Prof. Vladimir Litvak

🚨 New research alert: What happens at the cortex during pallidal #DBS in patients with cervical #dystonia? 🧠 ⚡
---> www.researchgate.net/publication/... <-----

Finally, we are grateful to our clinical colleagues Lucy Simmonds, Susie Lagrata, Manjit Matharu, Harith Akram and Ludvic Zrinzo and to the outstanding research facilities of the Department of Imaging Neuroscience @imagingneuroucl.bsky.social (formerly the Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging).

We are equally indebted to Arjun Ramaswamy @arjunramaswamy.bsky.social for his perseverance and rigorous analysis, and to Jon Roiser @jonroiser.bsky.social for invaluable input to Arjun's work alongside co‑supervision from Umesh Vivekananda.

This study would not have been possible without Douglas Steele @dougiej.bsky.social , who suggested the task and travelled from Dundee to London for every patient recording.

Taken together, these findings show that the essential components required to compute reward prediction error, as proposed by reinforcement learning theory and earlier animal work, are present in the human VTA.

We observed stronger responses to rewarding outcomes than to losses or neutral events. In a subset of patients, we also identified a signal reflecting the value of the chosen option around the time of the decision.

This project was conceived over a decade ago, with data collection spanning a period of six years.

Preprint alert!!! We recorded directly from the human ventral tegmental area (VTA), the principal source of cortical dopaminergic innervation, while patients performed an instrumental learning task. 🧵👇

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

When I was entering the field of DBS, Ludvic Zrinzo said a few things that were simple in retrospect but formulated so clearly that they fundamentally changed how I think of the therapy. I am super grateful about this super insightful interview at @stimulatingbrains.org – tune in 👇👇

I’m still trying to understand their explanation for why all the controls you used were invalid. But whatever the bottom line I have no doubt you were as rigorous as you could possibly be.

I’m looking forward to the debate around this important paper.
But even if some results from @andreashorn.org, @foxmdphd.bsky.social and other brilliant and hard-working colleagues turn out too good to be true, the field will correct itself and emerge stronger. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

What is the status of DBS for epilepsy?
Find out in our new review/metaanalysis spearheaded by @laurenahart.bsky.social & Garance Meyer in JNNP: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40666371/

A 🧵 — please RT for reach! 🙏

See you in Geneva! We have such an incredible line up of speakers this year!
#optoDBS2026 – registration now open at www.optodbs.ch

As last time, we are expanding scope way beyond just DBS and optogenetics – for instance including TMS and LIFU applications this year!

Deep brain stimulation and psychosis: A case series and two candidate causal brain circuits https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.11.18.25340443v1

Yes, I suspected it might have been me. Thanks for setting the record straight 😊

@orcid.org alerted me to the fact that my PhD thesis from 2006 is available online via OSF. I'm not sure how it got there, but it was quite nostalgic to flip through those long-forgotten pages again and remember the good times in Haifa and Würzburg. Enjoy! doi.org/10.31237/osf...

And one can definitely learn from it how to write the most useful review.

q.e.d Science Critical Thinking AI for constructive criticism and science evaluation

I’m really impressed with qedscience.com. Not perfect but the best qualitative jump I’ve seen in AI output since the original ChatGPT. Even the kind of dumb things it sometimes says, a human reviewer could say as well, but many of the points are spot on.

#BrainMeeting 🧠 Alert! 🎺

This Friday, October 24th, the Brain Meeting speaker will be Terence Sanger, MD, PhD.

This talk will be online only. 12 Queen Square Seminar room (4th Floor) will be available if you need a space to watch the stream. For more information:
www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/event

YouTube video by Weizmann Institute of Science Bat Island: The New Era of Science

Who says a scientist’s life is boring? Was nice to see some friends from times long gone in this movie.

youtu.be/46svA-C939s?...

What was the point he was making with this? I recently heard about Pollock in a different context from @marcusdusautoy.bsky.social .

Looks amazing! Congratulations!

Issues | Cerebral Cortex | Oxford Academic Publishes papers on the development, organization, plasticity, and function of the cerebral cortex, including the hippocampus.

A birthday is a good time to reflect! To mark SPM @ 30, this month's issue of Cerebral Cortex features deeply insightful commentaries on neuroimaging analysis from Ed Bullmore, Peter Bandettini, Peter Fox, Pedro Valdes-Sosa, Klaas Enno Stephan, Viktor Jirsa, et al [1/2] academic.oup.com/cercor/issue

Welcome! You are invited to join a webinar: DBS Think Tank Rising Stars Challenge. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email about joining the webinar. DBS is a rapidly developing area of neuroscience that has revolutionized the treatment of a variety of neurological and psychiatric disorders. From Parkinson’s disease to depression, DBS has the poten...

DBS Think Tank @dbsthinktank.bsky.social taking place next week is always the highlight of my year. Its Rising Stars event showcasing the work of talented early career DBS researchers starts in an hour. Don’t miss. ufl.zoom.us/webinar/regi...

This is very exciting as it could provide a way to identify stimulation targets for syndromes for which no stimulation data exists at all as long as there is some genetic data. Congratulations!

Great news! Ningfei is a great scientist and a highly valued collaborator. I’m looking forward to working with him in the new capacity.

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).

We are recruiting a new PI at the FIL @imagingneuroucl.bsky.social, Associate or Full Professor. This is an amazing place to do cognitive neuroscience, in the heart of London. If you or someone you know might be interested, please pass it on. #neuroskyence

www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...

This paper is the work of the brilliant Haeun Sun. It’s rare for an MSc thesis to be publishable, but Haeun’s perseverance made it possible.

I’m also grateful to all the co-authors — especially Ningfei Li and Davide Giampiccolo @dgiampiccolo.bsky.social, who co-supervised Haeun’s project.

We propose an approach to help select the most informative tasks and contacts to test in each patient.

Our method also makes it possible to identify the most promising symptoms to study, given typical implantation patterns at a clinical site, and to estimate the required patient numbers.

Graphical abstract

🧠 New preprint alert!

medrxiv.org/cgi/content/...

SEEG in epilepsy affords a rare opportunity to record and stimulate in brain regions that are difficult to access, including the white matter. Could we leverage this to map circuits relevant to psychiatric symptoms?

If so, where would one start? 👇