It is really disheartening to see the men who are in charge of science and healthcare in the United States stand before us all and spew misinformation about autism. To claim that genetic background isn’t the overwhelming contributor to autism is egregious.

The FDA is taking their reviews of new drugs behind closed doors, with Director Marty Makary replacing vetted and publicly transparent deliberations with "panels of handpicked scientists who support his views." This is a miscarriage of science, and a betrayal of public trust in service of MAHA.

Is precision functional brain imaging in babies possible? YES! We show this in not one but two new preprints out of WashU and @umn-midb.bsky.social! 1️⃣: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 2️⃣: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 🐣👶🧠

NIMH Data Archive is now also imposing NIST/ISO requirements (like NBDC). Not sure how many labs actually have the resources to meet these requirements. Is the golden era of open brain imaging data basically over?

Great write up of our @nature.com study by @claudia-lopez.bsky.social

Now out in @natneuro.nature.com What happens to the brain’s body map when a body-part is removed? Scanning patients before and up to 5 yrs after arm amputation, we discovered the brain’s body map is strikingly preserved despite amputation www.nature.com/articles/s41593-025-02037-7 🧵1/18

"Simple" tools in the same loop as the experiment along with thoughtful, common sense approaches (like focusing on individuals instead of consortia). That's really powerful. That's how you translate. And there aren't a lot of groups that do all of experiment and tools and theory well. 7/

Be honest. You've written the same thing a dozen times. But in my defense, I felt like I did my part -- wrote about a tool. Made some observation. Now let other people figure out how to apply it. Fin [at least my contribution]. That's such a copout! How do we get away with saying these things? 3/

But every one of those papers has the same throwaway statement somewhere. It goes sort of like this: "in principle, this tool could be used in future studies for biomarkers or for helping better understand [your favorite disorder]." Those statements are trite and essentially meaningless. 2/

I've been thinking a lot about the preprint in terms of my own career. I grew up academically in computational labs. My papers were abstract early on and they only got more abstract as I progressed. The model was: find a new exciting mathematical tool. Apply it to brain imaging data. Write it up. 1/

A truly spectacular demonstration of the medical potential of precision mapping an individual patient's brain. I am so excited to be part of this work!

Precision Functional Mapping (PFM). 8 yrs ago some told us it wasn't interesting. Now it's helping cure depression as part of PACE (Personalized Adaptive Cortical Electro-stimulation), ... commercialized by @turingmedical.bsky.social. osf.io/preprints/ps... www.cell.com/neuron/comme...

This is the #Neurosurgeon who perfected the process to integrate seamlessly into typical workflows. Driving the work in both depression and pain… #AllHandsOnDeck 👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾

This is the future. The reality of biological #psychiatry. We listen to the patient, create a personalized map of their brain, use algorithms to disrupt stuck networks, and adapt the stimulation over time while continuing our quest to understand those networks.

From 30+ years of suffering to sustained relief thanks to personalized brain maps + adaptive stimulation PACE – an approach for a personalized brain pacemaker Insights on how decades of basic science in fMRI and cognitive science can lead to real breakthroughs in medicine

I still get chills Meet Mike *30+ years severe depression *first hospitalized @ 13y *20 meds *3 rounds of ECT *2 near-fatal suicide attempts Mike felt joy for the first time in decades after we turned on his new brain pacemaker or PACE see videos, read paper, follow thread doi.org/10.31234/osf...

The language 🧠 areas are selective for language relative to many forms of reasoning (arithmetic, social, semantic, etc.). @hopekean.bsky.social has now shown that even formal logical reasoning—the domain that is perhaps the closest to language—neither engages nor requires the language system!

1 To predict the behaviour of a primate, would you rather base your guess on a closely related species or one with a similar brain shape? We looked at brains & behaviours of 70 species, you’ll be surprised! 🧵Thread on our new preprint with @r3rt0.bsky.social , doi.org/10.1101/2025...

1/11 Very excited to say that our preprint, Precision functional mapping reveals less inter-individual variability in the child vs. adult human brain, is up on biorxiv! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Can we run a child version of the Midnight Scan Club? Not at midnight, of course, but turns out we can! We collected large amounts of resting-state fMRI data from individual kids, and show high reliability with increasing amounts of data and individual variability. Check it out!

I am no constitutional scholar, but I can't help but feel that "the President gets to dictate what every university can teach and what every television station should broadcast" is closer to what the founding fathers were worried about when it comes to free speech than trigger warnings on syllabi.

What a fantastic effort. Truly inspiring to see brilliant people dig deeply into these meta scientific issues. This is the best time to be doing neuroimaging.

Congratulations to Leon and Thomas for a massively important exploration of the tradeoffs between sample size and scan time. This is really critical for anyone designing an fMRI study. I hope NIH study sections can start incorporating these ideas!

1/11 Excited to share our @Naturestudy led by @leonooi.bsky.social @csabaorban.bsky.social @shaoshiz.bsky.social AI performance is known to scale with logarithm of sample size (Kaplan 2020), but in many domains, sample size can be # participants or # measurements... doi.org/10.1038/s415...

We have argued that the brain’s Action Mode Network controls functions required for goal-directed behavior. www.nature.com/articles/s41... Now, in new work, we show that AMN contains distinct subnetworks for making decisions, implementing actions, and processing feedback. doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

I'm not going to repost any of the insane antisemitic conspiracy bullshit that grok is spewing today, but it highlights how absolutely essentially is that we not let LLMs become a form of epistemic grounding for our society.

Everyone knows that if you're NIH funded, you're on the hook for gold OA fees for papers accepted on or after 7/1/25, right? grants.nih.gov/faqs#/public...

Fantastic work here, and an amazing illustration of how precision mapping enabling powerful and fast hypotheses testing.

A US judge has ordered hundreds of terminated research projects at the US National Institutes of Health to be reinstated, calling the processes that led to their cancellation “bereft of reasoning”. https://go.nature.com/4kOmXDy

Protest has network effects. In my calculations, the (now) well-known data of Chenoweth and Stephan shows a large effect: the 100th person to join a protest has 100 times the impact of the 1st person. (i.e. effectiveness ~N-squared) So get out there! samwang.substack.com/p/network-ef...

Very cool preprint examining how brain networks and cognition co-evolve during development By @bttyeo.bsky.social @lucinauddin.bsky.social @avramholmes.bsky.social @elvisha.bsky.social & colleagues 🧪🧠 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

EVERYBODY WATCH. ICE IS OUT OF CONTROL. Video of SEIU California’s President David Huerta getting assaulted & arrested during an ICE raid in the warehouse district of Downtown Los Angeles today. He’s an LA native, American citizen and labor leader. Don’t turn away.

When location is everything: Why does brain ‘real estate’ determine the success of focused ultrasound (FUS) and DBS? Ever notice how the difference between success and struggle in FUS and DBS may come down to just a few millimeters? Precise placement is common to be THE deciding factor in outcome.

Can brain injury cause the loss of visual imagination? We studied #aphantasia due to brain injury. Lesions were in many different regions but 100% were connected to the fusiform imagery node - a region active during visual mental imagery @braincircuits.bsky.social www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

My med school textbook says stimulants like Ritalin treat hyperactivity by “stimulating” the brain’s attention and cognitive control systems. We studied children taking stimulants in the ABCD Study, and the largest differences were actually in arousal and reward networks! Check out our preprint!

What do stimulants actually do to your brain? They must act on attention systems, right? Maybe not....

The brainstem’s red nucleus is an evolutionarily old structure that emerged as animals began to use limbs for walking, but its function in humans reaches beyond motor control, a new study suggests. By @sydneywyatt.bsky.social #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/brain-imagin...

Killing the goose that lays golden eggs because it's too woke

Northwestern just announced that the university will meet the funding needs of any research that is being impacted by stop orders. LET'S GOOOOOOOOOOOOO! #edusky #academicsky wgntv.com/evanston/nor...

Per source, NIH has been instructed to hold off from issuing ALL awards to Harvard, Cornell, Columbia, Brown, and Northwestern (including med schools) Agency staff have also been instructed to not speak about this funding freeze to grantees and applicants

I'm so grateful that @roselynechauvin.bsky.social analyzed subcortical effects of limb-casting on resting-state brain activity! These effects mirror those seen in Parkinson's disease, perhaps because both conditions involve disuse and plasticity that suppresses future limb movements

It turns out the brain🧠is silently🤫working when your arm is in a cast. 🩼 🚧 Plastic changes occur, and revert again when the cast is removed … not just in cortex.

The result of a large (42 authors!) collaboration: "Go Figure: Transparency in neuroscience images preserves context and clarifies interpretation" arxiv.org/abs/2504.07824 TL;DR: The FMRI world can (and should) improve results interpretation and reproducibility *today*, via transparent thresholding.

@samkrimmelneuro.bsky.social shows the utility of Precision Functional Mapping deep into the brainstem! The red nucleus turns out to be much more potentially interesting for cognitive neuroscience than anyone thought, including connectivity to the Somato-Cognitive Action Network.

CHICAGO…

I have never seen anything like this in NYC. 5th Ave covered from 42nd St well to the 20s. Nobody prepared for this volume. Volunteers are holding the traffic on all the side streets. No police in sight. #handsoff

Salt Lake City showed up

Absolutely incredible turn out at MN State Capitol! #HandsOff

Baltimore City was on point today. The signs were hitting hard! #HandsOff

Spectacular view of 100,000 people attending the #HandsOff march in NYC