Franziska Knolle

At 17, Hannah Cairo Solved a Major Math Mystery | Quanta Magazine After finding the homeschooling life confining, the teen petitioned her way into a graduate class at Berkeley, where she ended up disproving a 40-year-old conjecture.

What a fantastic accomplishment -- and what a fantastic story! www.quantamagazine.org/at-17-hannah...

We heard you! You can now use text search to browse the Brain Knowledge Platform’s Data Catalog.

Whether you're exploring brain regions, age groups, or specific metadata, this update makes discovery faster and more intuitive.

🧠📈 Try it out: knowledge.brain-map.org/data

What do representations tell us about a system? Image of a mouse with a scope showing a vector of activity patterns, and a neural network with a vector of unit activity patterns Common analyses of neural representations: Encoding models (relating activity to task features) drawing of an arrow from a trace saying [on_____on____] to a neuron and spike train. Comparing models via neural predictivity: comparing two neural networks by their R^2 to mouse brain activity. RSA: assessing brain-brain or model-brain correspondence using representational dissimilarity matrices

In neuroscience, we often try to understand systems by analyzing their representations — using tools like regression or RSA. But are these analyses biased towards discovering a subset of what a system represents? If you're interested in this question, check out our new commentary! Thread:

Individual differences in decision-making shape how mesolimbic dopamine regulates choice confidence and change-of-mind - Nature Neuroscience Differences in neuroeconomic decision-making influence nucleus accumbens dopamine dynamics and reflect choice confidence during evaluation, as well as past and future value during re-evaluation, which...

Dopamine dynamics in the nucleus accumbens core reflected decision confidence during evaluation of decisions in an economic foraging task in mice, as well as both past and future value during re-evaluation and change-of-mind

@perothwell.bsky.social

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

This paper is making the rounds: arxiv.org/abs/2506.21734

A tiny (27M) brain-inspired model trained just on 1000 samples outperforming o3-mini-high on reasoning tasks.

#MLSky 🧠🤖

A diagram showing 128 neural network architectures.

How does the structure of a neural circuit shape its function?

@neuralreckoning.bsky.social & I explore this in our new preprint:

doi.org/10.1101/2025...

🤖🧠🧪

🧵1/9

Dopaminergic action prediction errors serve as a value-free teaching signal - Nature Dopaminergic action prediction error signals are used by mice as a value-free teaching signal to reinforce stable sound–action associations in the tail of the striatum.

This is intetresting, paper argues that dopamine also encodes "action prediction errors", i.e. differences between actions you predict you will make and actions you do, regardless of reward. Could be used to reinforce habits for repetitive voluntary behaviours:

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

🧠📈 🧪

A few years ago, with @tyrellturing.bsky.social @patrickmineault.bsky.social and others, we showed one single objective (prediction) was sufficient for explaining specialized pathways of mouse visual cortex: tinyurl.com/2vsjbve7

Super cool to see the same observation now for human visual cortex.

🧠🗣️ I’m co-editing a Neuropsychologia Special Issue:
“Language in Psychosis – A Multidisciplinary Approach”

We welcome contributions on:
• neural mechanisms
• predictive processing
• cognitive, computational & clinical perspectives

📅 Deadline: Sept 30, 2025 www.sciencedirect.com/special-issu...

A metaphysics for predictive processing - Synthese For predictive processing, perception is tied to the upshot of probabilistic inference, which makes perception internal, affording only indirect access to the world external to the perceiver. The meta...

Great to see this detailed response by Jakob @hohwy.bsky.social in Synthese to my challenge for predictive processing accounts, formulated in ‘PP’s flirt with transcendental idealism’ in Noûs.
@metzinger.bsky.social @anilseth.bsky.social @wanjawiese.bsky.social

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Schematic overview of the proposed sound reconstruction pipeline. Left: DNN feature extraction from sound. A deep neural network (DNN) extracts auditory features at multiple levels of complexity using a hierarchical framework. Right: Sound reconstruction. The reconstruction pipeline starts with decoding DNN features from fMRI responses using trained brain decoders. The audio generator then transforms these decoded features into the reconstructed sound.

Reconstructing sounds from #fMRI data is limited by its temporal resolution. @ykamit.bsky.social &co develop a DNN-based method that aids reconstruction of perceptually accurate sound from fMRI data, offering insights into internal #auditory representations @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/4fhNw1Z

Taking a look at your speech: identifying diagnostic status and negative symptoms of psychosis using convolutional neural networks - NPP—Digital Psychiatry and Neuroscience Short snippets of everyday speech hold medical clues. Using computer vision techniques on sound pictures (“spectrograms”) from short speech fragments, researchers trained a neural network on recording...

Check out this 🆕 paper form @lenapl.bsky.social et al showing that speech spectrograms can track negative symptom severity in schizophrenia

www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Altered processing of self-produced sensations in psychosis at cortical and spinal levels Molecular Psychiatry - Altered processing of self-produced sensations in psychosis at cortical and spinal levels

just out in Molecular Psychiatry 😍: spinal & cortical alterations in processing of self-produced sensations in psychosis

including: touch, interoception, fMRI, SEP, HEP, behavior🧠🫀

#neuroskyence
#PsychSciSky
@paulasalamone.bsky.social @adamenmalm.bsky.social @rkaldewaij.bsky.social
rdcu.be/exN0e

Herr Goebbels Angered By Anti-Nazi Wit Comedians Banned For Humorous Remarks on Leaders --The Montreal Star, 4 Feb 1939

1939

We are hiring for several research positions for this grant, starting early next year. Please reach out if you're interested!
More details on the jobs here: devcompsy.org/wp-content/u...

🚨Great work led by @esterner.bsky.social showing that individuals with higher schizotypal or autistic traits produce less stable semantic predictions over time, potentially showing the impact of exaggerated belief updating!

Was a fun project und a fantastic team 🤩

Auditory illusory models as proxies to investigate bottom-up and top-down neural networks of phantom perception Abstract. Auditory phantom perception, exemplified by tinnitus, is characterized by a perceptual experience without external stimuli. This study utilized two auditory illusions, the Zwicker Tone (ZT) ...

Inverse relationship between parietal theta power and strength of pavlovian hallucinations - very cool!

direct.mit.edu/imag/article...

Ireland launches global talent fund! www.researchireland.ie/funding/glob...
If you're a neuroscience professor (assistant/associate/full) and would consider relocating to the vibrant and booming city of Dublin, please get in touch!

Have your daughters and sons vaccinated against HPV when they go to high school. Eradicate several HPV caused cancers. No ifs or buts.

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/

Fast efficient coding and sensory adaptation in gain-adaptive recurrent networks As the statistics of sensory environments often change, neural sensory systems must adapt to maintain useful representations. Efficient coding prescribes that neuronal tuning curves should be optimize...

Efficient coding theories often implicitly or explicitly assume slow changes in tuning (e.g., through synaptic plasticity). Arthur Prat-Carrabin has collected psychophysical data showing that it can be fast, and this can be explained by a gain-adaptive RNN:
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

This new Yeo Lab tool should immediately and permanently replace sample-size-only power calculations for functional MRI.

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...

Check out this👇 amazing new python tool for Bayesian modelling, lead-developed by @nicolaslegrand.bsky.social - it includes (among many other things) all elements of the generalised HGF (arxiv.org/abs/2305.10937) for you to use and apply. Can't wait to see what the community will do with it! 🚀

New layer fMRI book chapter on the value of layer-fMRI for understanding psychiatric disorders.

by J Haarsma and P Kok @jhaarsma.bsky.social @peterkok.bsky.social

doi.org/10.1007/7854...

Lesions in the cerebellum impact cross-modal temporal predictions The cerebellum (CE) supports the encoding of the precise sensory event timing and the generation of temporal predictions. Here we investigated whether focal CE lesions impact temporal predictions in a...

In this pre-print, we show that lesions in the #cerebellum (CE) impact motor-independent cross-modal #temporal #predictions

Co-authors: Franziska Knolle, Erich Schröger, Michael Schwartze, Rich Ivry, Sonja Kotz

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

Yes it was super nice, and CPC! (Although I feel like I am travelling too much lately😅 having said that it would be fun to organise a symposium at a meeting somewhere together😁 biological psychiatry or something)

I very much enjoyed our symposium on discussing a mechanistic understanding of psychotic symptoms with Marta Garrido, @drrickadams.bsky.social and Al Powers at #CPConf2025. Thanks, Marta, for bringing us together!🧠🤩

Experimentology cover: title and curves for distributions.

Experimentology is out today!!! A group of us wrote a free online textbook for experimental methods, available at experimentology.io - the idea was to integrate open science into all aspects of the experimental workflow from planning to design, analysis, and writing.

Psychedelics in mental health: still a field full of hype, hope… & huge gaps in evidence buff.ly/nBGYa3B

New blog by leading experts sets out 5 priorities to move the field forward — from better trial design to preparing health systems. Let’s unpack them 👇

🧵 THREAD

#Psychedelics #MentalHealth