back in the MEG after a break, doing the very last measurements. 🌟 surrounded by retrofuturistic objects, e.g., the MEG phantom: in the usual physics fashion, the human head is approximated by a water-filled sphere. electric fields can be generated inside the sphere to test source localization.

old school cool figure: Georgopoulous et al. (1988), example of population coding of movement direction. (or a retro space simulator? 🙃)

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ ⬆ brain rhythms ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ Subscribe: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:yy2mduwa64cqkfbwu7xc65w4/feed/aaap7fylawwqy

sometimes I am asked which is the best book/resource for starting out with EEG/MEG. I think my pick would be this one! 'MEG-EEG primer' academic.oup.com/book/46874 beautiful illustrations throughout & the side-by-side discussion of EEG & MEG makes a lot of sense.

weekend project: built an LED action potential 💡

Friday @ MEG lab diary entry: new high score in this head position deviation game, <0.8mm ➡️ a good day! 🟢🌟🟢

very useful to see work in this direction, trying to figure out the cellular contributions to 1/f-activity. at the moment, it's sometimes frustrating to read studies in the vein of: 'we found differences in this 1 number and it means this 1 thing', there's not enough evidence for that. 🙃

intracranial EEG artifact: if an electrode is located over a blood vessel, you can occasionally see some nice rhythms. sadly, these are not neural rhythms, but reflect the pulsation of the blood vessel, which moves the electrode around slightly. can also be seen in non-invasive EEG occasionally.

we have a themed bathroom on the ground floor of the institute 🙂 (designed by our fantastic graphic designer Claudia Kernberger)

Really happy for my awesome colleague Jiajie Zou! He is now leaving us for a postdoc at the MPI for Biological Cybernetics. Tübingen folks, please give him a warm welcome, aka invites for talks and such. 🙂

Mon-Thu: reformat figure legends for the 17th time and other equally exciting tasks, mild questioning of life choices. Friday!: look at the brain in real time! 🤩🙂

the median number of authors on a research paper who are familiar with the underlying code: 1 it generally feels like that number will decrease even further, honestly a quite scary development. 😕⬇️

"delta" activity across species 🙃

more MEG artefacts: the tram runs in ~200 meter distance from the MEG lab here. even though the MEG sensors are shielded by a few tons of metal, they still pick up the railway traction power signal (at 16.67 Hz in Germany), a demo of their high sensitivity.

my face when reviewing a paper and the authors have descended into the supplementary material of one of my papers for method specifics. 🌟

BIDS is definitely one of the absolute best things that happened to human neuroscience in the last years! extremely cool to see more and more expansions.

a while ago, I made this feed for neuroscience/cognitive science summer schools. after some tuning, it generally manages to find cool events. 🙂 bsky.app/profile/did:...

artefacts in MEG: here, the participant forgot to remove a belt with a metal buckle. the buckle moves when breathing, introducing low frequency artefacts. taking off the belt solves resolves this. 🙂

I honestly didn't expect it, but all MEG experiments after the winter break went super smoothly so far. spending every Friday looking at traces & 90s-style interfaces. 🙂

George Opie did the actual hard work on this, but I am happy to have contributed with some opinions from my oscillation armchair. 🙂〰️ the broader question is whether macroscale electrophysiological signals allow inference about underlying physiology & I am definitely optimistic about that.

I am interested in network effects in social media & post activity related to recent conferences may be an indicator of this. therefore, I counted bluesky vs. X/twitter posts mentioning #cosyne2026 hashtags, with more bluesky posts this time around.

time-frequency representation of human electrocorticography data. 🌊 one axis shows frequency, the other time. the high peaks correspond to a prominent alpha rhythm at 10 Hz which appears and subsides during the experiment.

booked the MEG again to do some final data collection after winter break, always very fun to be there. 🙂 (also: my last MEG experiment ever? 🥲) & love our pretty recruitment poster (designed by Claudia Kernberger)

always very cool to see developmental transitions! reminds me of the large-scale burst type signals of human preterm babies; which become decorrelated after a while. interesting to see this general type of dynamics in young rats. 🙂

woodcut illustration of the brain. 🧶 artist: Aoki Shukuya book: Kaishi Hen, anatomical atlas published in Kyoto in 1772.

I learned a lot from Christoph & Paolo when doing TMS-EEG experiments back then. all this methods knowledge now condensed here! 🌟 thanks to TMS-EEG, I feel that phase effects for sensorimotor mu-rhythms are now nicely established. (in contrast to visual alpha, which imho still needs work)

brain prize recipients over the years. I remembered that I made this plot last year for a bias watch project (yes, because of that 2013–2018 period 🙃). the prize for this year will be announced later this afternoon, let's see. 🔮

oscillatory bursts in unexpected places 🙃 (even with harmonics!)

beautiful plots! & structural changes clearly have implications for the strong changes in electrophysiological activity across development. one aspect that I find tricky: in the HBN dataset, ~70% of participants have a neurodevelopmental disorder, which is not discussed here.

wow! @ data analysis archaeology I want to see the LFP for this. 🙃

How dynamics arise from the structure is my biggest interest. In this study, we started with a small step and asked how structure constrains dynamics. Spoiler: would that it were so simple… (1/6)

now all researchers associated with a label get added to a method starter pack. these are created automatically once a label reaches 10 people or so; updated in intervals; randomized order every time for democracy. 💫 for example, 〰️MEG starter pack bsky.app/starter-pack...

I built a bluesky labeler for neuroscience methods. 1️⃣ follow/subscribe to: @neuromethods.bsky.social 2️⃣ like the post with your favorite method ➡️ get a shiny methods label in your profile/posts. 🌟

I played around with building a bluesky labeler for neuroscience methods. subscribe to: neuromethods.bsky.social and like the corresponding post to have a shiny methods label appear in your profile.

sometimes you need to see objects in 3D to appreciate their structure more: the human brain as always with great folding & curvature. 🌟

I was wondering for ages why posts from some people never show up in the bluesky timeline. finally figured it out, it was: Settings > Languages > Content Languages set to only English. this filters out many posts, e.g. ones with the wrong language set. maybe it's useful for somebody else. 🙂

underappreciated concept 🙂 for more dipoles: neighboring dipoles have different orientations & can have different stimulus preferences. so even though topographies look similar, subtle differences remain. maybe that's why it is possible to decode information from relatively few sensors?

neuroscience data often has a many-to-many data structure, e.g relationships across regions, which is hard to visualize. (connected edge graphs = chaotic & not that useful honestly 🙃) treating time as an extra dimension like here looks pretty cool! @ this 'crawling seed' movie #VisualizationInspo

💯 there's definitely a big divide between human and animal neuroscience. e.g., there are few training courses that take a unified approach, it feels highly separated. a big missed opportunity...

oscillations & 1/f-activity in Fragile X syndrome, human & for a mouse model. some differences in alpha, but what sticks out to me is that the second frequency peak (~30 Hz) is looks so unusual in the human clinical phenotype, cool. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

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.