Christopher Whyte

1/ "Hemispherotomy leads to persistent sleep-like slow waves in the isolated cortex of awake humans" - out now in @plosbiology.org, led by Michele Colombo, Jacopo Favaro, & Marcello Massimini. 🧠

A Minimal Physiological Model of Perceptual Suppression and Breakthrough in Visual Rivalry Visual rivalry paradigms provide a powerful tool for probing the mechanisms of visual awareness and perceptual suppression. While the dynamics and determinants of perceptual switches in visual rivalry...

This was a whole lot of fun. The paper is unapologetically nerdy (even by vision science standards), and it was also a dream come true to work with Hugh Wilson extending his model to a new domain.

The first paper in the series ⬇️

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

TLDR?

We derive a closed-form expression for the hysteretic difference between contrast thresholds for awareness and suppression, and test a prediction of the expression in human psychophysical data.

2/3

A Minimal Quantitative Model of Perceptual Suppression and Breakthrough in Visual Rivalry When conflicting images are presented to either eye, binocular fusion is disrupted. Rather than experiencing a blend of both percepts, often only one eye's image is experienced, whilst the other is su...

The final paper of my PhD is now out as a preprint. This is a follow-up piece in series of two companion papers modelling awareness and suppression in a new variant of continuous flash suppression.

arxiv.org/abs/2510.17154

🧵 1/3

What changes and what stays the same as you scale from single neurons up to local populations of neurons up to whole brains?

Michael and Mac @macshine.bsky.social on the systems approach to study brains across scales.

braininspired.co/podcast/220/

Thank you so much for having me!! I always have a blast chatting with @bethfisher.bsky.social and this time was no different! 💕 Also I loved your reflections in the end and how both of you have change your mind perhaps a bit through sharing your experiences with each other. So cool and precious!

Integrated information and predictive processing theories of consciousness: An adversarial collaborative review As neuroscientific theories of consciousness continue to proliferate, the need to assess their similarities and differences -- as well as their predictive and explanatory power -- becomes ever more pr...

The first major output of the @templetonworld.bsky.social @arc-intrepid.bsky.social adversarial collaboration testing IIT & predictive processing theories of consciousness is out now

arxiv.org/abs/2509.00555

Adaptive learning is coordinated across behaviour, time and neurobiology (from synapses and dendrites, to astrocytes and the systems level).

If you’ve ever wondered how noradrenaline helps shape these multiscale learning processes, you might like this: www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

OHBM Oz rego + abstracts now open. Get amongst it!

I wrote a Comment on neurotheory, and now you can read it!

Some thoughts on where neurotheory has and has not taken root within the neuroscience community, how it has shaped those subfields, and where we theorists might look next for fresh adventures.

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

It’s touching and wonderful the amount of people saying reading Pratchett has made them a better person, myself included.

Was it @adamchapman.bsky.social I remembering saying that his downstream positive effect on UK society is something we should increasingly be considering as his readers age?

🎊Ain’t no party like a thesis submission party🎊

Honored to have submitted my PhD as a recipient of the Paulette Isabel Jones Career Development Award from The University of Sydney!

Thank you x1000000 to MVP supervisor @bendfulcher.bsky.social & co-supervisor @macshine.bsky.social 😊

I need some help from the #neuroskyence Bluesky-verse. Anyone know the source of this ~quote from Walter J. Freeman Jr.: "the secrets of the brain are hidden by two of God’s own firewalls: neurobiology and non-linear dynamics". I read it yrs ago but can't seem to find my way back to the source.

Position open for a neuroimaging focused postdoc to come work with us in Sydney

Feel free to get in touch for a chat if you have any questions about it :)

usyd.wd105.myworkdayjobs.com/en-GB/USYD_E...

Interested in cortical wave dynamics? Check out our new preprint led by J Cruddas with @jchrispang.bsky.social where review the physics and physiology of cortical waves and their implications for psychological function:

osf.io/preprints/ps...

@nsb-lab.bsky.social

The synaptic architecture of layer 5 thick tufted excitatory neurons in mouse visual cortex - Nature Neuroscience This study maps the connections of layer 5 pyramidal neurons in the mouse cortex, revealing distinct local and intercortical wiring patterns, and provides an open framework for exploring the connectiv...

New electron microscopy study in @nature.com Neuroscience finds that layer 5 ET neurons mostly connect to inhibitory cells locally, esp. those suppressing other excitatory cells, suggesting a "winner-take-all" system.

🧠📈 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

After five years of confused staring at Greek letters, it is my absolute pleasure to finally share our (with @smfleming.bsky.social) computational model of mental imagery and reality monitoring: Perceptual Reality Monitoring as Higher-Order inference on Sensory Precision ✨
osf.io/preprints/ps...

moritz kriegleder presenting a slide on the current state of consciousness science

finally recovered from all the thought provoking discussions I had at @assc28.bsky.social! presented a meta analysis of the current state of consciousness science and why we should leave theory convergence behind (based on work with @mnoichl.bsky.social & @niccolonegro.bsky.social)

Dynamical independence reveals anaesthetic specific fragmentation of emergent structure in neural dynamics Conscious experience depends on the coordinated activity of neural processes that span multiple scales--from synapses to whole-brain dynamics. A recently introduced measure, dynamical independence, id...

📜🪇[PUBLISHED]: NEW PREPRINT!🪇📜

I am incredibly excited to announce that we have published our paper on how "Dynamical independence reveals anaesthetic specific fragmentation of emergent structure in neural dynamics"
w@thomasandrillon.bsky.social @anilseth.bsky.social Barnett, Carter

Strap in!
1/n

A new study led by @timothysit.bsky.social reveals that different layers of mouse V1 integrate visual and non-visual signals differently.

Activity is dominated by vision (or spontaneous fluctuations) in L2/3 and by movement in L5. This leads to different geometries.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

New paper!

We introduce an efficient set of statistical features for fMRI time series (calibrated on mouse manipulation experiments and tested on mouse and human data): catchaMouse16.

Paper: doi.org/10.52294/001...

Code (python/Matlab/C): github.com/DynamicsAndN...

Cooperative thalamocortical circuit mechanism for sensory prediction errors - Nature Experiments in mice show that a cortico-thalamic circuit generates prediction-error signals in primary visual cortex that amplify visual input that deviates from animals’ expectations.

Pairs well with www.nature.com/articles/s41...

“Our results indicate that individual V1 neurons do not signal how the actual visual input deviates from the animal’s predictions, as postulated within the predictive coding framework”

Thrilling to see a major theory get tested!

Sensory responses of visual cortical neurons are not prediction errors Predictive coding is theorized to be a ubiquitous cortical process to explain sensory responses. It asserts that the brain continuously predicts sensory information and imposes those predictions on lo...

1/3) This may be a very important paper, it suggests that there are no prediction error encoding neurons in sensory areas of cortex:

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

I personally am a big fan of the idea that cortical regions (allo and neo) are doing sequence prediction.

But...

🧠📈 🧪

As an Australian I can’t help but feel a little glib at the prospect of everyone else also having to travel for more than 12 hours 😂Hope to see you there, it will be worth it!

Congratulations to Abhilash Dwarakanath who won this year's William James Prize for his brilliant work on the b istability of prefrontal states gating access to consciousness. You can read his paper here: www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...

New paper @pnas.org with Lola Beerendonk, Jan Willem de Gee, Simon van Gaal and others, on pharmacological shifts of performance. We combine psychophysics and pupillometry with computational modeling to provide interesting insights linked to PV-SST-VIP circuits: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Title card for podcast episode on complexity and the universe.

Mindscape 320 | Solo: Complexity and the Universe. Our cosmos was once simple, and someday will be simple again. We currently live in the complicated, exciting era of universal history! Enjoy it while it lasts. #MindscapePodcast

www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2025...

New preprint!

Why are long-range connectomic interactions in the cortex dominant in shaping dynamics in some experiments but apparently negligible in others?

We (w/ R Maran, @elimuller.bsky.social) address this question by studying a new hybrid model of cortical dynamics.

arxiv.org/abs/2506.19800

This paper, from @smellosopher.bsky.social et al, is a well-designed spherical cow with a lot of 🥛 to give.

Has been quite influential in how I think of #NeuroAI and ANNs as models for the brain 🐮

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Memory by a thousand rules: Automated discovery of functional multi-type plasticity rules reveals variety & degeneracy at the heart of learning Synaptic plasticity is the basis of learning and memory, but the link between synaptic changes and neural function remains elusive. Here, we used automated search algorithms to obtain thousands of str...

We just pushed “Memory by a 1000 rules” onto bioRxiv, where we use clever #ML to find #plasticity quadruplets (EE, EI, IE, II) that learn basic stability in spiking nets. Why is it cool? We find 1000s!! of solutions, and they don’t just stabilise. They #memorise! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...