Lina Skora

Reporting today as a freshly-minted #MSCA fellow - I will be joining the @epanlab.bsky.social at the @dondersinst.bsky.social 🤩 Over the moon, but also thinking about all the excellent proposals who were not awarded funding in this brutal round - feels more like a lottery than ever.

Article by article, how Big Tech shaped the EU’s roll-back of digital rights | Corporate Europe Observatory In a new analysis we trace Big Tech's fingerprints on the Digital Omnibus proposals - a major deregulation of EU digital laws including the GDPR and the AI Act. They are helped in this attempt by the ...

The EU’s “Digital Omnibus” is being sold as simplification. Analysis shows something else: major changes that tilt the rules toward Big Tech-weakening privacy, AI safeguards, and accountability.

corporateeurope.org/en/2026/01/a...

👇👇👇

Cardiac-vagal rhythm echoes on the heartbeat’s mechanosensory imprint in the brain - Communications Biology Vagal-driven heart rhythm fluctuations modulate the heartbeat strength sensed in the head, linking cardiac rhythms to brain mechanosensation. These findings highlight vagal tone’s role in shaping brai...

Out now in Communications Biology 🧠 🫀We show that cardiac oscillations associated with vagal tone influence the strength of the heartbeat as sensed at brain level. We hypothesize that the heart may send information to the brain, encoded by the heartbeat strength doi.org/10.1038/s420...

Excellent theme issue - a much needed spotlight on the functions of consciousness!

Congratulations, how exciting!

So happy this paper is now out in @plosbiology.org! We investigated whether fluctuations in MEPs can be explained by phasic influences from internal bodily rhythms, and whether this might happen independently per organ system.
#interoception #neuroskyence

Figure from paper showing "The Brain is ..." at the top and answers in a 2D embedding space at the bottom.

Complete this sentence, "The brain is ...".
What's your favorite answer? I'm team cluster 17/18.

Taken from this delightful paper by Taylor Bolt and @lucinauddin.bsky.social; results of text in >4 million peer-reviewed articles + text analytic tools.

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39798046/

Congrats Dennis!

Interoceptive Ability is Unrelated to Mental Health Symptoms: Evidence From a Large Scale Multi-Domain Psychophysical Investigation Interoception-the sensing and perception of the internal viscera-is widely cast as a transdiagnostic mechanism linking brain-body interaction to mental illness. Prevailing models propose that altered ...

Are interoception and mental health linked? Many assume so, with interoception even described as a psychiatric “p-factor.” But in our latest preprint, we were surprised to find little evidence for such a connection. www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1... 🧵 Thread with our reflections on the matter 👇

Could the diversity of findings in heartbeat-evoked response (HER) research be due to variability in methods?

In our new preprint my co-first authors, Maria Azanova and @willenjoy.bsky.social, and me systematically reviewed 132 M/EEG HER studies and found:

The first step to publishing null results is to learn about equivalence testing, so that you can design studies that statistically support the conclusion that there is no meaningful effect. lakens.github.io/statistical_.... If you are a statistics teacher, include this into 2nd year courses.

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

Respiration as a dynamic modulator of sensory sampling Respiration dynamically modulates sensory perception by orchestrating transient states of the brain and the body. Using simultaneous recordings of high-density magneto-encephalography (MEG), respirati...

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...

Are you hurting?

'Mental health diagnoses are not just misapplied, but invented.'

Camilla Nord on the mental illness epidemic

Out in Cognitive Psychology, led by @maxmaier.bsky.social: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
A new lottery task with choices that matter across trials; the risky option has a chance of going extinct, which ends the study. We derive optimal policies and develop a strategy-classification model.

Super interesting! Do you think there is any reason why the location (L/R ear) would matter? We didn’t find an effect of subjective intensity perception in our left-ear study… In any case, I think we might have to come up with a new sham control

A plot showing that taVNS does not induce larger pupil dilation compared to sham.

A plot showing that sham-induced pupil dilation is much more variable

Pulsed taVNS elicits pupil dilation. However, if sham feels as intense, there is not much left. Based on our comparatively large sample (94 participants, single-blind crossover), we show that a highly variable sham response explains this.
#neuroskyence 🩺
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Make science more collegial: why the time for ‘adversarial collaboration’ has come Bringing together proponents of rival theories to test their ideas against each other can advance science — but only if all sides can accept that they might be wrong.

Thanks I hate it. This "let's settle things in the ring once and for all" approach to science is weird as hell. There are no easy formulas, no promised answers, and science isn't to be determined by an agreement between two parties.

When your heart isn't in it anymore: Cardiac correlates of task disengagement Neuroscience is beginning to uncover the role of interoceptive feedback in perception, learning, and decision-making; however, the relation between spontaneous visceral and cognitive dynamics has rece...

Mind-wandering is associated with late modulation of the heartbeat-evoked potential; mind-blanking is associated with greater decoupling of heart-brain phase coupling.

New findings from our radically-revised study of spontaneous cognitive & physiological dynamics

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

The Cruel Fantasies of Well-Fed People The astonishing story of how a movement’s quest for rural simplicity drifted into a formula for mass death

The Cruel Fantasies of Well-Fed People. A couple of years old now, from @georgemonbiot.bsky.social A long read so get yourself a cuppa. TLDR = 8 billion+ people need an efficient food system not a rural fantasy. #food #sustainability #doughnuteconomics www.monbiot.com/2023/10/04/t...

These fluffy white wolves explain everything wrong with bringing back extinct animals Don’t buy the hype about “de-extinction.”

The fun thing abt my job is sometimes I have no idea what will be plopped onto my agenda—which is to say, I got roped into writing about the new wolves. They're neither dire wolves nor "de-extincted," & they have more to do w/ enacting human fantasies than helping animals
www.vox.com/future-perfe...

1. One of capitalism’s greatest successes is to shut down our imaginations. With the help of its favoured tools - neoliberalism and fascism - it persuades us that “there is no alternative”. Our first task is to re-ignite our moral imaginations and name our alternatives. 🧵

Great news Jonathan, congrats!

A graphical abstract titled "Can Beta-Blockers Manipulate Interoception? A Placebo-Controlled Study." The image illustrates how bisoprolol and propranolol affect interoception. On the left, a green figure represents bisoprolol, showing a zoomed-in synapse where it selectively blocks β1 receptors. On the right, a purple figure represents propranolol, blocking both β1 and β2 receptors, affecting both brain and body. A psychophysics graph models interoceptive responses, showing response intensity over trials. Below, line plots compare placebo, propranolol, and bisoprolol effects on interoception—cardioception (threshold) and respiroception (slope)—indicating drug effects on bodily awareness.

Can we enhance interoception by controlling the heart? Thrilled to share our new study, led by @ashleytyrer.bsky.social , where we use computational modeling to show that blockading peripheral noradrenaline uniquely alters awareness of heart rate & breathing! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 🧵👇

An important thread on a straggeringly irresponsible Nature(?!) piece ⬇️

Why academia is sleepwalking into self-destruction. My editorial @brain1878.bsky.social If you agree with the sentiments please repost. It's important for all our sakes to stop the madness
academic.oup.com/brain/articl...

Almost no papers using the heartbeat-evoked potential (HEP) report cardiovascular features, like blood pressure or stroke volume. When done, clear correlations appear. Another one here: doi.org/10.1016/j.bb...
If not properly processed or controlled, HEPs are not measures of brain-heart interaction

<em>Psychophysiology</em> | SPR Journal | Wiley Online Library Heart rate variability, measured by HF-HRV and RMSSD, is conventionally used to index cardiac vagal activity. Our study demonstrates that transcutaneous auricular vagus nerve stimulation (taVNS) decr...

Published now in Psychophysiology:
We show that taVNS decreases HRV independent of a caloric load. This suggests that acute taVNS does not increase cardiovagal activity ("vagal tone"). #neuroskyence 🩺
Led by @kristinkaduk.bsky.social w/ @koeniglab.bsky.social
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

There’s a Term for What Trump and Musk Are Doing How regime change happens in America

The Department of Government Efficiency isn't interested in efficiency. Or transparency, or cutting costs. It's real goal is to destroy the federal civil service. In other words, regime change. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...