Benedikt Ehinger

The best brain-machine interface remains the mouth. Evolution spent 4B years of evolution on R&D developing the device, so I guess it's not that surprising. Yet it still rarely appears as a baseline in evaluations of new devices.

Trial scheme (horizontal vs. vertical reading) and fixation-related potential results for readers from Taiwan vs. Mainland China

Everyday visual experience tunes neural processing. Using fixation-related EEG, this new work shows how the N1 preview benefit depends on Chinese readers' prior experience with left-to-right vs. up-down reading. @umaurer.bsky.social

www.authorea.com/doi/full/10....

Very cool!!

🚨 New paper at #NeurIPS2025!

A systematic fixation-level comparison of a performance-optimized DNN scanpath model and a mechanistic cognitive model reveals behaviourally relevant mechanisms that can be added to the mechanistic model to substantially improve performance.

🧵👇

Welcome to my body After twenty years of pain and repeated medical dead ends, a stranger sent me a message on Instagram. It led to a diagnosis all the doctors…

Last month, I found out I have hypermobile Ehlers Danlos Syndrome, after decades of chronic pain and medical disinterest.

I've decided to write publicly about this, not just about hypermobility and its health impacts, but about how it feels when doctors don't care:

medium.com/p/4fea6398b8ba

That image is from 1961 and an idealization. Here is an actual trajectory of fixational eye movements. The dots are 2 ms apart. If a midget ganglion cell, with single-cone receptive field, fires at 100 Hz, then every spike reports about a different cone. How can we ever read anything?

Our response to "Visual attention in crisis" by @ruthrosenholtz.bsky.social is here www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
And here is the author's response to all comments: www.cambridge.org/core/journal... I found the target paper very thought-provoking, and Ruth's responses are insightful. But...

‼️Now published in @imagingneurosci.bsky.social‼️
(with @judithschepers.bsky.social & @benediktehinger.bsky.social)

Do you have RTs in your 🧠📈-data? Fixation durations?

How do event-durations affect your data? And how to deal with this?

doi.org/10.1162/IMAG...

🧵 ⤵ 1 / 7

🧪 #EEG #fMRI #neuroimage

A new successful replication in the TDBRAIN challenge by Wei Wu and Yonghao Song in predicting TMS Response from EEG!

Let's focus on a future of robustness that can truly benefit patients!

brainclinics.com/research/art...

“Never trust a professor who makes their grad students pay for their own food or coffee.” -the immortal Chris Krueger, sending me off to grad school

Interesting. I wonder what happens if you remove the 5 outlier countries with low gdpr and outlierish wait times? is there still a correlation?

Which countries are these?

Niemand:

Deutsches Wissenschaftssystem: Wie können wir möglichst unattraktiv für potenzielle Bewerber_innen sein? 🤔 Ah ja! 💡 Wir machen einfach 12 Jahre prekäre Arbeitsbedingungen, anschließend Rauswurf, & behandeln die Beschäftigten zwischendrin mit Geringschätzung & Misstrauen. 🥰

#IchBinHanna

The figure shows exemplary stimuli in experiments 1 and 2, that were biased for M- vs. P-pathway processing by spatial filtering (exp 1) or by isoluminance (exp 2).

Happy to be a collaborator on this new work by first-author Xin Huang from Urs Maurer's lab. In two combined eye-tracking/EEG experiments, we asked whether rapidly processed magnocellular (M-pathway) information in parafoveal vision plays a special role for word recognition in natural reading. (1/2)

The universal agreement among commenters throughout was that our collective time to shine is represented by the bottom right cell. Congrats to all of us for making it on to the alignment chart!

Thus concludes reality distraction strategy #822.

🙈

A table showing profit margins of major publishers. A snippet of text related to this table is below. 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year.

A figure detailing the drain on researcher time. 1. The four-fold drain 1.2 Time The number of papers published each year is growing faster than the scientific workforce, with the number of papers per researcher almost doubling between 1996 and 2022 (Figure 1A). This reflects the fact that publishers’ commercial desire to publish (sell) more material has aligned well with the competitive prestige culture in which publications help secure jobs, grants, promotions, and awards. To the extent that this growth is driven by a pressure for profit, rather than scholarly imperatives, it distorts the way researchers spend their time. The publishing system depends on unpaid reviewer labour, estimated to be over 130 million unpaid hours annually in 2020 alone (9). Researchers have complained about the demands of peer-review for decades, but the scale of the problem is now worse, with editors reporting widespread difficulties recruiting reviewers. The growth in publications involves not only the authors’ time, but that of academic editors and reviewers who are dealing with so many review demands. Even more seriously, the imperative to produce ever more articles reshapes the nature of scientific inquiry. Evidence across multiple fields shows that more papers result in ‘ossification’, not new ideas (10). It may seem paradoxical that more papers can slow progress until one considers how it affects researchers’ time. While rewards remain tied to volume, prestige, and impact of publications, researchers will be nudged away from riskier, local, interdisciplinary, and long-term work. The result is a treadmill of constant activity with limited progress whereas core scholarly practices – such as reading, reflecting and engaging with others’ contributions – is de-prioritized. What looks like productivity often masks intellectual exhaustion built on a demoralizing, narrowing scientific vision.

A table of profit margins across industries. The section of text related to this table is below: 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year.

The costs of inaction are plain: wasted public funds, lost researcher time, compromised scientific integrity and eroded public trust. Today, the system rewards commercial publishers first, and science second. Without bold action from the funders we risk continuing to pour resources into a system that prioritizes profit over the advancement of scientific knowledge.

We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing:

a 🧵 1/n

Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820
Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...

Fig. 1

"Electrodes are held on the scalp of the patient by an arrangement of rubber and whalebone bars tied under the chin (fig. 1). A most suitable cap is one made for setting waves in hair. It is not necessary to shave the scalp, though the examination is easier if the hair is short and recently washed."

US-Faschismus-Theoretiker warnt: „Es werden nur noch wenige Demokratien übrigbleiben“ Jason Stanley sieht die Meinungsfreiheit und demokratische Institutionen in den USA massiv bedroht und zieht historische Vergleiche.

Der Faschismusexperte Jason Stanley stellt Deutschland in diesem Interview (gegen Ende des langen Texts) ein schlechtes Zeugnis für seinen Kampf gegen den Neofaschismus aus. Lesenswert!
www.fr.de/kultur/gesel...

Koofr with Zotero via WebDAV Are you using Zotero with Box and don’t know what to do when Box support for WebDAV eventually runs out? Are you searching for Zotero with Box alternative? Don’t fret, Koofr is here for you. Read abou...

FYI, if you are using Zotero, koofr.eu provides a free 10 gb cloud with webdav that could be used for synchronizing pdfs. I tested it this week as I no longer have access to the server I used previously. Seems to work well. koofr.eu/blog/posts/k...

LLM PR is "impressive" in that it picks up a lot of the issues that human reviewers do. Or at least, the issues that humans do based on a quick read. And that's the problem with both human and LLM reviews. They respond mostly to surface level. In humans because of time pressure, in LLMs by design.

I have to try more CSD stuff as well - always seemed a bit arbitrary to me 🙈

I'm unfortunately bogged down with too many projects to push the decisionmaking angle strongly right now, so it will take time :)

Tricky indeed - we are working on getting RIDE to combine nicely with unfold, maybe that's a good venue. and Cameron-Hassals time-dilation could also be an option for modelling. All with more realistic simulations of SSMs via UnfoldSim

Tracing the neural trajectories of evidence accumulation and motor preparation processes during voluntary decisions Voluntary decisions have previously been described by where they arise in the brain and how actions corresponding to one's choice are prepared. However, the processes by which these internally guided ...

Interested in how we make preference-driven decisions, and how this is implemented in the brain?

We report that neural correlates of evidence accumulation (CPP, Mu/Beta) are also observed during value-based decisions.

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

Led by @laurencf.bsky.social (Lauren Fong)

1/n

(one more thing, could you also upload the continuous EEG data, not only the epoched? that would be super great :-))

uh and this looks like amazing work with a super great experimental design, cool analyses and nice datasharing. Thanks a ton!

thanks for tagging!

Quick q: Given the C-response is what supposedly is the actual decision making process - why not analyse that directly? Don't you else have an overlap-biased c-component overlap with R?

In other words, why not look at C directly?

I am on the job market and wanted to advertise myself here! 🤠

Looking for full-time or contracting roles!

Historically, my work spans population dynamics, healthcare informatics, robust adaptive controls, software engineering, and community engagement. 🧪

#STEMjobs #academicsky #publichealth

A screenshot of Catherine Yeh's website: https://catherinesyeh.github.io/ The website looks clean, colorful, and modern.

A screenshot of four of the websites included in my Are.na board. They mostly show academic websites in different styles. Some are more text-heavy, some feature more colors and images.

If you're a student in need of a personal website (and if you're doing research, yes, you need a website!), I keep a list of nice examples here, most of which are reusable: www.are.na/maria-antoni...

For example, I just spotted this beautiful website by Catherine Yeh: github.com/catherinesye...

MRI is one of the coolest medical technology!