Tim Lawn

The Danger Of Superhuman AI Is Not What You Think | NOEMA The rhetoric over “superhuman” AI implicitly erases what’s most important about being human.

The danger of superhuman AI is not what you think. This essay in @noemamag.com by @shannonvallor.bsky.social is brilliant. Well worth a read. www.noemamag.com/the-danger-o...

Inter-individual variability of neurotransmitter receptor and transporter density in the human brain | doi.org/10.1007/s004...

How do neuroreceptor distributions vary across people?

🚨 New preprint: Objective Quality Assessment for Precision fMRI

Precision functional mapping (PFM) enables individual-level brain network studies — but demands more, and better, data.

We introduce an objective framework to determine when a dataset truly supports interpretable, replicable PFM.

The science of psychedelic medicine - Nature Medicine This Review outlines the science behind psychedelic medicine and integrates mechanistic knowledge with clinical evidence across neuropsychiatric indications, highlighting challenges, controversies and...

The big questions facing psychedelic science:

1. What’s the biology of psychedelic experiences?
2. Is the experience necessary for clinical benefit?
3. How do we solve expectancy+unblinding in trials?

We synthesize what we know and the big Qs in a Nature Med Review:
nature.com/articles/s41...

🐭🧠 Can fUSI truly map canonical mouse resting-state networks — and how does it compare to fMRI?

I’m excited to share the work of my PhD in our new preprint!👉 doi.org/10.64898/202...

Go check it out — it’s time to expand your neuroimaging toolkit 🧠🚀

The many-to-many problem of endophenotypes in psychiatry - a biological perspective - Molecular Psychiatry Molecular Psychiatry - The many-to-many problem of endophenotypes in psychiatry - a biological perspective

Despite decades of research there are still no reliable biomarkers for any of the major psychiatric diagnoses. In this now published perspective in Molecular Psychiatry we consolidate evidence from genetics, exposome and neuroimaging research on the potential reasons underlying these failures.

A social club — started by Nico Dosenbach, MD, PhD and a colleague — dubbed the "Midnight Scan Club," leveraged low-cost nighttime fMRI scans to provide unique insights into individual brain function.
Read all about the history of precision self-scanning: https://bit.ly/4qeuLjR

With a +64% increase in MSCA 2025 scholarship applications, funding cut-offs reached absurd levels. (e.g. a score of 96/100 remained unfunded, got news today from a candidate I sponsored). When rating is this compressed, a lottery among top-rated proposals deserves serious consideration I think.

Parkinson’s disease as a somato-cognitive action network disorder - Nature The substantia nigra and all Parkinson’s disease deep-brain stimulation targets are selectively connected to the somato-cognitive action network rather than to effector-specific motor regions.

A recently discovered brain network that links cognition (thinking) and actions may have an important role in Parkinson’s disease and could improve its treatment, according to a study published in Nature: spklr.io/63320DMwOi

#Neuroscience #Neuroskyence #Parkinsons 🧠 🧪

Excited to share a new preprint, led by the inimitable @colleenhughes.bsky.social!

Individualized Mapping of Functional Brain Networks in Older Adulthood

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

A short 🧵 1/

Individualized Mapping of Functional Brain Networks in Older Adulthood https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.01.30.702883v1

Convergent transcriptomic and connectomic controllers of information integration and its anaesthetic breakdown across mammalian brains - Nature Human Behaviour Luppi et al. identify transcriptomic and connectomic controllers of information integration and its breakdown induced by anaesthesia in humans, macaques, marmosets and mice.

Luppi et al. identify transcriptomic and connectomic controllers of information integration and its breakdown induced by anaesthesia across species

Left: Pathways involved in brain energy metabolism. Energy metabolism refers to processes involved in energy production from nutrient molecules. Glucose is the main energy source in the brain under normal physiological conditions. Glucose entering brain cells can be utilized in three parallel pathways. It can be processed through glycolysis to produce 2 ATP and 2 pyruvate molecules (blue). Lactate dehydrogenases catalyze the interconversion of lactate and pyruvate (purple). Pyruvate is transported into mitochondria, where it enters the TCA cycle to generate high-energy electron carriers NADH and FADH2 (green), driving the complete oxidation of glucose through the mitochondrial electron transport chain (red). Glucose entering the brain can also enter the PPP. PPP is an anabolic pathway that uses glucose to produce 5-carbon sugars and NADPH, an essential co-factor used in nucleotide and lipid biosynthesis (yellow). Glucose can also be stored in the form of glycogen via glycogen synthase, a process mainly active in astrocytes. Right: Energy pathway maps. Colors show z-scored mean expression values across all genes in each pathway. ppp, pentose phosphate pathway; tca, tricarboxylic acid cycle; oxphos, oxidative phosphorylation; lactate, lactate metabolism and transport.

How are energy #metabolism pathways distributed across the #cortex? @alaindagher.bsky.social &co map five pathways in the human #brain, linking metabolic organization with brain structural & functional properties, as well as developmental dynamics @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/4c1JVp8

Left: Pathways involved in brain energy metabolism. Energy metabolism refers to processes involved in energy production from nutrient molecules. Glucose is the main energy source in the brain under normal physiological conditions. Glucose entering brain cells can be utilized in three parallel pathways. It can be processed through glycolysis to produce 2 ATP and 2 pyruvate molecules (blue). Lactate dehydrogenases catalyze the interconversion of lactate and pyruvate (purple). Pyruvate is transported into mitochondria, where it enters the TCA cycle to generate high-energy electron carriers NADH and FADH2 (green), driving the complete oxidation of glucose through the mitochondrial electron transport chain (red). Glucose entering the brain can also enter the PPP. PPP is an anabolic pathway that uses glucose to produce 5-carbon sugars and NADPH, an essential co-factor used in nucleotide and lipid biosynthesis (yellow). Glucose can also be stored in the form of glycogen via glycogen synthase, a process mainly active in astrocytes. Right: Energy pathway maps. Colors show z-scored mean expression values across all genes in each pathway. ppp, pentose phosphate pathway; tca, tricarboxylic acid cycle; oxphos, oxidative phosphorylation; lactate, lactate metabolism and transport.

How are energy #metabolism pathways distributed across the #cortex? @alaindagher.bsky.social &co map five pathways in the human #brain, linking metabolic organization with brain structural & functional properties, as well as developmental dynamics @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/4c1JVp8

Histology-based SWM microstructure intensity profile. Top: SWM sampling framework from 3D postmortem histology. The Laplacian field within the white matter domain was solved for each histological classified volume to sample 50 SWM surfaces, spanning from the GM/WM interface to 3 mm into the white matter. These surfaces were then mapped to each histological staining method, allowing the extraction of intensity profiles for each vertex across SWM depths. Bottom: Alterations in the intensity distributions of histological features across SWM depths. The GM/WM interface (0 mm) and 25 representative SWM surfaces (up to 3 mm into the white matter) are shown. The surfaces showing the greatest variation in SWM, from 0 to 1.8 mm into the white matter, were mapped onto the brain alongside the intensity profiles on the left.

How does superficial white matter contribute to large-scale #brain function? @borismontreal.bsky.social &co use an approach based on 3D histology & 7-Tesla MRI to reveal associations between superficial #WhiteMatter microstructure & diverse cortical properties @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/460WNIz

Now in press one of my last PhD projects! We traced the neurobiological profile of fMRI BOLD signal variability, a measure that has been related to age, behaviour, disease status, but had not yet been fully contextualised within the brain's multiscale architecture. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

We could all use some extra stress #resilience rn. But how does it work in the brain? On the surface, resilience looks like ignoring stress. Does the brain fail to respond? Or are active adaptations required? Or are resilience and susceptibility divergent paths? doi.org/10.1016/j.celrep.2025.116867

People have been looking at "AI & brains" through the lens of LLMs/transformers. But what latent diffusion? (think text-to-image/video platforms such as Midjourney).

**Class conditioned latent diffusion and semantically cued hippocampus share a remarkably similar computational architecture...**

On research careers in academia and industry The epilogue to a series on Cognitive Science and AI

Should you go to academia or industry for research in AI or cognitive science? It's the most common question I get asked by PhD students, and I've written up some of my thoughts on the answer, as an epilogue to my research-focused series on these fields: infinitefaculty.substack.com/p/on-researc...

George Mashour "Consciousness and the Dying Brain" at the MIT Consciousness Club.
#neuroscience

The neural correlates of shared and individual experience - Communications Biology The authors find a correspondence between dynamic ratings of subjective experience and brain network dynamics during a naturalistic auditory story. They then explore which networks differentially supp...

Consciousness is personal. Awake story listening fMRI shows that default mode network dynamics diverge across individuals, supporting personal experience, while auditory & attention networks stay aligned, underpinning shared experience. #Neuroscience #Consciousness
www.nature.com/articles/s42...

𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗶𝘀 𝗻𝗼𝗶𝘀𝗲 𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗯𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻?
Almost always we average responses thus equating response variability with noise.
Well, we shouldn't because variability is also signal, not noise to be entirely discarded.
#neuroskyence
doi.org/10.1016/j.ne...

A brief history of precision self-scanning When a researcher solved a logistical problem by going rogue, the idea proved remarkably infectious.

When a brain researcher solved a logistical problem by going rogue, the idea proved remarkably infectious.

By @lyrebard.bsky.social

#neuroskyence

www.thetransmitter.org/brain-imagin...

Now online in @biologicalpsych.bsky.social CNNI - our paper showing that reliance on habitual responding in transdiagnostic compulsivity may be underpinned by uncertainty about learned environmental structure

📃 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Learning as the unifying mechanism of psychedelic action - Alice Caulfield, Allan H. Young, Mitul Mehta, 2025 Psychedelics are gaining attention as putative treatments for a range of psychiatric conditions, and evidence suggests that they produce sustained behavioural a...

New theory of psychedelic mechanisms just dropped:
"Learning as the unifying mechanism of psychedelic action."

journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

Methodological flaw may upend network mapping tool The lesion network mapping method, used to identify disease-specific brain networks for clinical stimulation, produces a nearly identical network map for any given condition, according to a new study.

More than 200 published studies and at least seven ongoing clinical trials rely on potentially faulty brain network maps, according to a study published yesterday.

By @avaskham.bsky.social

#neuroskyence

www.thetransmitter.org/brain-imagin...

Investigating the methodological foundation of lesion network mapping - Nature Neuroscience The lesion network mapping method links diverse brain lesions to similar functional brain networks, reflecting general brain organization rather than disorder-specific circuits.

Really thorough breakdown to methodological limitations of lesion network mapping!

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

We have reached a situation where (1) the time/resources spent by people applying for grant X often outweighs (2) the time/resources awarded.

For these grants, society loses net time/resources.

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Gonadal and sex chromosomal contributions to sex differences in mammalian brain organization www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... - really nice work from Armin Raznahan @bogglerapture.bsky.social and colleagues

Please spread the word🔊My lab is looking to hire two international postdocs. If you want to do comp neuro, combine machine learning and awesome math to understand neural circuit activity, then come work with us! Bonn is such a cool place for neuroscience now, you don't want to miss out.