (!) authors. ❤️ royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

Fusing multisensory signals across channels and time. Now published at PLOS Comp Biol! 🎉 With @swathianil.bsky.social and @marcusghosh.bsky.social. journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol... TLDR, when multisensory signals vary over time, neural architecture becomes important. Biggest not always best.

When it comes to text prediction, where does one LM outperform another? If you've ever worked on LM evals, you know this question is a lot more complex than it seems. In our new #acl2025 paper, we developed a method to find fine-grained differences between LMs: 🧵1/9

Great work by Changde Du from Huiguang He's lab at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. How similar are visual and conceptual representations in (multimodal) large language models to those found in humans? It turns out quite similar! www.nature.com/articles/s42...

What are the organizing dimensions of language processing? We show that voxel responses during comprehension are organized along 2 main axes: processing difficulty & meaning abstractness—revealing an interpretable, topographic representational basis for language processing shared across individuals

New publication on #experimentalpragmatics! When do listeners recognize speaker´s #communicativefunction conveyed by #prosody? Work led by @caterinavillani.bsky.social collab @isabellaboux.bsky.social and #FPulvermüller shorturl.at/NDXFM @freieuniversitaet.bsky.social @humboldtuni.bsky.social

Did you know that sperm whales possess a phonetic alphabet & are capable of social learning? @projectceti.bsky.social (Cetacean Translation Initiative) is using ML & robotics with Prof @mmbronstein.bsky.social to listen to and translate the communication of sperm whales. #WorldOceanDay

So excited to see this paper with @ckaicher.bsky.social and @cantlonlab.bsky.social finally out!

🧠 Newly out: Paper-with-a-way-too-long-name-for-social-media! How does the brain turn words into sentences? We tracked words in participants' brains while they produced sentences, and found some unexpectedly neat patterns. 🧵1/9 rdcu.be/epA1J in @commspsychol.nature.com

The deadline has been extended to the 10th June. There are still a couple of spots available. Apply before it's sold out! EEG/fNIRS/hyperscanning/TRFs/Speech/Music/Ping pong!