Elliot Murphy

The methodological foundations of lesion network mapping remain sound

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

The neural basis of imagination: An evolutionary perspective The study of imagination has progressed due to its operationalization through a variety of behavioural tasks, initially designed for human participant…

Hot take: the hippocampus isn't actually "evolutionarily ancient" and its not helpful to think of it as such.

The full argument for this take is right here (but you need to scroll down to sections 5-6):
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Causal parametric language mapping with electrical stimulation during awake neurosurgery Temporal parameters of direct electrical stimulation reveal dissociable stages of language processing.

Beautiful new work on cortical stimulation mapping moving beyond traditional binary classifications of causal functional classifications.

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Rapid homotopic communication between human orbitofrontal subregions Using intracranial cortico-cortical evoked-potential mapping in humans, Starkweather et al. reveal rapid, homotopic interhemispheric communication between bilateral orbitofrontal cortices (OFCs): medi...

Rapid homotopic communication between human orbitofrontal subregions

www.cell.com/current-biol...

Some very nice conclusions from Elliot Murphy's review of my book, Wired for Words in Bioloinguistics. @elliot-murphy.bsky.social

bioling.psychopen.eu/index.php/bi...

New preprint with Léo Pio-Lopez:
www.preprints.org/manuscript/2...

"Multi-Scale Longevity: Defeating Aging from Cells to Embodied Human Minds, and the Future of the Species"

a broader view of longevity research.

Multilingual Large Language Models do not comprehend all natural languages to equal degrees Large Language Models (LLMs) play a critical role in how humans access information. While their core use relies on comprehending written requests, our understanding of this ability is currently limite...

Multilingual Large Language Models do not comprehend all natural languages to equal degrees

arxiv.org/abs/2602.20065

Vectorized instructive signals in cortical dendrites - Nature Mice learning a neurofeedback brain–computer interface task show neuron-specific teaching signals in cortical dendrites, consistent with a vectorized solution for credit assignment in the brain.

This paper on how the brain may do gradient descent is very cool: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The scaffolding of individual variability in language processing by domain-general neural networks

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

“Attractor dynamics of a whole-cortex network model…”
(Eyebrows raised)
“…predicts emergence and structure of fMRI co-activation patterns…”
(Heartbeat increases; forehead sweating intensifies)
“…in the mouse brain”
(youtu.be/DT8pRV2Vr8A)

YouTube video by Voidless FAHHH Sound Effect

“Attractor dynamics of a whole-cortex network model…”
(Eyebrows raised)
“…predicts emergence and structure of fMRI co-activation patterns…”
(Heartbeat increases; forehead sweating intensifies)
“…in the mouse brain”
(youtu.be/DT8pRV2Vr8A)

𝗔𝘁𝘁𝗿𝗮𝗰𝘁𝗼𝗿 𝗱𝘆𝗻𝗮𝗺𝗶𝗰𝘀 𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗯𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻
Looks like a very cool paper about the dynamics of large-scale networks in the mouse brain.
Starting to be all about dynamics!
journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...
#neuroskyence

You truly haven’t gotten under my skin, I’m just curious what you expect/want from this research team? There are tons of intrinsic limitations/complexities to iEEG work, more so than in any other field of cog neuro. It’s hard work. But current evidence speaks to close similarities w/neurotypicals.

There *may* be all kinds of differences between patients with epilepsy and neurotypicals but so far our work and other labs work shows acute similarities across a broad range of perceptual and cognitive processes. Again, I don’t know what these researchers were supposed to do except add some caveats

We can consider functional differences all we like but we also have to find them. Our recent work on visual attention/category processing in ventrotemporal & frontotemporal cortex shows truly remarkable similarity in functional localization (faces, places, words, animals) btw patients&neurotypicals

What are the non-replicable findings in this paper? Which other iEEG math tasks? And if so, how exactly is this any different from the wonderful world of neurotypical fMRI research, which has been tackling multiple replicability crises for the past decade now?

And what exactly can we intracranial researchers do about it, aside from add a sentence to our Discussion sections saying “here are a few typical caveats about iEEG research”? If you don’t have productive evidence/suggestions I’m not sure what to say.

Do you have any evidence to back up your claims about functional migration and connectivity disruption though? There is a broad spectrum of brains impacted by epilepsy, but beyond the naive intuition that “brains with epilepsy are different” what evidence is there?

On the point about "functional migration could occur, connectivity could be disrupted" - this has to be empirically demonstrated via e.g. iEEG vs MEG control analyses, DTI, but I haven't seen evidence that would make me question the preserved function of major tracts relevant to higher cognition.

Epilepsy may lead to forms of reorganization, but our patients overwhelmingly have medial temporal lobe epilepsy, which is not expected to impact lateral cortical organization (e.g., syntax, semantics, phonology in MTG are not going to be moved around due to anterior hippocampal seizure) (9/10)

Our many previous studies of reading in epilepsy patients have consistently shown highly comparable localizations and functional responses of nodes of the reading network
compared to those seen using fMRI and MEG in healthy controls (8/10)

For example, in one recent study of ours the average age of epilepsy onset was 20yrs old, long after the reading and semantic networks should be fully established, and we rarely publish on older patients (55+) (7/10)

We also often stress that while these patients have epilepsy, those included for publication-worthy analyses have no history of prominent language deficits, and all individuals included have IQs of typically 100±10 (6/10)

On your other point, we have previously addressed this issue more than a decade ago by showing that the activations in the brains of individuals with epilepsy are not dissimilar compared to healthy volunteers across semantic classes (nouns and verbs) (Conner et al. Cerebral Cortex 2014) (5/10)

All patients included in our iEEG studies undergo extensive presurgical neuropsychological assessments and we only include individuals able to perform tasks within acceptable performance characteristics (4/10)

We have a careful preprocessing pipeline: any trials that are contaminated by inter-ictal epileptic spikes, saccade artefacts and trials in which participants responded incorrectly are discarded (3/10)

Some audiences still harbor misunderstandings about the language reorganization and/or basic competences of patients with epilepsy. I cannot speak to the above study, but in our work electrodes are visually inspected for line noise, artifacts and epileptiform activity (2/10)

This is a not infrequently raised concern about intracranial EEG studies in humans, and many people still harbor outdated and inaccurate biases here. Obviously by their invasive nature, these procedures must almost always be conducted in patients with epilepsy or other neurologic disorders (1/10)

Temporal order of activations and interactions during arithmetic calculations measured by intracranial electrophysiological recordings in the human brain - Scientific Reports Arithmetic requires complex and fast processes orchestrated within a large-scale network spanning multiple brain regions. However, reports on the network’s temporal dynamics are scarce. Here, we prese...

Temporal order of activations and interactions during arithmetic calculations measured by intracranial electrophysiological recordings in the human brain

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

A new preprint, co-authored with @johnwkrakauer.bsky.social:

The Deliberation Taboo

Cognitive science is, nominally, the science of thinking. We argue that the field has no theory of what thinking is and, even worse, that the topic has largely dropped out of focus. 1/

osf.io/preprints/ps...