Alejandro Blenkmann

❗Our dear Olga will defend her Phd thesis this Friday!
You are welcome to join physically or online 🙂

Human single-neuron responses to multi-feature auditory deviants: Evidence from amygdala, hippocampus, insula, and auditory cortex The ability to detect unexpected sounds within regular acoustic patterns is fundamental to adaptive behavior. This capacity is reflected in the mismatch negativity (MMN) event-related potential and ha...

New preprint from my colleagues @viniciusrc.bsky.social & @ablenkmann.bsky.social: they recorded single neurons in human amygdala, hippocampus, insula & auditory cortex during a multi-feature auditory oddball paradigm (frequency, timing, intensity, location).
www.authorea.com/users/100748...
#brain

🚨 Join me for a hands-on #iElectrodes tutorial at #PracticalMEEG!
📍 Online • 🗓 Thursday, Oct 30 • 14:00–17:00 CET
💐 Free but mandatory registration
Learn how to localize intracranial #iEEG #SEEG #ECoG electrodes — and explore many other great toolboxes!

Excellent work by @dquiroga.bsky.social!
Happy to be part of this great collaboration exploring how the brain manipulates thoughts through music 🎶

#Neuroscience #MusicScience #CognitiveNeuroscience #iEEG

New position, new social media account. After 5 fantastic years in Tuebingen, I moved to @yale.edu and the @wutsaiyale.bsky.social this summer - which means that I’ll be recruiting PhD students and postdocs. Please help me to spread the word and see current opportunities below 👇

🚨 Join me for a hands-on #iElectrodes tutorial at #PracticalMEEG!
📍 Online • 🗓 Thursday, Oct 30 • 14:00–17:00 CET
Learn how to localize intracranial electrodes — and explore many other great toolboxes:
cuttingeeg.org/practicalmee...

#iEEG #ECoG #SEEG

👏 Huge congratulations to Olgerta Asko, who led this work, and to our fantastic collaborators at @unioslo-ritmo.bsky.social, @ucberkeleyofficial.bsky.social cial.bsky.social, and @oushf.bsky.social sky.social.
🙏 Special thanks to the patients who made this research possible.

Predictive encoding of auditory sequences in the human prefrontal cortex Humans extract regularities from the environment to form expectations that guide perception and optimize behavior. Although the prefrontal cortex (PFC) is central to this process, the relative contrib...

👩‍🔬👨‍🔬 Together, these results provide electrophysiological and causal evidence that the human prefrontal cortex predicts future sounds through distinct, time-ordered roles of OFC and LPFC.
Read the full preprint here 👉 doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Intracranial EEG shows expectancy modulations in the prefrontal cortex:
🧠 OFC earlier
🧠 LPFC later
(This was measured via high-frequency activity, a marker of local brain activity)

Connectivity analyses reveal bidirectional exchange, with the first lead by OFC.

#iEEG #PredictiveProcessing #HFA

Lesion evidence indicates distinct roles:
🧠 Orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) damage abolishes sensitivity to expectancy.
🧠 Lateral prefrontal cortex (LPFC) damage shows only modest, non-significant effects compared to controls.
(Shown using #CNV #ERP that tracks anticipation)

#BrainLesion #Prediction

In an auditory local–global deviance detection task, we found that the brain tracks sound regularities to anticipate when a rare deviant sequence will occur.
⚡ Participants detected deviants faster when they were expected.

#PredictiveProcessing

Predictive encoding of auditory sequences in the human prefrontal cortex Humans extract regularities from the environment to form expectations that guide perception and optimize behavior. Although the prefrontal cortex (PFC) is central to this process, the relative contrib...

🤔How does the human brain predict unexpected sounds?
Our new study shows that the prefrontal cortex doesn’t work as a single unit. Instead, the orbitofrontal and lateral prefrontal cortex make distinct, time-sensitive contributions. #iEEG #BrainLesion #OFC #LPFC
doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Job alert 🚨 Fully funded PhD position available in our Maastricht lab! Are you interested in predictive processing, individual differences, and computational modelling of behavioural and neural data? Please apply! #NeuroJobs vacancies.maastrichtuniversity.nl/job/Maastric...

PhD and Postdoc Positions (m/f/d) in Human Cognitive Neuroscience of Dynamic Cognition – M/EEG, brain stimulation Job Offer from August 11, 2025

We’re hiring! 🥳fully funded PhD and postdoc positions in human cognitive neuroscience @mpicybernetics.bsky.social

M/EEG and brain stimulation methods to study timing/ prediction/ attention/ oscillations
tinyurl.com/5dku4du9

@timingresforum.bsky.social @gtc-tuebingen.bsky.social

please repost 🙏

Why are indexers unable to see that peer review can be more than a thumbs up or a thumbs down? | DORA Journals and peer review are unlikely to change for the better if the companies that operate scientific indexes and citation databases continue to stifle innovation. At eLife we believe that the conte...

Great perspective about elife publishing model and who controls the scientific publishing system

sfdora.org/2025/07/30/s...

The development of aperiodic neural activity in the human brain - Nature Human Behaviour This study establishes how aperiodic activity, a ubiquitous signal linked to neural noise, develops in localized brain regions and illuminates the development of prefrontal control during adolescence in the development of attention and memory.

This study establishes how aperiodic activity, a ubiquitous signal linked to neural noise, develops in localized brain regions and illuminates the development of prefrontal control during adolescence in the development of attention and memory.

Evidence in support of the "Brain from the inside out":

Response to movies is dominated by intrinsic brain dynamics. The dynamic itself is barely alternatered by the task of watching movies.

Human intracranial recordings from 5000 electrodes, now out in eLife.

elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre...

PhD position alert!!!
Together with @predictivebrain.bsky.social and Sonja Kotz we are looking for a PhD candidate to join a great project on the biological foundations of perceptual decisions vacancies.maastrichtuniversity.nl/job/Maastric...

Happy to answer any question you may have!

🚨PhD position alert!🚨
Joint PhD position with @fedemar.bsky.social @predictivebrain.bsky.social and Sonja Kotz, to investigate the neurobiological underpinnings of perceptual decisions
vacancies.maastrichtuniversity.nl/job/Maastric...
Please share and if you have questions, send me a message!

Don't miss the chance to apply to work with Andres.
He is a great researcher in the field of predictive processing, working with #iEEG across humans and non-human primates

Direct brain recordings reveal implicit encoding of structure in random auditory streams - Scientific Reports Scientific Reports - Direct brain recordings reveal implicit encoding of structure in random auditory streams

Nice work Antonino and colleagues!
We have a recent paper addressing a similar issue that you might find interesting
doi.org/10.1038/s415...

🚨 New preprint! 🚨
Can humans learn sensory regularities that are irrelevant to ongoing behavior? Yes, and we reveal the predictive coding mechanisms behind their acquisition

Our results support uncertainty minimization over environmental state transitions as a core objective of brain function

🧵👇

Hippocampal-entorhinal cognitive maps and cortical motor system represent action plans and their outcomes - Nature Communications When interacting with the environment, humans are able to weigh and select between multiple alternative actions. Here, the authors show that this ability is supported by map-like representations of th...

Nature Communications

Hippocampal-entorhinal cognitive maps and cortical motor system represent action plans and their outcomes

idp.nature.com/authorize?re...

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Thanks to our fantastic team and collaborators across Oslo, Cambridge, Berkeley, and Buenos Aires!

📄 Read the full paper: doi.org/10.1038/s415...

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🔬 This work has implications for cognitive neuroscience, especially in understanding how structure is extracted from seemingly unstructured input, and bridges predictive coding and statistical learning.

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💥 Our findings reshape how we understand statistical learning: the brain doesn't just react—it constantly builds models of the world.
This study shows, for the first time, that the brain implicitly encodes transitional probabilities in random streams without attention or intention.

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🧠 Key finding: TP encoding wasn’t limited to auditory cortex.
Hippocampus and inferior frontal gyrus showed strongest sensitivity to TPs.
Auditory cortex responded more to deviance per se, but statistical learning was distributed– and hierarchical.

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Using an information-theoretical approach, we quantified how much information each brain response "encoded" relative to expected patterns.
Then, we tested how this encoded information tracked the likelihood of transitions– aka transitional probabilities (TPs).

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👂 Participants listened to streams of random tones while ignoring them (reading a book).
We recorded high-frequency brain activity (75–145 Hz) from over 1000 electrodes in 22 patients.
We then tracked, trial-by-trial, how surprising each deviant sound was based on TP estimates.