How similar are two activity patterns? We all know that low correlations don't mean that they are necessarily dissimilar – our measurements could be noisy. So how do you correct for this? Our slightly nerdy, but hopefully useful preprint takes a deep dive: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Also out today - A quick intro piece on the role of the cerebellum in cognition. What does it do? How will we find out? This is what @actlab.bsky.social and I think the critical questions are right now. It was fun to write - especially the section on evolution.... journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

For nearly two decades resting-state fMRI has ruled supreme. And resting-state is suprisingly powerful. But we can do so much better by using broad batteries of tasks with the right design. Here a double-punch delivered by two papers from @carobellum.bsky.social and @basselarafat.bsky.social!

The MultiTaskBattery toolbox is live: 20+ implemented tasks, object-oriented design and a battery optimizer built in! Docs: multitaskbattery.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ Github: github.com/DiedrichsenL... With @carobellum.bsky.social Jinkang Derrick Xiang @diedrichsenjorn.bsky.social 🙌

The cutting edge work is thanks to investment from partners like @braincanada.bsky.social @westernu.ca @schulichmeddent.bsky.social and our amazing collaborators who use these systems to understand the brain.

As eLife editor, it has been exciting and we are in a new steady state: quality of papers remains high, variance has dropped; work during the editorial phase has gone up tremendously; review quality is excellent and has improved. Kudos to @behrenstimb.bsky.social and the leadership team.

After nearly 11 years of learning how to be more polite and how to portage a canoe i became a proud Canadian today. In a time where some political leaders think they can threaten whole nations it seems more meaningful than ever to become part of a free, friendly and peaceful nation.

Today I received a note from a grad student who lives in Tehran. Her note gives you firsthand experience of what it’s like to live in a city that is being bombed, and what it’s like to be young and feel despair about your future. rezashadmehr.blogspot.com/2026/03/hope...

Now out in Journal of Neuroscience: www.jneurosci.org/content/earl... How are motor memories and sensory information combined when you are playing the piano? Congrats to Amin and Medha! I know having a paper out may seem small and insignificant against all that happens in the world right now!

@carobellum.bsky.social really wanted to know how well resting-state correlations can predict which areas co-activate over a wide array of tasks. It turns out that you are better off running a short Multi-task battery, even if the tasks are completely different from the ones you want to predict!

Language areas in the cerebellar mapped by @coltoncasto.bsky.social: www.thetransmitter.org/language/cer... Very consistent with @carobellum.bsky.social functional atlas, but providing deeper details. By now the "terra incognita" of the cerebellum isn't so "incognita" anymore!

Sir Ian McKellen performing a monologue from Shakespeare’s Sir Thomas More on the Stephen Colbert show. Never have I heard this monologue performed with such a keen sense of prescience. Nor have I ever been in this exact historical moment.TY Sir Ian, for reaching us once again. #Pinks #ProudBlue

Incredibly hard and heroic work by @rhodricusack.bsky.social, @clionaod.bsky.social and many other just out in Nature Neuroscience: Visual categorization in the ventral stream can is present in 2-month old already. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The first Canadian paper from @sivanjo.bsky.social: when we started this work, I thought the cerebellar articulation areas would just look like the speech area in M1. Not so. Check it out! @coltoncasto.bsky.social

Great collboration from @mnlmrc.bsky.social: Multivoxel fMRI and neuropixel recordings show sensorimotor prediction errors in M1 / S1 in the input, but not in the spiking of output neurons! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... With @andpru.bsky.social @jonathanamichaels.bsky.social @gribblelab.org

🥳 Happy holidays everyone, the list will be back in January 🎉

If you are an MRI researcher interested in moving to 🇨🇦 for $500k a year or $1M a year for 8 years with a possibility of renewal at a reduced rate, take a look at our equipment cfmm.uwo.ca and this program www.canada.ca/en/impact-pl... . MSK, neuroscience, cardiac, cancer applications all encouraged!

This is an amazing success story. We are happy to have published several papers there - it really has become the top neuroimaging journal within just two years. Kudos to all who had the courage to make it happen!

This week's sensorimotor superlab reading list is out https://superlab.ca/posts/2025-11-28-list313.html @andpru.bsky.social @diedrichsenjorn.bsky.social @gribblelab.org #neuroskyence #psychscisky #Sensorimotor

The Sensorimotor Superlab with @gribblelab.org and @andpru.bsky.social is a unique place to work and learn. We are now accepting MSc and PhD applications for Fall 2026. Join our awesome team at Western University... For application instructions see diedrichsenlab.org and gribblelab.org/join.html!

A new paper from the lab featuring an elegant set of experiments to explore whether and how reaction times relate to sequence planning -- stellar work by @arminpanjehpour.bsky.social. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Also out today in PNAS: Anwesha Das shows in this thorough paper that "micro-offline gains" in sequence learning do not reflect consolidation of a motor memory - they also happen in random sequences. With @eazanon.bsky.social and Max-Philip Stenner (Magdeburg). www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

I'm really proud of being part of this paper - an amazing success for us in the Western Sensorimotor Superlab with @andpru.bsky.social @gribblelab.org! Congrats Jon!

C.S. Lewis responding to a letter from an American schoolgirl asking him for some writing advice. (Worth reading? ✅️)

Come work with us! we are hiring a scientific software developer! www.radboudumc.nl/en/vacancies...

We will have an NHP position open at @westernu.ca this year. Posting is coming soon. If you're interested about our setup and the opportunities here, feel free to get in touch.

Variance partitioning is used to quantify the overlap of two models. Over the years, I have found that this can be a very confusing and misleading concept. So we finally we decided to write a short blog to explain why. @martinhebart.bsky.social @gallantlab.org diedrichsenlab.org/BrainDataSci...

Exited to share tomorrow new updates on trying to figure out how the neocortex and cerebellum talk to each other. Work by @carobellum.bsky.social, Ali Shabazi, and others in the lab!

Amazing new paper - such a pleasure to be involved! With so much and clean neuropixel data - analysis becomes a completely different game…

Four #WesternU faculty members were recognized by the Ontario government with Early Researcher Awards. Congratulations to Liliana Alvarez, Thomas DeFalco, Yalda Mohsenzadeh and Lyle Muller. 👏 #PurpleAndProud

We’re hiring! 🥳fully funded PhD and postdoc positions in human cognitive neuroscience @mpicybernetics.bsky.social M/EEG and brain stimulation methods to study timing/ prediction/ attention/ oscillations tinyurl.com/5dku4du9 @timingresforum.bsky.social @gtc-tuebingen.bsky.social please repost 🙏

Please repost. The Centre for Functional and Metabolic Mapping is looking for a Preclinical MRI physicist (9.4T and 15.2T Bruker Advance Neo). You will join a team of 14 dedicated staff in Canada's National Ultra-high field MRI platform who also operate 3T and 7T human scanners in the same facility.

And Functional Fusion is our Python toolbox and Data-sharing framework that allows you to have fMRI contrast maps from ~200 subjects and ~450 different tasks for any arbitrary atlas space (surface, volume, ROI) at your finger tips in a few minutes. functional-fusion.readthedocs.io

Just in time we also released 2 important toolboxes that make it easy to collect fMRI contrast from many tasks efficiently from the same subject: The MultiTaskBattery project (multitaskbattery.readthedocs.io) allows you to pick the tasks you want and be at the scanner within 1 hr!

Are broad task batteries better than resting-state fMRI to learn something general about the human brain? If you are at #CCN2025 come by @basselarafat.bsky.social and @carobellum.bsky.social poster on Tuesday and Wednesday! @cogcompneuro.bsky.social

Impressive new paper by @nikospriovoulos.bsky.social. Clearly pushing the limits of what we can do with in-vivo imaging for the highly folded human cerebellum. Especially interesting is the careful characterization of cerebellar vasculature. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

New high resolution fMRI paper describing the capabilities and challenges of 9.4T fMRI in the cerebellum. By van der Zwaag et al., (@highonfield.bsky.social, @nikospriovoulos.bsky.social) doi.org/10.1002/mrm....

Ireland launches global talent fund! www.researchireland.ie/funding/glob... If you're a neuroscience professor (assistant/associate/full) and would consider relocating to the vibrant and booming city of Dublin, please get in touch!

Careful dissection of motor sequence learning by @andpru.bsky.social and @mkashefi.bsky.social. In my humble opinion this should be an instant classic 😏. www.jneurosci.org/content/earl...

Congrats to @alighavampour.bsky.social and @mnlmrc.bsky.social for developing a new paradigm for hand synergy learning. If you are looking for a motor skill task that seems impossibly difficult and really needs to learning to be mastered, here it is: journals.physiology.org/doi/full/10....

Landed at the Cerebellum GRC in Switzerland, where the science is high-level and so are the altitudes. Very ready for this week's deep dives into cerebellar function, alongside some excellent bovine branding. 🐄🧠

This week's sensorimotor superlab reading list is out https://superlab.ca/posts/2025-05-23-list296.html @andpru.bsky.social @diedrichsenjorn.bsky.social @gribblelab.org #neuroskyence #psychscisky #Sensorimotor

Another outstanding recognition for our amazing postdoc @carobellum.bsky.social ! Can‘t believe that she will be leaving the lab in just over a month. She will leave a big carobellum-shaped hole.

This week's sensorimotor superlab reading list is out https://superlab.ca/posts/2025-04-25-list292.html @andpru.bsky.social @diedrichsenjorn.bsky.social @gribblelab.org #neuroskyence #psychscisky #Sensorimotor

This week's sensorimotor superlab reading list is out @andpru.bsky.social @diedrichsenjorn.bsky.social @paulgribble.bsky.social #neuroskyence #psychscisky #Sensorimotor https://superlab.ca/posts/2025-04-04-list289.html

On today -- a new view on the most classical of all motor cortical questions.

This week's sensorimotor superlab reading list is out @andpru.bsky.social @diedrichsenjorn.bsky.social @paulgribble.bsky.social #neuroskyence #psychscisky #Sensorimotor https://superlab.ca/posts/2025-03-28-list288.html

Going to #Cosyne2025? Check out two posters from the lab, presented by @jonathanamichaels.bsky.social and @mkashefi.bsky.social.

This week's sensorimotor superlab reading list is out @andpru.bsky.social @diedrichsenjorn.bsky.social @paulgribble.bsky.social #neuroskyence #psychscisky #Sensorimotor https://superlab.ca/posts/2025-03-21-list287.html

ICYMI: The Western Postdoctoral Fellowship Program is accepting applications for the 2025 cohort! This fellowship offers a competitive stipend package over two years - learn more about the program on our website: uwo.ca/research/fun...