Juan Camilo Avendano-Diaz

Registration now open !

Free and hybrid - full info below

www.aalto.fi/en/events/sm...

Grateful to Tuula Kieseppä (Editor) and the reviewers for their insightful feedback, and deeply grateful to Lauri Parkkonen and Riitta Hari for their mentorship and support at @aalto.fi, and to Business Finland and the Norman Loveless Memorial Fund for supporting this work.

We highlight valuable work by many labs and researchers, including @leoschilbach.bsky.social, @dimitrisbolis.bsky.social, @introspection.bsky.social, @thomasinselmd, and many others, alongside previous work with Niclas (e.g., the ConNECT approach - frontiersin.org/journals/hum...).

We outline historical shifts between individual-centered and relational paradigms in psychiatry and neuroscience, introduce multi-person approaches to psychiatry and psychotherapy, and synthesize these developments into a relational framework for advancing mental health research.

We emphasize the central role of social interaction and intersubjectivity, and the need to rigorously measure real-life, dynamic exchanges, moving beyond single-person approaches.

Where we describe and integrate scientific developments highlighting the importance of adding a social lens to psychiatry and mental health.

🧠Excited to share our new paper with
@NiclasKaiser
— an invited contribution to Psychiatria Fennica!

"Rethinking mental health through emerging relational frameworks: A review of multi-person approaches". Available here: www.psykiatriantutkimussaatio.fi/wp-content/u...

The social, decoupled self: interpersonal synchronization of breathing alters intrapersonal cardiorespiratory coupling People synchronize their periodic behavioural and physiological rhythms with each other during social interaction. While this interpersonal synchronization has largely been associated with positive ef...

🫁❤️New preprint out: The social, decoupled self

We show effects of interpersonal synchronization of physiological rhythms on intrapersonal cardiorespiratory coupling: when we sync our breathing, our breathing–heart rhythms decouple, with a perturbed phase-relationship
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Confronting the connectivity crisis in human M/EEG research The cognitive neuroscience community using M/EEG has not converged on measures of task-related inter-regional brain connectivity that generalize acros…

In our Trends in Cogn Sci paper we point to the connectivity crisis in task-based human EEG/MEG research: many connectivity metrics, too little replication. Time for community-wide benchmarking to build robust, generalisable measures across labs & tasks. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

The cognitive side of communication in social insects Social insects rely on multiple communication channels. These channels have traditionally been considered innate, eliciting stereotyped responses. However, recent research has shown that cognitive modulation occurs in communication contexts long assumed to be entirely genetically encoded, thus revealing a previously unrecognized cognitive plasticity in social insect communication.

Online Now: The cognitive side of communication in social insects

Stomach–brain coupling indexes a dimensional signature of mental health - Nature Mental Health Using a relatively large and diverse sample of mostly young adults, this study by Banellis, Rebollo and colleagues examines associations between regional stomach–brain coupling and mental health and i...

🧠🥬 Your gut really does talk to your brain

A new study links stronger stomach–brain synchrony to worse mental health. Anxiety, depression, and stress all showed ties to this gut-brain rhythm.

🔗 www.nature.com/articles/s44...

#Gut #SciComm 🧪

Imageless imagery in aphantasia revealed by early visual cortex decoding Chang et al. report that during imagery attempts, those with validated aphantasia have decreased perceptual BOLD response and higher ipsilateral imagery response. Imagery content could be decoded usin...

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

allowing such views to pass uncritically. The core traps here with AI are what @irisvanrooij.bsky.social and I outline (based on our previous work) in a forthcoming short publication, distilled into the table below: bsky.app/profile/iris...

A neural manifold view of the brain - Nature Neuroscience Recent advances in neuroscience have revealed how neural population activity underlying behavior can be well described by topological objects called neural manifolds. Understanding how nature, nurture...

Check out our new review/perspective (w/ @juangallego.bsky.social & Devika Narain) on neural manifolds in the brain! It was a lot of fun to think through these ideas over the past couple of years, and I'm excited it's finally out in the world!

🔗: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
📄: rdcu.be/ex8hW

New paper out ! 😎

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

A History of Metaphorical Brain Talk in Psychiatry
by Kenneth Kendler

"describing the disturbed mental processes in psychiatric illness in terms of brain function in ways that appear to be explanatory but actually have little to no explanatory power"

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

The self-reference memory bias is preceded by an other-reference bias in infancy - Nature Communications A classic feature of human memory is that we remember information better when it refers to ourselves. Here, the authors show that before the emergence of self-concept, infants instead remember informa...

Sharing our new paper published today in Nature Communications. In my view, this is our clearest demonstration to date that something profoundly changes in how infants encode the world around them before and after the emergence of self-representation. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

@assc28.bsky.social In Crete already for @ASSC2025? Lucky you ! 😎

Check out our poster tomorrow brilliantly led by Altea Vanni and Jan Pohl 👇🏼

How people (dis)connect from their bodies impacts the way people form joint agencies with human and artificial others !

See you there !

Is criticality a unified setpoint of brain function? Hengen and Shew propose that criticality—a state with scale-invariant dynamics—is a universal computational setpoint of healthy brains. Their meta-analysis of two decades of research reconciles contra...

Is criticality a unified setpoint of brain function?

#ComplexSystems #Neuroskyence

www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...

Inter-brain neural dynamics in biological and artificial intelligence systems - Nature Shared inter-brain neural dynamics, reflecting aspects of social interaction including self and other’s behaviours, arise in GABAergic neurons of the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex of socially interact...

This! 👉 Inter-Brain Neural Dynamics in Biological and Artificial Intelligence Systems
www.nature.com/articles/s41... #Social #NeuroAI #Hyperscanning

For those joining us at the #ASSC28, mind to download the app for a comfortable navigation and easy networking with peers during the conference days. Soon!

Rethinking excitation/inhibition balance in the human brain - Nature Reviews Neuroscience The balance between neural excitation (E) and inhibition (I) shapes cognition, development and brain-based disorders. Electroencephalography and magnetic resonance spectroscopy allow non-invasive quan...

Rethinking excitation/inhibition balance in the human brain — a Comment article by Roi Cohen Kadosh

#neuroscience #neuroskyence

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

Overview of the simulation strategy and analysis. a) Pial and white matter boundaries surfaces are extracted from anatomical MRI volumes. b) Intermediate equidistant surfaces are generated between the pial and white matter surfaces (labeled as superficial (S) and deep (D) respectively). c) Surfaces are downsampled together, maintaining vertex correspondence across layers. Dipole orientations are constrained using vectors linking corresponding vertices (link vectors). d) The thickness of cortical laminae varies across the cortical depth (70–72), which is evenly sampled by the equidistant source surface layers. e) Each colored line represents the model evidence (relative to the worst model, ΔF) over source layer models, for a signal simulated at a particular layer (the simulated layer is indicated by the line color). The source layer model with the maximal ΔF is indicated by “˄”. f) Result matrix summarizing ΔF across simulated source locations, with peak relative model evidence marked with “˄”. g) Error is calculated from the result matrix as the absolute distance in mm or layers from the simulated source (*) to the peak ΔF (˄). h) Bias is calculated as the relative position of a peak ΔF(˄) to a simulated source (*) in layers or mm.

🚨🚨🚨PREPRINT ALERT🚨🚨🚨
Neural dynamics across cortical layers are key to brain computations - but non-invasively, we’ve been limited to rough "deep vs. superficial" distinctions. What if we told you that it is possible to achieve full (TRUE!) laminar (I, II, III, IV, V, VI) precision with MEG!

𝗕𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻-𝘄𝗶𝗱𝗲 𝗱𝘆𝗻𝗮𝗺𝗶𝗰𝘀 𝗼𝗳 𝗮𝗻 𝗲𝗺𝗼𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗹 𝗿𝗲𝘀𝗽𝗼𝗻𝘀𝗲

Looks like an interesting paper about brain-wide processes.
Sure to generate discussion.
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
#neuroscience #neuroskyence

The extraordinary enigma of ordinary tickle behavior: Why gargalesis still puzzles neuroscience Tickle sensation remains one of the biggest unresolved mysteries in neuroscience—one that scientists are only beginning to unravel.

New article out at Science Advances!

Three challenges, five questions, and multiple implications of tickle.

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

@dondersinst.bsky.social @ki.se @erc.europa.eu
#neuroskyence #psychscisky #Sensorimotor #ERCResearch #ticklelab

Does brain activity cause consciousness? A thought experiment The authors of this Essay examine whether action potentials cause consciousness in a three-step thought experiment that assumes technology is advanced enough to fully manipulate our brains.

The craziest paper I have ever done is this thought experiment with Albert Gidon and Matt Larkum.

In the first journal, reviewer 1 recommended that we should not try to publish this; reviewer 2 called it "wacky". Thanks for the motivation: A sequel is coming up!

journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

Human pain neuroscience and the next generation of pain therapeutics The recent approval of suzetrigine for acute pain treatment highlights both the success of targeting peripheral sensory neurons for pain management and the potential of developing new pain therapies p...

We wrote this Neuroview to get the word out about the extremely exciting and important NIH funded work happening in the pain field and how it has the potential to really change pain treatment in the coming years www.cell.com/neuron/fullt... We did not imagine how rapidly things would be dismantled.

👏

White matter microstructure and macrostructure brain charts across the human lifespan | bioRxiv www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Lovely work — and yet another proof that perceptual integration, likely based on recurrent connections, can occur without awareness during the attentional blink.

See also www.pnas.org/doi/full/10....

First time at #SANS2025!
Thrilled to hear about all the fascinating work and to present our own from @sinelabdtu.bsky.social
@ale-dabr.bsky.social!