Happy new years to all!

Now published in Biological Reviews! Continual decision‐making dynamics across biological organisms onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Damn I went and spoke my mind. Hello anxiety. Time to drive 15 hours.

Bottom line is that this is all reverse inference of intrinsic functional connectivity. No task. No behavior. The take-home headline inferences (behavioral, cognitive, and psychological) are misaligned with the approach. You don't need imaging at all for drawing strong psych inferences.

From sensory to perceptual manifolds: The twist of neural geometry doi.org/10.1126/scia... #neuroscience

Any studies looked at cerebrovascular reactivity during or after tFUS? Perhaps a hypercapnic challenge such as breath hold assessed with ASL or BOLD? Could be an interesting, relatively simple way to assess the vascular effects of tFUS.

TFUS mechanism, redux. Recent papers show TRPC6 mechanosensitive ion channels in cultured mouse neurons (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2404877121), a way tFUS might interact with the brain. And yet TRPC6 is also a major player in vascular (myogenic) tone. Ignore vessels at your peril, tFUS folks!

Breath as an internal context: Respiratory phase alignment between encoding and retrieval optimizes memory performance. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2025.12.25.696473v1

"Socioeconomic status (SES) — not IQ or psychopathology — showed the strongest associations with both resting-state functional connectivity and cortical thickness in the ABCD Study." www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

The roast was amazing. Enjoyed by all. Melt in your mouth delicious. Buon natale per tutti! Now to bed with a belly full of joy, grappa, and fiorintina. Viva Della veneto!

Stage one is complete. 5.9kg bone in beef florentine. Roasted to internal 42c, resting 1h, then finished with oven sear. Christmas Eve dinner for 15 is on track!

Merry Christmas from Italy!

The number 1 movie when you were ten years old will define your 2026

"Some people do believe that they are able to perform relatively well on tasks even when there is little reason for that confidence. Our results support the claim that overconfidence might be a trait." pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41401360/

What if thinking doesn’t begin in the brain, but in the ceaseless labour of our cells? Today’s essay rethinks the question of how we become minds, arguing that cognition begins not in the mind but in the collective processes that keep a body alive @annaciaunica.bsky.social

All research is exploratory if you’re confused enough

Delighted to delivering a keynote on computational and causal approaches to interoception!

I have an early Christmas present for you! 🎅 Happy to announce that we have three excellent keynote speakers at Psychology and Brain 2026 in Heidleberg! Professors Shamay-Tsoory, Schönauer and Allen will cover topics from empathy over memory to interoception! pug2026.org

It is hugely fun & we are very lucky to do science for the sake of science. But it is amazing to see work we and many others I admire have done turn into public awareness thanks to excellent science writing. (see also www.nytimes.com/2025/11/25/s...)

netneurotools: a trainee-oriented approach to network neuroscience | doi.org/10.1101/2025... Our lab’s internal toolkit for accomplishing everyday tasks in brain imaging ⤵️

Are you curious about electrogastrography, but keep getting chicken-related results when googling "EGG"? We have the preprint for you! In this tutorial, we describe how to acquire and analyse gastric data from human participants. Plus FREE software! Read it here: arxiv.org/abs/2509.17260

Infra-slow (<0.1 Hz) modulation of human brain pulsations in awake and sleep states https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2025.12.15.692942v1

I've used Lavaan almost every (work)day for 15 years, but this open source labour of love has never received proper institutional support. I'm delighted to be a small part of an 1.5M OpenScienceNL award, led by Jorgensen, to completely revamp and futureproof Lavaan www.openscience.nl/en/news/45-p...

Last preprint 🎶(of the year). If vagus nerve stimulation alters motivation by amplifying internal signals, then bodily states should matter. Using milkshake vs. water loads, we show that tVNS-induced changes in Pavlovian bias are dependent on hunger. #neuroskyence 🩺 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

🧠New preprint! What if cortical geometry alone already encodes much of white-matter organization? We introduce a subject-specific, reversible cortical folding model that unfolds and refolds the brain from a single T1w MRI; no diffusion, no ML. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

fMRI signals “up,” but neural metabolism might be going “down.” In our @natneuro.nature.com paper, we demonstrate that about 40% of voxels with robust BOLD responses exhibit opposite oxygen metabolism, revealing two distinct hemodynamic modes. rdcu.be/eUPO8 funds @erc.europa.eu #neuroskyence 🧵:

The brain’s energy landscape as a potential window into brain health www.nature.com/articles/d41... (study led by Martin Picard and Michel Thiebaut de Schotten)

New writeup on interoception in Scientific American focusing on its role in mental health: www.scientificamerican.com/article/inte...

Just skimmed the paper and this looks super useful!

If you analyse time-resolved data (M/EEG, iEEG, pupillometry, force recordings…) and feel limited by cluster-based permutation tests (CBPTs); especially when trying to determine when an effect starts or ends; you may want to try our new R package: lnalborczyk.github.io/neurogam/ #rstats #brms #EEG

🧠🪰 The adult Drosophila brain connectome now gives us a complete wiring diagram of ~140k neurons. But a wiring diagram alone isn’t understanding. How is this massive network organized? Our paper tackles that question by mapping community structure across the entire fly brain. 1/

Joint modelling of brain and behaviour dynamics with artificial intelligence www.nature.com/articles/s41...

It seems a bunch of groups are leaping into tFUS for neuromodulation without assessing effects of tFUS on CBF with ASL, or on vascular territory effects using cerebrovascular reactivity. Seems like a giant oversight to me!!!! (My five bucks says tFUS is primarily vascular...)

One of those posts that makes you realize we really are living in a cyberpunk dystopia novel.

The @springernature.com book "The Bodily Self, Emotion, and Subjective Time: Exploring Interoception through the Contributions of A.D. (Bud) Craig" is out: 22 authors, 16 chapters. Neurobiology, Psychology, Psychiatry, Neuroimaging, Musicology, Philosophy, ... link.springer.com/book/10.1007...

Just provisionally accepted -- preprint updated | The dual interpretation of edge time series: Time-varying connectivity versus statistical interaction | www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

New study challenges the idea of a unified decision network: Neuropixel recordings in primate OFC showed robust encoding during value-based choices but near-silence during perceptual decisions, even when rewards are at stake. #RewardSignals #neuroskyence www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Human cortical networks trade communication efficiency for computational reliability. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2025.12.11.693716v1

New paper out in @science.org! We unveil the online manipulation market with the Cambridge Online Trust & Safety Index (COTSI). We show in real time the cost of purchasing fake accounts across every social platform around the world - so they can be held accountable www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Our Click to Call is set up! Let's get these phones ringing off the hook with voters demanding that our representatives take a stand, and give Bobby the Boot! There is not a moment too soon to #impeachrfkjr standupforscience.net/impeac...

Have you called your congressperson today to tell them to co-sponsor articles of impeachment for RFK jr????

posted about my Apple ID woes, please share widely? hey.paris/posts/appleid/

Neural replay is connected to latent cause inference and supports fast generalization https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2025.12.12.693963v1

Friendly holiday reminder that people rush to submit before the holidays and declined reviews get even worse than usual. And editors want to enjoy holiday time, too. Patience and grace to all (and to all a good night)!

When the AI boom began, copywriters were singled out as one of the jobs most vulnerable to AI. Now, three years later, I wanted to hear from workers on the frontlines of the industry, to hear what had actually taken place on the ground. For many, it was even worse than they'd feared.

Is there anything in academia that is not horrifically anticlimactic?

Enjoyed this James Hoffman video on the neuroscience of why coffee ☕️ makes you poo 💩 youtu.be/LZnAQ-PWQdg?...

lab preprint! Interopceptive predictions are central to many brain-body interactions theories, but it's unclear if/how they affect bodily physiology. We (fearless Einav Litvak et al) show that insular cortex predictions are essential for glucose homeostasis-THREAD.. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Our toddler (3 since May) is really going through it right now. she's been stuck in potty training since the summer (struggling to go #2, very withholding), home sick since last week, and is just generally super frustrated with us and everything around her. I feel for her thought she pushes away.