Gregory B. Cogan

Amazing news, congratulations!!

Circuit dynamics of approach-avoidance conflict in humans Debilitating anxiety is pervasive in the modern world. Choices to approach or avoid are common in everyday life and excessive avoidance is a cardinal feature of all anxiety disorders. Here, we used in...

This week, Jim Zhang (3rd year PhD student, @dukebrain.bsky.social) presented Brooke Staveland’s paper on circuit dynamics of approach-avoidance conflict in humans. This 🧵 explores our thoughts (🤍 & ❔)

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

Last week, Areti Majumdar (1st year PhD student) presented Leyao Yu and colleagues’ new paper on two overlapping but distinct frontal networks for word retrieval. This 🧵 explores our thoughts (🤍 & ❔)

doi.org/10.1016/j.ce...

Last week,
@danielsexton16.bsky.social
(7th year Neurosurgery Resident at Duke University) presented Linnea Evanson and colleagues' new paper on comparing the development of language from childhood to adulthood and how it relates to LLMs. This 🧵 explores our thoughts (🤍 & ❔)

Flexibility of intrinsic neural timescales during distinct behavioral states - Communications Biology Calcium imaging of spontaneously behaving mice show increased intrinsic neural timescales during behavior. The behavioral state of mice can be predicted from the topography of timescales of the cortex...

Last week, Nicole Liddle (CRS, Sr. @nicoleliddle.bsky.social) presented Çatal and colleagues’ 2024 paper on the flexibility of intrinsic neural timescales during distinct behavioral states. This 🧵 explores our thoughts (🤍 & ❔):

www.nature.com/articles/s42...

my lab (lacns.github.io) at @mpi-nl.bsky.social and @dondersinst.bsky.social is recruiting for two PhD and two postdoctoral positions funded by an @erc.europa.eu Consolidator - come join us!

PhD: www.mpi.nl/career-educa...

Postdoc: www.mpi.nl/career-educa...

(please share widely)

Great news!!! Looking forward to having you join us here at Duke 🎉

Come join us at Duke!

Come join us at Duke!

Two-dimensional neural geometry underpins hierarchical organization of sequence in human working memory - Nature Human Behaviour Working memory is constructive in nature. In three electroencephalography/magnetoencephalography studies, Fan et al. provide converging behavioural and neural evidence that a one-dimensional syllable ...

Last week, Baishen Liang (postdoctoral associate) presented recent verbal working work using two-dimensional neural geometry by Fan and colleagues:
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
This 🧵 explores our thoughts (🤍 & ❔) :

POST-DOC CALL!
2-year post-doctoral position to work in Marseille on any topic in the field of language, communication and the brain.
Deadline May, 20, 2025
www.ilcb.fr/ilcb-postdoc...

“This is seismic. Think of a car being built. The direct portion of any NIH grant goes toward the car components, but the indirect payments pay for the assembly line — the facilities, the specialty equipment, the IT structures, and the people. The F&A payments are essential; they are required to do the work.” Colin S. Duckett, PhD, Executive Vice Dean for Basic and Preclinical Science, Duke University School of Medicine, on the devastating effects of the NIH’s cap on indirect grant payments.

Duke is one of the largest biomedical research enterprises in the country. A cut of this magnitude (15%cap on F&As) would result in thousands of lost jobs at Duke & potentially tens of thousands across NC.
Sources: medschool.duke.edu/about-us/fac... & www.unitedformedicalresearch.org/nih-pdf/?sta...

Federal Register hold makes ‘end run’ around court pause on NIH funding freeze NIH-related updates to the Federal Register, which are required for the scheduling of study sections and advisory councils, are on hold indefinitely, according to an email reviewed by <i>The Transmitt...

A large portion of grants awarded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health cannot be funded for the foreseeable future because of an indefinite hold on submissions to the Federal Register, according to an email reviewed by The Transmitter.

By @avaskham.bsky.social

bit.ly/3X8ngz8

Hey neuroscientists: were you, your lab or any of your ongoing projects caught up in any of the latest NIH firings? You can find me on Signal at avaskham.54 if you want to chat. 🧪

#neuroskyence

Control of working memory by phase–amplitude coupling of human hippocampal neurons - Nature Hippocampal theta–gamma phase–amplitude coupling integrates cognitive control and working&nbsp;memory storage across brain areas&nbsp;in humans.

Last week, @danielsexton16.bsky.social (7th year Neurosurgery Resident at Duke University) presented Jonathan Daume and colleagues' new paper on single cell phase-amplitude coupling in a working memory task. This 🧵 explores our thoughts (🤍 & ❔)

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

Intracranial Mapping of Response Latencies and Task Effects for Spoken Syllable Processing in the Human Brain Prior lesion, noninvasive-imaging, and intracranial-electroencephalography (iEEG) studies have documented hierarchical, parallel, and distributed characteristics of human speech processing. Yet, there...

This week, Areti Majumdar (1st year PhD student) presented @vibhaviswanathan.bsky.social and colleagues’ new paper on auditory response latencies and task-related effects in diverse cortical and subcortical regions. This 🧵 explores our thoughts (🤍 & ❔)

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

✨i'm hiring a lab manager, with a start date of ~September 2025! to express interest, please complete this google form: forms.gle/GLyAbuD779Rz...

looking for someone to join our multi-disciplinary team, using OPM, EEG, iEEG and computational techniques to study speech and language processing! 🧠

Representation of verbal thought in motor cortex and implications for speech neuroprostheses Speech brain-computer interfaces show great promise in restoring communication for people who can no longer speak[1][1]–[3][2], but have also raised privacy concerns regarding their potential to decod...

Last week, Zac Spalding (3rd year PhD student, Duke BME) presented Erin Kunz, Benyamin Meschede-Krasa, and colleagues' 2024 preprint on how covert speech is represented in the motor cortex.

[cont.]

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

Had a great time presenting in the intracranial language symposium at #SNL2024!!
Thanks to all the amazing speakers: Matt Leonard, Stéphanie Riès, Anna Mai,and especially to Jill Kries for organizing!!

Great work by Kumar to investigate the neural mechanisms of speech production!!

Coming to SfN and want to hear about intracranial neural recordings during speech and cognition? Stop by our posters to hear about our science and to chat!

Human stereoEEG recordings reveal network dynamics of decision-making in a rule-switching task - Nature Communications How sensory evidence is transformed into motor output is not fully understood. Here, the authors use stereoEEG recordings during a rule-switching task to reveal network dynamics of decision-making.

Last week, Jim Zhang (3rd year PhD student,
@dukebrain.bsky.social) presented Marije ter Wal and colleague’s paper on how human stereoEEG recordings reveal network dynamics of decision-making in a rule-switching task. This 🧵 explores our thoughts (🤍 & ❔)

doi.org/10.1038/s414...

A bilingual speech neuroprosthesis driven by cortical articulatory representations shared between languages - Nature Biomedical Engineering Multilingual articulatory representations in the speech-motor cortex of a participant with vocal-tract and limb paralysis enabled the development of a bilingual speech neuroprosthesis.

Last week, Ahmed Hadwan (3rd Year Undergraduate student, Duke Kunshan University) presented Alex Silva and colleagues’ new paper on shared cortical articulatory representations between languages for BCI. This 🧵 explores his thoughts (🤍 & ❔)

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

Dimensionality reduction beyond neural subspaces with slice tensor component analysis - Nature Neuroscience Neural activity does not always lie in a low-dimensional subspace. The authors extend this classic view to show that task-relevant information is distributed across multiple covariability classes and ...

Last week, Aaron Earle-Richardson (Research Tech) presented Arthur Pellegrino and colleague’s new paper on Dimensionality reduction beyond neural subspaces with slice tensor component analysis. This 🧵 explores his thoughts (🤍 & ❔)

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

Hierarchical dynamic coding coordinates speech comprehension in the brain bioRxiv - the preprint server for biology, operated by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, a research and educational institution

This week, Nicole Liddle (Sr. Clinical Research Specialist) presented @lauragwilliams.bsky.social and colleagues’ recent preprint on hierarchical dynamic coding of linguistic features during speech comprehension. This 🧵 explores her thoughts (🤍 & ❔)

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

Ramping dynamics and theta oscillations reflect dissociable signatures during rule-guided human behavior - Nature Communications The authors show that neuronal populations in the human prefrontal-motor network interact via two discernible communication modes – ramping dynamics and neural oscillations. These modes operate in con...

This week, Jim Zhang (2nd year PhD student, @dukebrain.bsky.social) presented Weber and colleague’s paper on how ramping dynamics and theta oscillations reflect dissociable signatures during rule-guided human behavior. This 🧵 explores our thoughts (🤍 & ❔) www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Alignment of brain embeddings and artificial contextual embeddings in natural language points to common geometric patterns - Nature Communications Here, using neural activity patterns in the inferior frontal gyrus and large language modeling embeddings, the authors provide evidence for a common neural code for language processing.

Last week, Ahmed Hadwan (3rd Year Undergraduate student at Duke Kunshan University) presented Ariel Goldstein and colleagues’ new paper on shared geometrical patterns between contextual linguistic embeddings and brain embeddings. This 🧵 explores our thoughts (🤍 & ❔) www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Message me if you are interested/want to know more!

Last week, Zac Spalding (2nd year BME PhD student) presented Gallego-Carracedo et al.’s 2022 paper investigating the relationship between latent dynamics of neural populations and local field potentials (LFPs) during movement. [cont.]

Dissecting neural computations in the human auditory pathway using deep neural networks for speech - Nature Neuroscience Using direct intracranial recordings and modern speech AI models, Li and colleagues show representational and computational similarities between deep neural networks for self-supervised speech learnin...

Last week, undergraduate sophomore Raymond Xiong presented YuanningLi and colleagues’ new paper on using state-of-the-art deep neural network (DNN) models to investigate the neuro-mechanisms of speech perception. This 🧵 explores our thoughts (🤍 & ❔)
www.nature.com/articles/s41...