I don't think I'll ever get bored of looking at raster plots of head-direction cells 🤩

the cutoff scores for #MSCA postdoc fellowships are very high this year. has the score distribution shifted compared to previous years? I made a plot with scores from past years. if scores are at ceiling level, the process becomes essentially a lottery, because minor issues can lead to deductions.

interesting oscillation peak frequency shifts under LSD compared to placebo, with power vs. frequency dissociation: regions that attenuated a lot in power, shifted relatively little in frequency & vice versa. 1/f-fits appear worse for LSD condition, implications of this would be interesting. 🤔

Before mice open their eyes at two weeks old, the retina exhibits spontaneous retinal waves. Waves at the start of the second postnatal week show a bias to propagate in the nasal direction (or right to left in the movie below). (2/11)

"Nested spatiotemporal theta–gamma waves organize hierarchical processing across the mouse visual cortex" www.nature.com/articles/s41... traveling waves-related, supershiny looking figures, apparently made in Julia: github.com/brendanjohnh... makes me want to learn it 🙂 #VisualizationInspo

bsky.app/profile/did:... another custom bluesky feed using regular expressions, this time for jobs in the realm of neuroscience 🙃 matches: (brain|psycho|neur|cogni|physio) and (postdoc|phd|coordinator|professor|fellow|researcher) and some keywords like job/opportunity/hiring/...

it's easy to create custom feeds for bluesky based on regular expressions, here's an attempt for rhythms in the brain: bsky.app/profile/did:... feeds with a curated user list amplify often the same high-profile posters, I feel this maybe has a better chance of catching more obscure content.

supernice colors! 🙂🌈 #VisualizationInspo

I def agree that there are multiple alpha rhythms. (I think the whole field agrees?) here, fixed 'archetypal' alpha components are identified & peak frequency variation across subjects is explained by relative contribution of archetypal components within a subject. interesting, but maybe odd?

if you look into the activity of any brain, usually many different rhythms can be seen. is there any systematic relationship between their frequencies? there are proposals (often by physicists 🙃) that rhythms are organized according to specific ratio, e.g. the golden ratio or simply factor 2.

ripple researchers probably open this article with sweaty palms, because ripple detection with 77% false positives for standard processing sounds pretty bad... 😨

Interpreting EEG requires understanding how the skull smears electrical fields as they propagate from the cortex. I made a browser-based simulator for my EEG class to visualize how dipole depth/orientation change the topomap. dbrang.github.io/EEG-Dipole-D... Github page: github.com/dbrang/EEG-D...

main goal for this year: find a new job! 🙂 looking for a role with fun & complex technical challenges & within a great community. my main expertise is in signal processing/EEG/MEG, but topic-wise I am quite flexible. science/industry both great! starting mid-year. nschawor.github.io/cv

took the longest vacation since forever (no laptop for once) now trying to integrate back into daily life 🧑‍💻🧠

📆 updated for 2026! list of summer schools & short courses in the realm of (computational) neuroscience or data analysis of EEG / MEG / LFP: 🔗 docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

are you looking for someone with expertise in analysis of neuroimaging data (fMRI/DTI/EEG)? see ⬇️

mole-rats seem to have a nice theta-rhythm!

currently reading this fun book about the early pioneers of animal electrophysiology (of course with the inevitable pile-on about who discovered electrical activity in the brain first 🙃).

in my experience, phase efects for sensorimotor mu-alpha rhythms can come out very clear. but for visual alpha there are definitely less consistent results... taking individual variability into account seems like a step in the right direction to me.

cool traces on old book covers 🙂

this paper shows 8 Hz oscillatory patterns in spontaneous unit activity, with spikes appearing at a regular pattern. so naturally, I was intrigued + downloaded the data + saw for myself. 🙂 really pretty! (but there is only 1 unit like this, out of ~15)

during SfN, it was fun to check the hashtag activity for #sfn25 or #sfn2025 here on bluesky, so I wondered how it would compare to twitter. grabbed the number of posts for each day via the API and it seems to be pretty comparable. (with reposts & replies excluded)

fun old experiment (1968): O. Lippold believed that the alpha rhythm was related to the physiological tremor in eye muscles (also ~10 Hz). so in this experiment, the eyeball was cooled & warmed to shift the muscle tremor frequency. when they measured EEG, the alpha frequency seems to change.

superconvinced that the folks from @backyardbrains.bsky.social have the most fun at work. 🧠🤖🙂 new educational robot with camera + motors. interesting for neuro: programmed with spiking neurons (similar devices typically use a sequential GUI programming interface like Scratch) #sfn25 #sfn2025

all the stars aligned ➡️ I am in San Diego for #sfn25 🙂 find me to chat about oscillations & other cool electrophysiology! already managed to get lab swag from the old lab! ❤️🙂

"Electrodes are held on the scalp of the patient by an arrangement of rubber and whalebone bars tied under the chin (fig. 1). A most suitable cap is one made for setting waves in hair. It is not necessary to shave the scalp, though the examination is easier if the hair is short and recently washed."

auditory tau-rhythm with a cool waveform, oscillating at 10 Hz, recorded with intracranial electrodes. 🧠〰️🙂

our lab alumni list is full of incredible people! poeppel-lab.github.io/alumni

thank you for listening to my EEG TED talk! (the vibes from these chairs 😅). we ran a MNE-python tutorial for >100 people for a week. the program going from preprocessing to source estimation to group analysis was ambitious, but I hope seeing all the steps involved was helpful for participants. 🙂

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!

learn about advanced electrophysiology-related toolboxes (>20 to choose from) at this online event, in lectures or hands-on tutorials: 📅 Wednesday, October 30th at 2 pm (CET) cuttingeeg.org/practicalmee... very cool concept! 🙂 free but registration required. #PracticalMEEG2025

very cool PI + great methods + 💰 #NeuroJobs

I always learned a great deal from simulating data (aka mostly how things don't really work the way they are advertised 🙃). so I can definitely recommend playing with this toolbox for simulating EEG/MEG sources with desired properties (location, coupling) for connectivity. ⬇️

made a mini-game for events: find pairs of matching brains, the Allen mouse brain & a macaque brain are smuggled in to make it easier. meanwhile, we can talk about brain structure, cortical folding, twins, individual differences, & etc. 🙂💗🧠

this looks great! (+ cool plots) given that alpha rhythm is often decreased in frequency (e.g. 8 Hz instead of 10 Hz) for epileptic patients and this is #iEEG data, I find it tricky to call this theta-activity; but it's also different from classical mu-dynamics (Fig. S4). 🤔

ok, imagine you have an oscillation that is not symmetric around 0 (small direct current shift) with some amplitude modulation, for instance with 1/f-dynamics. ➡️ then these 1/f-dynamics will show up in low frequency part of spectrum (red); in addition to around oscillation peak (yellow).

otherwise I have been mostly watching the color of 3 shapes (iykyk 😬). but lots of cool oscillatory bursts, now we need to look at the data during the annual MEG service. & already missing the balcony summer!

I love baby EEG, so had to check this! here, a dichotomy is drawn between theta & alpha rhythms, but this is tricky. the posterior dominant rhythm emerges in the infant at 3-4 Hz & increases until ~10 Hz in adults. I think there is much evidence that this 'theta' rhythm is the equiv of adult alpha.

back from summer break, back to printing little brains (& some real work too 🙂)

I'm giving a talk there in a workshop with a really great topic: "Same words, different worlds: Conceptual consistency in systems neuroscience" 🙂 & many other fab looking workshops! (some by my cool friends: @matteosaponati.bsky.social @rdgao.bsky.social @j-b-eppler.bsky.social 🌟)

a seemingly general electrophysiological phenomenon: once you have to process stimuli, low-frequency rhythms disappear, spectrum becomes flatter & sometimes an increase in broadband gamma activity. we also found this for visual memory encoding in #iEEG data: doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2404-24.2025

read the news about 17yr old Hannah Cairo who found a counterexample to a conjecture from harmonic analysis. love the playful presentation slide style. 🙂💕💚 #VisualizationInspo

making little mini brains for internal participants (who I can not pay with money) for our current experiment, using the individual structural MRIs. #ForbiddenBubbleGum 🙃

this figure from 1944 is cited as the first topoplot, from Koiti Motokawa. in an era where only handful of EEG channels across space were used, he measured the mean alpha amplitude for 90 points across the scalp. ❗ (compiling a presentation about the evolution of topoplots, cool stuff out there 🙂)

topoplots or vintage rugs? 🙃🌈

something curious I noticed when working with this dataset, related to the ease of access for different data components. I am not exactly sure what to do with this observation, but here you have it:

E/I-balance as a too simplistic construct, 1/f-exponent reflecting at least 10 different things (some of them definitely non-neural changes) ➡️ a tangled web of spurious correlations 😶‍🌫️ definitely more additional careful work needed

happy that our article about mu & alpha rhythm waveform shape in development is now finally out in the open: doi.org/10.1162/jocn... oscillation frequency changes across development (one of the most robust findings in the oscillation world). in this work, we also look at waveform shape changes.

I signed up to post this week for @realscientists.de (in German 😬), so let's see how that goes 🙂

in Oxford, looking at fancy bike helmets 🙂 #OPMMEG