Franziska Knolle

I would love to be involved!

TUM launches Public Science Lab The Technical University of Munich (TUM) has founded the TUM Public Science Lab, which will involve people from all areas of society in research.

Our #university launched the TUM #PublicScience Lab — a new platform where science engages with society. The lab brings together diverse perspectives to address major #societalchallenges and promote #sustainableinnovation: go.tum.de/583509

#publicengagement

📷A.Heddergott

🧠 #BernsteinConference 2025 — Day 4 Recap

The final day featured 4 Invited Talks and 3 Contributed Talks, wrapping up an inspiring week of #CompNeuro discussions.

Thanks to all speakers and participants — we can’t wait to see you again next year!

#BernsteinNetwork

Volume 51 Issue Supplement_3 | Schizophrenia Bulletin | Oxford Academic The flagship journal of the Schizophrenia Bulletin family. Reviews recent developments and empirically based hypotheses regarding the etiology and treatment of schizophrenia, ranging from the molecula...

ICHR special issue in Schizophrenia Bulletin released this month. Too many good papers to mention - academic.oup.com/schizophreni...

Why does the naked mole rat have the longest lifespan of any rodent, nearly 40 years?
A 30-year long mystery unraveled @ScienceMagazine today!
Its cGAS enzyme in cells has 4 missense mutations that upends its function, promoting DNA repair and suppressing inflammation
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Recurrent pattern completion drives the neocortical representation of sensory inference Nature Neuroscience - Neurons that respond emergently to illusory contours drive pattern completion in V1. Pattern completion in lower cortical areas may therefore mediate perceptual inference by...

"pattern completion circuits in lower cortical areas may reinforce activity patterns that match prior expectations..."

Yes. That's active filtering. Sensory cortical recurrent networks learn the structure of the sensory world.

New paper from Shin, Adesnik et al. 🧠🤖🧪

🧠💬 Do large language models really represent meaning like the human brain?

Our new fMRI study tested how transformers compare to brain representations of sentence meaning — and found that structure matters.

📄 Read more: elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre...

The Content and Topography of Auditory Verbal Hallucinations in Adult Psychosis Patients: What Does a Voice Say, and How Does It Say It? An Umbrella Review and Collation Background Auditory verbal hallucinations (‘voices’) in clinical psychosis are associated with significant distress and disability, but the efficacy of CBT for voices is modest. Greater phenomenolog.....

Umbrella review from Cassie Hazell (a co-founder of ECHR!) and colleagues on what voices (AKA auditory verbal hallcuinations) say and how they say it (e.g., voice frequency, emotional tone, gender, and accent) - onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

UCL – University College London UCL is consistently ranked as one of the top ten universities in the world (QS World University Rankings 2010-2022) and is No.2 in the UK for research power (Research Excellence Framework 2021).

Post doc job alert 📢! Announcing a v exciting job on a Wellcome-funded project in my group at UCL, looking at auditory hallucinations... Advert here 👀: rb.gy/230w8l - deadline is end of Oct. Please apply! 1/5

Compassion in Philadelphia

Dr. Jane Goodall filmed an interview with Netflix in March 2025 that she understood would only be released after her death.

Image shows the first two printed pages of the paper “A forkhead-domain gene is mutated in a severe speech and language disorder” by Cecilia Lai and colleagues, published in Nature in 2001 (volume 413, pages 519-523). The abstract reads as follows: Individuals affected with developmental disorders of speech and language have substantial difficulty acquiring expressive and/or receptive language in the absence of any profound sensory or neurological impairment and despite adequate intelligence and opportunity. Although studies of twins consistently indicate that a significant genetic component is involved, most families segregating speech and language deficits show complex patterns of inheritance, and a gene that predisposes individuals to such disorders has not been identified. We have studied a unique three-generation pedigree, KE, in which a severe speech and language disorder is transmitted as an autosomal-dominant monogenic trait. Our previous work mapped the locus responsible, SPCH1, to a 5.6-cM interval of region 7q31 on chromosome 7. We also identified an unrelated individual, CS, in whom speech and language impairment is associated with a chromosomal translocation involving the SPCH1 interval. Here we show that the gene FOXP2, which encodes a putative transcription factor containing a polyglutamine tract and a forkhead DNA-binding domain, is directly disrupted by the translocation breakpoint in CS. In addition, we identify a point mutation in affected members of the KE family that alters an invariant amino-acid residue in the forkhead domain. Our findings suggest that FOXP2 is involved in the developmental process that culminates in speech and language.

Twenty-four years ago today, our paper “A forkhead-domain gene is mutated in a severe speech and language disorder” was published: www.nature.com/articles/350....
A personal thread about the ups & downs of the journey we took to get to that point....1/n
🗣️🧬🧪

Unfortunately the Wi-Fi is very unstable in the room, which is why we need to refrain from having the session hybrid! Next time I’ll organise it better! 😕

I will see what I can do! I’ll post the link here if I get it to work or will let you know otherwise 🤞

No, just come by 😊! I hope you realised my typo, it’s happening this Tuesday September 30!

BTW it's happening on Sep 30 not Oct 30!!!

If you’re in #Munich 🥨 and curious about decision-making, perception, and cognition through a translational lens, join us for a seminar I’m hosting on Oct 30 with three fantastic speakers: @jkesby.bsky.social (visiting from 🇦🇺), @miguelbengala.bsky.social, and @jacob-lab.bsky.social 🧠💡

🚨 I am over the moon 🌓 to announce that I am joining University College Dublin @ucddublin.bsky.social as an Assistant Professor this fall to start the Uncertain Mind (UMI) lab 💫

I am looking for PhD/Postdoc candidates to join (more below 👇 ). Please RT as the deadline is pretty soon 🙏

Delegation to artificial intelligence can increase dishonest behaviour Nature - People cheat more when they delegate tasks to artificial intelligence, and large language models are more likely than humans to comply with unethical instructions—a risk that can be...

"machines were far more likely than human agents to carry out fully unethical instructions." rdcu.be/eGY0v

Brainwide hemodynamics predict EEG neural rhythms across sleep and wakefulness in humans Author summary Neurons often fire in synchrony, generating rhythms that play major roles in brain functioning. These rhythms are hallmarks of different brain states of vigilance, such as sleep and wak...

"Cortical, subcortical, and non-neural fMRI signals differentially predict alpha and delta rhythms" dx.plos.org/10.1371/jour...

Semantic language decoding across participants and stimulus modalities Tang and Huth demonstrate that semantic decoders can be transferred across participants using functional alignment, and that this alignment can be performed using responses to either stories or movies...

Semi-related "Semantic language decoding across participants and stimulus modalities" www.cell.com/current-biol... - shows semantic decoders can be transferred across participants

🚨Our preprint is online!🚨

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

How do #dopamine neurons perform the key calculations in reinforcement #learning?

Read on to find out more! 🧵

New findings from my lab in Nature Communications suggest that racial stereotypes can lead the brain's perceptual system to temporarily "see" weapons where they don't exist.

Led by: @dongwonoh.bsky.social

Paper: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

(1/6)

Testing circuit-level theories of consciousness in humans Our understanding of the neural basis of consciousness is mostly restricted to large-scale brain activity patterns as measured by methods such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and magneto/electro-encephalography (M/EEG). In contrast, we lack even basic understanding of circuit-level mechanisms supporting consciousness – particularly in humans – despite the fundamental role that such mechanisms likely play in instantiating larger-scale brain activity patterns supporting conscious states and contents. Here, we review what progress has been made on circuit-level theories of consciousness (e.g., apical amplification theory, dendritic integration theory) and argue that such theories can be tested in humans using recently developed, state-of-the-art methods. Doing so will further facilitate translation of consciousness science into clinical settings and strengthen the bridge between circuit- and network-level theories of consciousness.

Online Now: Testing circuit-level theories of consciousness in humans

And another preprint from the lab: @lenarddome.bsky.social is presenting the CPM - a python toolbox that helps you model your tasks!

Glad to share our new article out in
Cognitive Neuropsychiatry! We assessed relationships between symptoms and sentiment in speech during picture descriptions from people with psychosis across 2 cohorts and 2 timepoints... 1/4

doi.org/10.1080/1354...

Big congrats to Marishka on this. I know how much time and effort went into it. Really happy to see it out! For those interested, she replicated prior longitudinal results using an approach-avoidance conflict task and showed how model parameters afforded out-of-sample clinical prediction.

New preprint from stellar IRTG PhD student Amelie Rauland + team on white matter bundle reconstruction! Shows that WM bundles can be reliably extracted from simple 32-direction dMRI & features predict cognition - huge potential for legacy and clinical data. Thread 👇

www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/...

A Practical Guide to Identifying Robust Clusters in Neuroimaging Data We outline practical strategies to enhance the reliability of clustering results in neuroimaging, addressing challenges in validation and interpretability. By integrating consensus-clustering, machin...

A Practical Guide to Identifying Robust Clusters in Neuroimaging Data onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

New preprint from the lab! 🧠
Led by Juliana Trach, w/ Sophia Ou

Using fMRI, we discovered evidence for time-sensitive reward prediction errors (RPEs) in the human cerebellum.

Builds on, and extends, recent work in both rodents and NHPs