After 5 years of data collection, our WARN-D machine learning competition to forecast depression onset is now LIVE! We hope many of you will participate—we have incredibly rich data. If you share a single thing of my lab this year, please make it this competition. eiko-fried.com/warn-d-machi...

Journal article: “the data are available on request” The data:

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

📢 Coming soon: A fully funded PhD position in this project, thanks to @dfg.de . If you're into social neuroscience, threat learning, or computational physiology — stay tuned!

The Renaissance of pupil dilation papers might be my favorite development in the recent years. They truly are the window to the soul

Synesthetes claim sensory experiences, such as seeing color when reading or hearing a (black) number. 
But how genuine are these reports and sensations? We introduce a rather direct measure of synesthetic perception: Synesthetes’ pupils respond to evoked color as if it was real color #vision! 👁️🎨🧪

I feared this in 2016, but now it’s happened: The CDC is gone. Strike them from your list of reliable purveyors of information.

Introducing CorText: a framework that fuses brain data directly into a large language model, allowing for interactive neural readout using natural language. tl;dr: you can now chat with a brain scan 🧠💬 1/n

🚨Preprint: Semantic Tuning of Single Neurons in the Human Medial Temporal Lobe 1/8: How do human neurons encode meaning? In this work, led by Katharina Karkowski, we recorded hundreds of human MTL neurons to study semantic coding in the human brain: doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Last week I was being trained as a #MNE-Python TrainEErs at #PracticalMEEG2025 - it was a lot of fun to look behind the scenes and learn how to run a good workshop :) thanks to @cuttingeeg.bsky.social for hosting and Marijn van Vliet and @nschawor.bsky.social for organizing this amazing workshop!

this week at #PracticalMEEG2025 in Aix! having run an MEG pipeline by trial and error, I was doubting myself between all parameters. lectures on the analysis steps + hands-on application together were very helpful! & seeing women on stage sharing what they're excited about just hits different ⭐️

Remember: finding oscillatory PCA components might not necessarily mean that there is oscillatory activity in your data

New paper finds that selective reporting remains the most replicable finding in science: journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.... I especially like their new exploratory metric 'p-values per participant'. Some papers had 11 p-values per participant! 🤯

How well do classifiers trained on visual activity actually transfer to non-visual reactivation? #Decoding studies often rely on training in one (visual) condition and applying it to another (e.g. rest-reactivation). However: How well does this work? Show us what makes it work and win up to 1000$!

Running Windows apps seamlessly on Linux? Finally a worthy WSL equivalent for Linux (LSW so to say)! No emulator, but a real Windows running in the background. Even Office works! wow. github.com/TibixDev/win...

Proposal for how to fix family wise error rates. For every uncorrected p value you must add an extra letter to the claim. “Eating chocolate maaaaaaaaay be associated with lower rates of stroke”

17,058 proposals received, 1,650 to be funded. Break-even, where more money is paid out than burned by the process, is ~2 months time investment per application (assuming only few admin/review/non-submitted efforts). Uncomfortably close to predatory territory: doi.org/10.1111/imcb...

www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-revie... Memory beyond synaptic plasticity - are there alternatives? Some thoughts and ideas from my favorite blog. Was an thought-provocing read, albeit I'm not convinced by all things said.

A transformation from vision to imagery in the human brain. Intriguing new preprint by Roy & Naselaris et al for anyone interested in mental imagery! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

cool evidence for systems consolidation in humans

Excited to present our new work reading minds! Ok, not *that* kind of mind reading, but we have created a deep learning method capable of using single neuron recordings from people watching episodes of TV that can predict when they recall specific memories from the episode. 1/6

Delighted to share our work on replay and successor representations! We find replay during very short task pauses in human visual cortex that is linked to learning SRs & happens when learning is implicit. Study led by @lnnrtwttkhn.bsky.social #compneuro #neuroskyence www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Excited to share our new paper on theta-phase locking of single neurons during human spatial memory: www.nature.com/articles/s41... With @lukaskunz.bsky.social, Joshua Jacobs, and our colleagues from the University of Freiburg

Liebe Menschen in Mannheim und einem Umkreis von 100km, ich würde mich sehr freuen, wenn ihr an dieser wunderbaren psychologischen Studie teilnehmt. Reposten ist natürlich auch sehr willkommen! Hier die Studieninfo von der Studienleitung: 🧵1/7

Undoubtedly the most massive group effort I was ever lucky to be involved in. Led by the ever-unwavering @annekeitel.bsky.social, this preprint synthesizes the status quo of what we (don't) know about neural oscillations. Grateful to be part of the @scone-neuro.bsky.social network. #neuroskyence

Serious concerns about a new cortical biomarker for pain sensitivity jamanetwork.com/journals/jam... We (with @tspisak.bsky.social, @christianbuchel.bsky.social) published a commentary on Chowdhury, Bi et al. (2025, JAMA Neurology) raising serious concerns about their reported results. 👇 1/13

Our study is out in Nature! Using wireless Neuropixels we recorded hippocampal activity in freely flying bats and uncovered replay and theta(less) sweeps, revealing striking differences from classic rodent models. 👉 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Binz et al. (in press, Nature) developed an LLM called Centaur that better predicts human responses in 159 of 160 behavioural experiments compared to existing cognitive models. See: arxiv.org/abs/2410.20268

New preprint with amazing work from @nchalas.bsky.social: How does respiration influence (un-)predictable near-threshold perception? MEG, arousal modulation, excitability states, respiration phase-resolved connectivity changes - it's all there :) #neuroskyence www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Here is my checklist summarising a small set of some of the simplest tasks you can do that have high potential to improve the reproducibility of your analysis code. This is based on my year of reproducibility reviews for the J. of Archaeological Science: authors.elsevier.com/a/1lHjN_6yUM... 🧪🏺

In this study, led by BlueSky-less superstar undergrad Andrew Lazarus, we set out to ask whether longer reactivation events during sleep lead to more memory benefits. Results suggest this is not the case, but there are some disclaimers. Read all about it! #sleep www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

746 proposals for a total of 3M (about 13 will be funded). If orgs spent 4000 in personnel time preparing their proposals on average, then this mechanism actually reduced funding for open science. Open science is extremely underfunded.

preprint alert 🚨 1/ Can we accurately detect sequential replay in humans using Temporally Delayed Linear Modelling (#TDLM)? In our recent study, we could not find any replay and decided to dig deeper by running a hybrid simulation with surprising results. Link to preprint & details below 👇

New opinion paper in @cp-trendsneuro.bsky.social with Dan Bendor, where we argue that rodent studies provide only marginal support for the idea that replay supports real-time decisions (e.g. planning). Fictive learning and memory tagging are more consistent w/evidence. www.cell.com/trends/neuro...

Can LLMs predict how humans percieve GIFs? My new (and first) blog post might give you an unexpected answer! skjerns.de/2025/01/26/d...

Super interesting results! Replay of recent paths is suppressed directly after exploration.

Awesome postdoc opportunity Mannheim/Heidelberg! Option A: chose from the exiting projects proposed by us Option B: propose your own project --> get two years postdoc at Germany's oldest uni with some of the best neuroscience facilities in Europe! www.health-life-sciences.de/opportunitie...

New preprint on "Attitudes Toward Open Science Practices"! We asked 596 German psychologists about their worries and hopes towards open science practices! ECRs reported more worries AND more fears, but the more you use OS the less worries and the more hopes you have. osf.io/preprints/ps...

Check out our new preprint of the effects of physical exercise on new learning AFTER intervening sleep. Our idea was to use HIIT to enhance plastic processed that are occurring during sleep, i.e., the down selection of synaptic connections (proposed by Tononi). www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Have you tried to ask ChatGPT for a review of your ms. before you submit it? I highly recommend it. Here is a case study. replicationindex.com/2024/12/23/t...

💤 As I approach the end of my PostDoc at IMT Lucca, I’m looking for a new job! 🧠 Ideally: Research roles related to sleep/dream/consciousness/cognitive science. 🤖 Open to scientific writing & data analysis, too. 📍 Milan, nearby areas, or Switzerland. DMs open 💃🏼

(recycled from X) My favorite take on LLM intelligence is by Paul Cisek on the connectionists mailing list: "We are like a bunch of professional magicians (...) wondering: 'Maybe there really is magic? I think it’s not that machines have passed the Turing Test, but rather that we failed it." 🔥

Confidence intervals are confusing intervals. The reason is because they tell us something about what happens across many confidence intervals, not in any single confidence interval. In the long run, 95% of 95% CI contain a population parameter. 1/n

I am very honored to receive one of this years ERC Consolidator Grants!!! #ERCCoG 🥳🥳🥳🥳🥳🥳🥳🥳🥳 www.zi-mannheim.de/en/institute...

Day 2 of #AdventOfCode was rather annoying. Is there a better way than taking each position out and recalculating the row for part 2? github.com/skjerns/adve...

Although we don’t want this fight now, if we have to have it we will. We have all the funders/unis/institutes on our side. Elife papers will be treated just the same as before. And maybe we can collectively put a dent in Clarivate’s business model.

Memory researchers: I am looking for studies of the temporal dynamics of (conscious / deliberate) memory retrieval compared to (unconscious / spontaneous) memory reactivation / replay. Any pointers appreciated, bonus points for studies involving humans and multi-item sequences. Thanks! #neuroskyence

📺🎤 Video Release! We teach scientists how to track, organize and share their work using #VersionControl with #Git! I was interviewed about our course concept (German only, sorry)! 🧑‍🏫 Thanks to #DDLitLab @uni-hamburg.de for production + funding! 🙏 lecture2go.uni-hamburg.de/l2go/-/get/v...

Have you read our (David Morgan, @caggursoy.bsky.social , Samuel Sander, @skjerns.bsky.social , @gordonfeld.bsky.social ) paper about how reward guides retrieval decisions yet? If you haven't, maybe this short "behind the paper" blogpost is for you. communities.springernature.com/posts/memory...