Ole Goltermann

How dynamics arise from the structure is my biggest interest. In this study, we started with a small step and asked how structure constrains dynamics. Spoiler: would that it were so simple… (1/6)

A recent @natneuro.nature.com paper analyzed lesion network mapping and raised concerns about the validity of the method.
See below 👇 for our response.

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

Schmidt et al. present PyLORAKS, a GPU-accelerated implementation of LORAKS, built with the PyTorch framework: doi.org/10.52294/001...

@nikweiskopf.bsky.social @ohbmofficial.bsky.social

Five ways to spot when a paper is a fraud Science sleuths share their common-sense tips for sniffing out fishy articles.

@sjmelchor.bsky.social writes for @nature.com about how to spot dubious papers, interviewing @elisabethbik.bsky.social, @abalkina.bsky.social, @jabyrnesci.bsky.social, myself and and my fellow @cosig.net maintainers @solalpirelli.bsky.social and Yagmur Ozturk!

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Thats a helpful approach to include spatial distribution of synaptic targets into fMRI signal regression

"You see what you look for, and you look for what you know."

We are proud to release FOCUS: a 100 μm deformable human subcortical atlas precisely registered to MNI space.

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

A lab visit to Hamburg so engaging I forgot to take photos except for a last-minute selfie. 😄🤳

Grateful to @christianbuchel.bsky.social, @olegolt.bsky.social, and lab for the warm welcome and inspiring discussions. 🧠

Leaving one’s own bubble. Immersing in critical, generous exchange. Science. 💛

A few years ago, I was on a commission here in the Max Planck Society that tried to motivate the society to stop wasting millions of Euros on Microsoft licenses for bad calendar and email software. That and Elsevier subscriptions are just wasteful use of public funds imo. >

Kaum Essen, Medikamente und Schutz: Studie von HelpAge International und Amnesty International deckt Leid älterer Menschen im Gazastreifen auf | Amnesty International Österreich HelpAge und Amnesty warnen: Ältere Menschen im Gazastreifen leiden unter einer Gesundheitskrise durch Blockade von Hilfsgütern, Medikamenten und Arbeitsverboten.

ÄLTERE MENSCHEN IM GAZASTREIFEN HUNGERN.
Sie rationieren Medikamente.
Sie verzichten auf Essen, damit andere überleben.
Sie verbringen ihre letzten Lebensjahre in überfüllten Zelten.

Neue Studie von @HelpAge & @amnesty zeigt das erschütternde Ausmaß:
bit.ly/4agr9b2 1/3

Linking Data-Driven Symptom Dimensions to Resting-State EEG Biomarker Candidates in Chronic Pain Chronic pain (CP) is a multidimensional condition characterized by physical, emotional, and cognitive symptoms. However, many neuroimaging studies investigating the brain mechanisms of CP have focused...

Quick correction — the correct preprint link is here: www.medrxiv.org/content/10.6...

How can we embrace the complexity of chronic pain and its brain basis? New preprint links data-driven symptom dimensions (affective vs physical burden) to resting-state EEG connectivity, moving beyond pain intensity alone. doi.org/10.64898/202...

"The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command."

(Video: @dropsitenews.com )

Alex Pretti, wearing a green sweater with his VA badge on.

This is Alex Pretti.

This morning he was murdered by ICE. Six ICE agents held him down and shot him at point blank range. Alex was a nurse and researcher at the VA.

Our thoughts are with his loved ones and we stand united in action calling for the abolishment of ICE.

#ScientistsAgainstICE

How do we achieve few-shot generalization? New work led by @fabianrenz.bsky.social dives into the role of replay in learning and using structure to generalize reward. Dream team effort with Shany Grossman @nathanieldaw.bsky.social Peter Dayan & @doellerlab.bsky.social
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Podcast: Aufstand im Iran: Kippt nun das Regime? Ein Gespräch über die Hoffnungen und Ziele der Proteste, die das Mullah-Regime mit blutiger Repression niederzuschlagen versucht - Folge #1560

Neuer Falter Podcast mit @raimundloew.bsky.social @tessaszy.bsky.social, dem ehemaligen UN-Diplomaten Homayoun Alizadeh und mir über die Proteste im Iran, das grausame Massaker an Demonstrierenden und weshalb man Exilfiguren nicht überbewerten sollte.

www.falter.at/podcasts/rad...

Thank you for your responses, Valentin! On this: I tried to match the contrast values to your results — the "true" ΔCBF is based on your reported 7.7% from Table S1; others are from Figure 2b,c. The noise-free simulation shows ΔCBF ranging from -7..7%, well within the -15..30% range in your Fig. 3b.

Two photos from the scientific paper, both showing an electron microscopy photo (black and white) of a white cell with lots of extrusions (tentacle like). I have added green and pink boxes to show areas that look duplicated.

An Editorial Expression of Concern by @Nature for one of Marc Tessier-Lavigne (former @Stanford president)'s papers.
pubpeer.com/publications...
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
#ImageForensics
#ScienceIntegrity

From Body to Brain and Back: Multimodal Evidence for Interoceptive Alterations in Schizophrenia Spectrum Disorders When the brain and body misalign, emotional experience and sense of reality can be disrupted. Although such atypical experiences are central to schizophrenia spectrum disorders (SSD), interoception, p...

How the brain listens to the body matters.
Our new preprint investigates interoceptive processing in schizophrenia spectrum disorders across phenomenology, behavior, and heartbeat-evoked brain responses. 🧠🫀DOI: doi.org/10.64898/202...

WARN-D machine learning competition is live » Eiko Fried If you share one single thing of our team in 2026—on social media or per email with your colleagues—please let it be this machine learning competition. It was half a decade of work to get here, especi...

After 5 years of data collection, our WARN-D machine learning competition to forecast depression onset is now LIVE! We hope many of you will participate—we have incredibly rich data.

If you share a single thing of my lab this year, please make it this competition.

eiko-fried.com/warn-d-machi...

A unifying account of replay as context-driven memory reactivation A context-driven memory model simulates a wide range of characteristics of waking and sleeping hippocampal replay, providing a new account of how and why replay occurs.

Really thrilled that this paper led by @neurozz.bsky.social is now published in its final version in @elife.bsky.social!!

This is a memory-focused (as opposed to RL-focused) account of the detailed characteristics of forward and backward awake and sleep replay!

elifesciences.org/articles/99931

Iran – Internetsperre: Dann eben Aufstand ohne Internet Kein Internet, kein Telefon: Das iranische Regime legt im Kampf gegen die Massenproteste die Kommunikation des Landes lahm. Die Menschen gehen offenbar trotzdem weiter auf die Straße. Auch wenn sie um ihr Leben fürchten müssen.

Kein Internet, kein Telefon: Das iranische Regime legt im Kampf gegen die Massenproteste die Kommunikation des Landes lahm. Die Menschen gehen offenbar trotzdem weiter auf die Straße. Auch wenn sie um ihr Leben fürchten müssen.

This paper had a pretty shocking headline result (40% of voxels!), so I dug into it, and I think it is wrong. Essentially: they compare two noisy measures and find that about 40% of voxels have different sign between the two. I think this is just noise!

Anatomical White Matter Tracts Span the Cortical Hierarchy to Support Cognitive Diversity Long-range white matter (WM) tracts support cognition by enabling communication between distant cortical regions, which are organized along a hierarchy defined by the sensorimotor-to-association (S-A)...

Ever wondered how white matter tracts actually map onto the cortical hierarchy and cognition—beyond the usual “projection vs association” labels?
Our new preprint tackles exactly that! 🧠✨ doi.org/10.64898/202...
Thread below 🧵

Happy to share this early Christmas present 🎄: our paper about geometry- and locomotion-dependence of 3D memory got published in PNAS! Joint work with co-first-author Volker Reisner (@reisnerv.bsky.social) as well as Leonard König, Misun Kim & Christian Doeller
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/

Absolutely agree. The genetic makeup of a species does explain what sets it apart from other species, but the explanation is usually complex, and not reducable to the isolated effects of single variants. IMO, this work provides further evidence for the existing view of combinatorial evolution.

BOLD signal changes can oppose oxygen metabolism across the human cortex, Nature Neuroscience

fMRI signals “up,” but neural metabolism might be going “down.”

In our @natneuro.nature.com paper, we demonstrate that about 40% of voxels with robust BOLD responses exhibit opposite oxygen metabolism, revealing two distinct hemodynamic modes.

rdcu.be/eUPO8
funds @erc.europa.eu
#neuroskyence 🧵:

🧠New preprint!

What if cortical geometry alone already encodes much of white-matter organization?

We introduce a subject-specific, reversible cortical folding model that unfolds and refolds the brain from a single T1w MRI; no diffusion, no ML.

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

I am so excited to share our newest preprint, inspired by @tinalonsdorf.bsky.social, “A multiverse approach to heat-evoked skin conductance analysis: Evaluating the influence of analytic pipeline on associations between skin conductance and pain osf.io/preprints/ps...

Dimensionality reduction may be the wrong approach to understanding neural representations. Our new paper shows that across human visual cortex, dimensionality is unbounded and scales with dataset size—we show this across nearly four orders of magnitude. journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...

Photograph of the outside of the Max Planck Institute (Nijmegen, the Netherlands) and the trees of the forest around it.

Only a few weeks left to apply for our 4-year PhD position, using human brain organoids & multi-omic methods to study genes implicated in speech disorders. Application deadline 5 Jan 2026. Fellowship is embedded in the International Max Planck Research School. More info: www.mpi.nl/imprs-phd-fe...