Thomas Andrillon

JUNIOR GROUP LEADERS IN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND DATA SCIENCE AT THE PARIS BRAIN INSTITUTE The Paris Brain Institute - Institut du Cerveau is an internationally renowned institute dedicated to advancing understanding of the brain and improving brain health across the whole spectrum of neuro...

My institute, @institutducerveau.bsky.social, is recruiting Junior (<7y post-PhD) Group Leaders (5y contract + start-up package)

Focus on AI and Data Science, researchers in cognitive and computational science are welcome to apply!

Details of the call:
institut-du-cerveau.wiin.io/en/applicati...

Why did consciousness evolve at all? A superb special issue of @royalsocietypublishing.org brings together experts across disciplines to explore the functions of consciousness and why it emerged in some species but not others. @tecumsehfitch.bsky.social royalsocietypublishing.org/rstb/issue/3...

Interested in cortical wave dynamics? Check out our review on the physics, physiology, and psychology of cortical waves led by J Cruddas with @jchrispang.bsky.social, out now in
@cp-neuron.bsky.social:

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

New preprint! with @niccolonegro.bsky.social and @liadmudrik.bsky.social
doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/ve6c5_v1
Consciousness seems central to moral status debates, from AI to animal welfare.
But is consciousness necessary for moral status? Is it sufficient?
We surveyed >1000 people to find out. 🧵 1/n

57 days, 21 hours and 20 minutes.

They did it! They just popped the loop. What an adventure!

This simple but effective account!
It's always important to consider the context of EEG biomarkers!

Esther and Luca's hypothesis was that it could all be explained by a change in the state of the participants.

In particular, whether they had their eyes open or close. This simple change can push the EEG in different territories of alpha oscillations with opposite relationship with alpha.

Alpha oscillations in EEG recordings are a frequently reported marker of mind wandering.

But the literature can be a bit confusing when looking at the direction of this effect! Sometimes an increase in alpha is associated with mind wandering, sometimes a decrease...

🚨 Preprint altert 🚨

**Opposite Effects of Alpha Oscillations on Mind-wandering With Eyes Open and Closed**

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

Led by Esther Thielking and Luca Iemi!

Notre article sur le vide mental a les honneurs du @lemonde.fr !

Merci @hnirom.bsky.social pour ce bel article !

www.lemonde.fr/sciences/art...

Sleep-like slow waves during resting-state: a promising EEG biomarker of amyloid and neurodegeneration in preclinical Alzheimer disease INTRODUCTION: Growing evidence supports a critical role of sleep slow waves (SW) in Alzheimer's disease (AD). However, wake SW (sleep-like SW potentially reflecting local intrusions of sleep) remain u...

Happy to share new preprint on wake slow waves in older adults with subjective cognitive decline, with my awesome postdoc mentors @thomasandrillon.bsky.social & @oudietted.bsky.social at @institutducerveau.bsky.social

Thanks @alzheimer-recherche.org for support!

www.medrxiv.org/content/10.6...

Check out this new model from @ivanmindlin.bsky.social, @rherzoga.bsky.social and friends showing that a local homeostatic inhibition allows for a broader repertoire of states, including spatial mosaics of wake and sleep-like activity.

Could this be the basis of the phenomenon of local sleep?

🧠🧪💤

The impact of homeostatic inhibitory plasticity in a generative biophysical model A main characteristic of biological systems is their capacity to dynamically adapt to environmental changes. In the brain, synaptic plasticity enables the strengthening or weakening of connections bet...

📄Very happy to share our new pre-print!! 🧠

We introduce a homeostatic inhibitory plasticity rule into the Dynamic Mean Field (DMF) model which stabilizes firing rates and expands the model’s dynamical repertoire—for example, enabling slow-wave activity.

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
⬇️⬇️⬇️
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A new comparative study of seven lizard species, including chameleons and bearded dragons, finds an ancient sleep rhythm conserved over millennia.

By Lauren Schenkman

www.thetransmitter.org/sleep/snoozi...

After 35 days at sea, Alexia and her team are passing Cape Horn!

Looping the loop!!!

This is the first article I read after my wife gave birth. It goes without saying it resonated deeply with what she told me of her experience and what I witnessed.

A beautiful and important piece. Have a look!

Functional connectivity drifts during sleep as a marker of fluctuations in the level of consciousness Abstract. During the wake–sleep cycle, consciousness waxes and wanes, and this is thought to be reflected in varying levels of integration between brain ar

🚨 New article in #NCONSC

Functional connectivity drifts during sleep as a marker of fluctuations in the level of consciousness
academic.oup.com/nc/article/2...

#consciousness
🧠🧪

I am very very thankful for the wonderful editing work of @christianjarrett.bsky.social!

If the essay reads well (and I hope it does), it's thanks to him!

Ever had someone ask "What are you thinking about?" and your honest answer was "Actually, nothing"?

In this essay for @psyche.co, I explain why "mind blanking" is more than just a glitch: it’s a window into how our brains toggle between being awake and asleep.

🧠🧪💤

psyche.co/ideas/what-y...

Sleep-dependent infraslow rhythms are evolutionarily conserved across reptiles and mammals - Nature Neuroscience Bergel et al. show that an infraslow rhythm connecting the brain and body during sleep is shared by lizards, mammals and birds, revealing an ancestral process and reshaping our understanding of the ev...

Infra-slow brain rhythms found in sleep in lizards, humans, rats and pigeons!

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

Congrats @antbergel.bsky.social!

What happens in your brain when you blank out?

Read a summary of our recent paper by @institutducerveau.bsky.social

parisbraininstitute.org/not-thinking...

Many thanks to @institutducerveau.bsky.social and @monash-m3cs.bsky.social for their support as well as to the funders of this research @erc.europa.eu and @hfspo.bsky.social!

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More broadly, our findings challenge the assumption that wakefulness always implies ongoing conscious content.

The stream of consciousness may include brief gaps, often unnoticed subjectively, but detectable in behavior and brain activity.

12/n

Together, these results support the idea that mind blanking corresponds to a genuine brain state, characterized by altered information processing rather than mere inattention or forgetting.

11/n

Using multivariate classifiers trained on EEG data near probes, we could decode ON, MW, and MB above chance.

Applying this model to unlabelled periods revealed a similar behavioural profile in the guessed-MB trials than for trails eventually labelled as MB by participants themselves!

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Studying the stream of consciousness is challenging because asking people to report their mental state interrupts the very process we want to observe. To address this, we tested whether EEG features could predict mind states without relying on immediate reports.

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Stimulus-locked EEG responses revealed a critical difference: while early sensory responses were preserved across states, late-stage processing associated with conscious access was strongly reduced during MB, unlike in MW or ON states.

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Neurally, MB showed reduced fast-frequency activity and lower signal complexity over posterior regions, together with reduced long-range fronto-posterior information sharing: patterns consistent with reduced cortical integration.

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Across behavioral and neural measures, MB showed a distinct profile, clearly separable from both MW and ON states.

Behaviorally, MB was marked by slower responses and more missed targets, suggesting a transient disengagement from the task.

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We analyzed EEG markers previously shown to track global changes in consciousness (stimulus processing, spectral power, signal complexity, and functional connectivity) to ask whether they also capture moment-to-moment changes in conscious content during wakefulness.

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