Romy Lorenz

Brain Surfaces of 70 primate species

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To predict the behaviour of a primate, would you rather base your guess on a closely related species or one with a similar brain shape? We looked at brains & behaviours of 70 species, you’ll be surprised!

🧵Thread on our new preprint with @r3rt0.bsky.social , doi.org/10.1101/2025...

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All this suggests that mechanical morphogenesis may be a major 3rd causal determinant of the development and evolution of brain organisation in primates.

Spatial specificity of the functional gradient echo and spin echo BOLD signal across cortical depth at 7 T Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) at high magnetic field strengths (≥ 7 T) is a promising technique to study the functioning of the human brain at the spatial scale of cortical columns and ...

I’m happy to share that our manuscript on the cortical depth-dependency of the GE- and SE-BOLD point spread function at 7 Tesla is now available on bioRxiv!

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

A human brain network linked to restoration of consciousness after deep brain stimulation - Nature Communications In people with severe brain injuries, stimulation restored consciousness by engaging a deep brain circuit for wakefulness—revealing a target that may also guide treatment in stroke and epilepsy.

Just dropped in @natcomms.nature.com: we show that re-engaging a thalamic–ventral tegmental circuit with deep brain stimulation can reignite consciousness in patients with severe brain injury. Work led by Aaron Warren, with @andreashorn.org @foxmdphd.bsky.social @ others! tinyurl.com/4kz8j89b

Evidence for dlPFC contribution to #memory suppression using #TMS! Now accepted @jocn.bsky.social. Great team effort and collaboration with Gesa Hartwigsen’s lab @mpicbs.bsky.social‬. We also had an exemplary experience at the journal with editors @barense.bsky.social‬ & @bradpostle.bsky.social‬.

Excellent piece today in @thetransmitter.bsky.social by @callimcflurry.bsky.social on a paper we’ve discussed at some length here (🧵below); she does a terrific job capturing different reasons to be excited about this work (as well as the controversies).

www.thetransmitter.org/emotion-proc...

Stomach–brain coupling indexes a dimensional signature of mental health - Nature Mental Health Using a relatively large and diverse sample of mostly young adults, this study by Banellis, Rebollo and colleagues examines associations between regional stomach–brain coupling and mental health and i...

I’m elated to share our latest publication - out now in @natmentalhealth.nature.com! www.nature.com/articles/s44... - tour de force by @leahbanellis.bsky.social @brainandstomach.bsky.social and the rest of the VMP team!

Trying to train RNNs in a biol plausible (local) way? Well, try our new method using predictive alignment. Paper just out in Nat. Com. Toshitake Asabuki deserves all the credit!
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

One of the “golden videos” that I took during my Grass Fellowship @grassfoundation.bsky.social - active sleep in these little guys is so obvious and flamboyant! @mblscience.bsky.social

Transformers

I wrote an entry on Transformers for the Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science (‪@oecs-bot.bsky.social‬). I had to work with a tight word limit, but I hope it's useful as a short introduction for students and researchers who don't work on machine learning:

oecs.mit.edu/pub/ppxhxe2b

Sensory responses of visual cortical neurons are not prediction errors Predictive coding is theorized to be a ubiquitous cortical process to explain sensory responses. It asserts that the brain continuously predicts sensory information and imposes those predictions on lo...

1/3) This may be a very important paper, it suggests that there are no prediction error encoding neurons in sensory areas of cortex:

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

I personally am a big fan of the idea that cortical regions (allo and neo) are doing sequence prediction.

But...

🧠📈 🧪

This is a nice new study showing the mechanisms why CBV fMRI is so specific to cortical layers:
The somatostatin neurons are driving the hemodynamic response at fMRI-typical time scales.
By Vo et al, from Seong-Gi Kim's lab.
doi.org/10.1038/s414...

Still not using DeepPrep? It’s been downloaded 15k+ times (7k on DockerHub alone) in just 5 months after launch — helping labs speed through fMRI preprocessing 10x faster than conventional pipelines.
see doc: deepprep.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

King’s Prize Fellowship

For any postdocs who are are looking to transition to independence and might be keen to join us here at @kingsioppn.bsky.social, King's Prize fellowship applications are open (deadline 27 Nov)

👇 See link for details, and feel free to reach out if you'd like to chat

www.kcl.ac.uk/jobs/119505-...

there are many! (from recent OHBM anatomy session slides on PFC)

Unattended working memory items are coded by persistent activity in human medial temporal lobe neurons - Nature Human Behaviour Paluch et al. show that unattended working memory items, as well as attended ones, are encoded in persistent activity in the medial temporal lobe.

Unattended working memory items are coded by persistent activity in human medial temporal lobe neurons

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

𝗣𝗿𝗲𝗳𝗿𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗮𝗹 𝗰𝗼𝗿𝘁𝗲𝘅 𝗼𝗿𝗴𝗮𝗻𝗶𝘇𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻
𝗛𝗶𝗲𝗿𝗮𝗿𝗰𝗵𝘆, 𝗵𝗲𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗮𝗿𝗰𝗵𝘆, 𝗯𝗼𝘁𝗵, 𝗻𝗲𝗶𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗿??
Posting this paper again because it's looking more spectacular than I realized before.
#neuroskyence
doi.org/10.1016/j.ce...

Mapping human thalamocortical connectivity with electrical stimulation and recording - Nature Neuroscience Intracranial stimulation maps human brain causal connectivity, uncovering distinct pathways. The authors show that thalamic pulses uniquely evoke delayed theta oscillations, offering new insights into...

Stimulating and recording with intracranial electrodes implanted in cortical regions and thalamic nuclei across 4,864 sites in 27 human participants reveals distinct spectral signatures elicited by perturbations of specific brain areas

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

1/11 Excited to share our @Naturestudy led by @leonooi.bsky.social @csabaorban.bsky.social @shaoshiz.bsky.social

AI performance is known to scale with logarithm of sample size (Kaplan 2020), but in many domains, sample size can be # participants or # measurements...

doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Prefrontal axons going to lots of places!
doi.org/10.1016/j.ce...
#neuroskyence

We have argued that the brain’s Action Mode Network controls functions required for goal-directed behavior. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Now, in new work, we show that AMN contains distinct subnetworks for making decisions, implementing actions, and processing feedback. doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

Our Institute is currently recruiting 2 new independent group leaders (W2) - Apply and let‘s become colleagues! You‘ll get an attractive set-up package and join a collaborative and fun work environment here in Tübingen! Position is for 6+3 years!
www.kyb.tuebingen.mpg.de/839436/max-p...

NIH announces end to funding for animal-only studies - Drug Discovery and Development Drug Discovery and Development covers strategies and technologies related to pharmaceutical research and development and drug formulation.

This will devastate all of my colleagues that do neuroscience in mice. Drugs don't always translate from mouse to human, But 90% of our genes are shared. They allow recordings and manipulations that cannot be done in humans. We will cede discovery to Europe and China with this unnecessary handicap.

Our Institute is currently recruiting 2 new independent group leaders (W2) - Apply and let‘s become colleagues! You‘ll get an attractive set-up package and join a collaborative and fun work environment here in Tübingen! Position is for 6+3 years!
www.kyb.tuebingen.mpg.de/839436/max-p...

One of the exciting news for this year OHBM BrainHack is that we are bringing together like-minded events and joining up forces! @neurodesk.org will be there on June 21 for the Workshop, as well as the the 22nd with 23rd with two Hacking projects!

The Royal Society is offering £4 million per researcher for scientists in the USA who want to move to the UK. The money offered is £30 million in all for all the Fellowships. These Faraday Fellowships are for 5 to 10 years.

Researchers reveal how our brains predict what we’re about to see Researchers in the UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology find that the hippocampus sends signals to the visual cortex to predict what we are about to see.

News story on the UCL Brain Sciences website about our recent paper using 7T fMRI to study the communication between hippocampus and neocortex. www.ucl.ac.uk/brain-scienc... Link to the paper: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/.... #neuroskyence

Research Assistant in Real-Time fMRI and Closed-Loop Brain Stimulation (fMRI-TMS)

>>>Job alert<<< For my lab, I am currently recruiting a research assistant (with possibility of extension into full PhD position) in fMRI-TMS. Feel free to reach out if interested! www.kyb.tuebingen.mpg.de/833081/resea...

Feedback Scales the Spatial Tuning of Cortical Responses during Both Visual Working Memory and Long-Term Memory Perception, working memory, and long-term memory each evoke neural responses in the visual cortex. While previous neuroimaging research on the role of the visual cortex in memory has largely emphasize...

New paper! @rewaniw.bsky.social, Clay Curtis, and I show that the way visual representations are routed through cortex when seeing vs. remembering affects their precision. We link this to behavior & show how task demand matters

(👀 cool animation in 🧵)

#neuroscience #visionscience #PhDSky
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New layer-fMRI manuscript:
V1 superficial layers create a saliency map that feeds forward to the parietal cortex for attentional guidance.

doi.org/10.1101/2025...

By Liu at al.