Can a brain injury make someone lose their imagination? We describe rare cases of acquired aphantasia, people who lost the ability to visually imagine after a stroke or other brain injury. Now published in Cortex 🧠 @braincircuits.bsky.social www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Large, real world cohort of patients (n=468) receiving amyloid target therapies in our center tracks amyloid-related edema and hemorrhage and identifies unique risk factors for ARIA including high-normal sodium and elevated diastolic blood pressure www.medrxiv.org/content/10.6...

“More than 7,800 research grants terminated or frozen. Some 25,000 scientists and personnel gone from agencies that oversee research. Proposed budget cuts of 35% — amounting to US$32 billion.”

This Thursday at noon. Join us (over Zoom) for the MIT Consciousness Club. George Mashour (University of Michigan Medical School) - "Consciousness and the Dying Brain" sites.google.com/view/mit-con... #neuroscience

From a new @thelancet.com article today entitled "Health care in the USA: money has become the mission" www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

Are connectome-based network mapping methods and the >200 papers that have used it invalid? New paper out in @NatureNeuro says YES. nature.com/articles/s41... I have concerns about this new paper's methods and conclusions, but am biased. What do others think?

Was fun presenting our work on network localization of aphantasia at #ASSC @assc28.bsky.social - I get pretty excited about #consciousness and visual mental imagery

Nice coverage of our recent paper: “White matter disconnection in acquired criminality” in @springernature.com by @cuanschutz.bsky.social news.cuanschutz.edu/news-stories...

What is common knowledge in your field, but shocks outsiders? There are almost no routine clinical applications of functional MRI for diagnosis and treatment in Neurology

Thrilled our ADHD network mapping work is now out in Annals of the Child Neurology Society, and honored to be featured on the cover! 🔗 Full article: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.... @childneurosoc.bsky.social @bostonchildrens.bsky.social @simonwarfield.bsky.social @braincircuits.bsky.social

Can a brain injury lead someone to commit a crime? Brain imaging is increasingly introduced as evidence in criminal trials but it remains unclear which structural injuries play a causal role in criminal behavior. @braincircuits.bsky.social @foxmdphd.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...

How far we’ve come in the “imagery debate”!

Interesting new lesion meta-analysis of aphantasia, in line with the importance of a specific region in the fusiform gyrus, previously identified by @alfredospagna.bsky.social et al, for visual mental imagery 🧠 www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

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...

New online! Implications of AD plasma and PET biomarker discordance

When the moment came, Harvard didn’t hedge or flinch—it stood up. A reminder that integrity isn’t complicated, it’s just rare.

This is high art

How does early life adversity impact white matter brain connections and subsequent cognitive abilities? Adversity was associated with lower white matter integrity and later difficulty with arithmetic & receptive language yet interpersonal resilience was protective. www.pnas.org/doi/epub/10....

Standing room only for 2 hour symposium on functional neurological disorder (#FND) at the #AAN2025 meeting - with a focus on functional seizures, post concussive syndrome / functional cognitive disorder & pathophysiology. #BarbaraDworetzky @mattburkemd.bsky.social

Was fun to do a podcast about our recent paper on creativity and brain disease with Dr Norman Swan @abcnewsbot.bsky.social @braincircuits.bsky.social @foxmdphd.bsky.social @harvardmed.bsky.social www.abc.net.au/listen/progr...

What is midrash? Interesting analysis by Ishay Rosen-Zvi @harvarddivinity.bsky.social on unique midrashic terminology (and apparently the Qumran folks thought there was a Sefer haBrit given to Abraham 📜)

Cool talk by Aaron Boes on clinical applications and cognitive prognosis from network neuroimaging @bostonchildrens.bsky.social @harvardmed.bsky.social

It's finally here! Use the Network Correspondence Toolbox to help contextualize your neuroimaging findings 🧠

99% of new medicines developed by the pharmaceutical industry depend on NIH research jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

Measles top Page One. @usatoday.com

Does human creativity map to a specific brain circuit? Can damage to this brain circuit increase creativity? New paper by Julian Kutsche @isaiahneuro.bsky.social @braincircuits.bsky.social out today in JAMA Network says answer to both is YES. Paper is open access and great thread below:

How can a brain disease increase creativity? We derive a brain circuit from creative tasks demonstrating they share reduced activity in the right frontal pole. Then we show that brain lesions & neurodegeneration that increase creativity are connected to this location jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

Do lesions that cause psychosis fall into a common brain network? Exciting new work by @andrewpines.bsky.social, @shansiddiqi.bsky.social and colleagues – tweetorial below by the first author, paper here: jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

I hope you enjoy some of the ideas I put forward in “Metacognition in the listening brain”: Trends in Neurosciences www.cell.com/trends/neuro... — out now.

Contra Michel et al.s' recent (2024) Letter in TICS (@matthiasmichel.bsky.social @jorge-morales.bsky.social), I argue that the episodic memory findings in aphantasia are genuine and defend the episodic memory account of aphantasia. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

"...the population-attributable fraction of cannabis use disorder associated with schizophrenia increased significantly from 3.7% in the prelegalization period to 10.3% during the postlegalization period." #Cannabis is not without risks... #MedSky #PoliSky

Thanks to all who came to support and watched online! A recording is available here: www.youtube.com/live/6LSfkQk...

In an unprecedented move, research-grant reviews have been suspended indefinitely at the world’s largest public funder of biomedical research https://go.nature.com/4gc0Bc5

Beautiful lecture by Dr. Schmahmann on the Systems Neuroscience of White Matter Pathways in honor of Dr. Filley @cumedicalschool.bsky.social @harvardmed.bsky.social

My article "A comprehensive assessment of current methods for measuring metacognition" is finally out in Nature Communications 🎉 If you work on metacognition and think you know the psychometric properties of your favorite measure, you may be surprised. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

“Was neither necessary nor sufficient”

“Consolidating memories…can be achieved by randomly interleaving their reactivation..[vs.] a temporal microstructure of sleep [that] promotes reactivation —> microstructure of non-REM sleep organizes memory replay w/ previous versus new memories being temporally segregated in different substates”

Report in NEJM describing the first critically ill adolescent with #H5N1 D1.1 (aka #BirdFlu) in North America. A 13 yo rapidly progressed from mild symptoms to respiratory & renal failure. She survived thanks to IMV + ECMO + CRRT. Scary stuff. 📄 www.nejm.org/doi/full/10....

I think about thinking

Cool to see our work from @braincircuits.bsky.social featured in @sciam.bsky.social today. Great read on an interesting and bizarre neurological condition. www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-...

Wonderful christmas read featuring our network mapping work on Alice in Wonderland syndrome- a bizarre and fascinating perceptual disorder. Kudos @sciam.bsky.social @foxmdphd.bsky.social @braincircuits.bsky.social www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-...

some fun discussion here 🧠📈 #cogSci #psychology #PhilMind #PhilNeuro #PhilCogSci

"Polls have shown that principal investigator biologists now spend up to 40 percent of their time—it’s a shocking number, 40 percent of their time—writing grants." www.harvardmagazine.com/2025/01/harv...

Wow - what’s going to happen with the software/hardware analogy? @davidlewisperez.bsky.social

The limiting factor for MRI based prediction of behavioral traits may be neither the imaging nor the pipeline or learning algorith but rather the reliability of the target phenotypes Thought provoking work my Martin Gell et al: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

In this new preprint @smfleming.bsky.social and I present a new theory of the functions and evolution of conscious vision. This is a big project: osf.io/preprints/ps.... We'd love to get your comments!

Should Alzheimer's be diagnosed with a blood test? Proposal sparks controversy doi.org/10.1038/d415...

How can someone lose a part of their vision and not know it? Visual deficits that go unnoticed challenges the view that our conscious experiences are what we know best. We review the surprisingly common phenomena @braincircuits.bsky.social Last day of free access to the full PDF⏱️ t.co/CBBLrhy5sB