Aaron Kucyi

Careers at Drexel - Human Resources

The MAC lab at Drexel is looking for a new post-doc to work on NIH-funded projects investigating the intersection of prior knowledge and long-term memory consolidation. Please pass along to any interested lab members! careers.drexel.edu/cw/en-us/job...

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...

🚨 New Preprint 🚨

Targeting intracranial electrical stimulation (ES) to network regions defined within individuals causes network-level effects

By Cyr et al.

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Q: Can we use individualized network maps from precision fMRI to modulate a targeted network via intracranial ES?

A: Yes!

🧵:

How does the human brain process the continuous world around us and transform it into distinct memories? Our latest research, recently published in Science Advances @science.org, uncovers how brain waves called high frequency oscillations (HFOs) may support this amazing feat! (1/n)

So nice to hear, congrats to you both!

Such an honor to be part of this symposium with @neuroperson.bsky.social , Julia Kam, Kalina Christoff Hadjiilieva, Matthias Mittner

Poster and data blitz alert! Come check out the latest from the MAC lab at #CNS2025
Sat 10:30am - Data Blitz @devayani.bsky.social
Sun 5pm - Posters C85 @devayani.bsky.social C118 @katelyncliver.bsky.social
#neuroscience #scicomm

Excited to share a new paper in Human Brain Mapping! Mindfulness is associated with better psychological health, and we were curious about its underlying brain mechanisms in the general population.
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

11/ thanks to co-authors @rodbraga.bsky.social and others who may or may not be bluesky yet (?)

10/ Even though our study is only n=3, this project made me hopeful about precision fMRI and its capacity to disentangle state vs. trait effects, which likely requires an idiographic approach (more on this to come from the lab soon)

Challenges in the measurement and interpretation of dynamic functional connectivity Abstract. In functional MRI (fMRI), dynamic functional connectivity (dFC) typically refers to fluctuations in measured functional connectivity on a time scale of seconds. This perspective piece focuse...

9/ I believe our paper offers some of the strongest evidence to date that dynamic functional connectivity at “rest” reflects spontaneous thought– at least to some degree (see direct.mit.edu/imag/article... for new excellent overview on contributions of other factors)

8/ Finally, connectome-based predictive models generated from other individuals or from larger-scale neuroimaging datasets largely failed when applied to densely sampled individuals, further highlighting the need for personalized models.

7/ The whole-brain functional connectivity features were highly idiosyncratic, as they were comprised of individual-specific intra- and inter-network pairings (e.g. 2 individuals shown)

6/ Idiographic predictive models were successful, providing strong evidence that dynamic connectivity at “rest” reflects spontaneous cognition when personalized brain-experience mappings are considered

Prediction of stimulus-independent and task-unrelated thought from functional brain networks - Nature Communications People spend much of their daily lives thinking about things that are unrelated to their immediate environment. Using fMRI, Kucyi et al. show that occurrence of these “stimulus-independent” thoughts c...

5/ We then generated idiographic (within-individual) connectome-based predictive models of mind-wandering within each individual based on dynamic functional connectivity in 30-second windows prior to thought probes (as in www.nature.com/articles/s41... but for individuals, not a group)

4/ But beyond default network, the large-scale networks most strongly associated with mind-wandering were largely unique in each individual (possibly reflecting different mind-wandering content)

3/ We used precision functional mapping to isolate default networks A and B (DN-A and DN-B) and found positive correlations between mind-wandering and DN-A activation within all 3 individuals

2/ Three densely sampled individuals each responded to hundreds of thought probes while undergoing “resting state” fMRI (simple visual fixation) and reported mind-wandering episodes >60% of the time

1/ New paper and first real foray into “precision fMRI”: Individual variability in neural representations of mind-wandering direct.mit.edu/netn/article...