Paul Fiedler

A woman's place was not in the home: Challenging the assumptions about women's work in early modern history New research has revealed that women played a fundamental role in the development of England's national economy before 1700.

“More than half of the work done by women in the period between the 16th and 18th centuries took place outside of the home, and around half of all housework and three-quarters of care work was conducted professionally for other households” [England]

phys.org/news/2025-10...

Meet the Physicist Who Wrote Over 2,000 Wikipedia Biographies for Women in STEM After noticing a lack of entries on Wikipedia for incredible women throughout history, this incredible woman decided to take matters into her own hands.

Jess Wade is amazing, and it's my absolute honour to be one of the more than 2000 women in STEM whose wikipedia page she started: mymodernmet.com/jessica-wade... 🧪🔭👩‍🔬

Arousal as a universal embedding for spatiotemporal brain dynamics - Nature Reframing of arousal as a latent dynamical system can reconstruct multidimensional measurements of large-scale spatiotemporal brain dynamics on the timescale of seconds in mice.

Super proud of this collaboration with rockstar Ryan Raut - born out of playing in the sandbox in our last year of grad school! Multi-scale brain activity can be predicted from a simple measure of arousal like pupil diameter. Out with linear causality, in with dynamic systems to explain neurobiology

Sinclair Lab The Learning & Behavior Change Lab at Rice University, directed by Dr. Sinclair

🌟 Excited to share that I'm recruiting PhD students in Psychology for my new lab at Rice University this cycle (Signal boost appreciated!)

To learn more, check out the Learning & Behavior Change Lab website:
www.sinclairlab-rice.com

Applications are due Dec 1st: psychology.rice.edu/graduate/pro...

ANSWER: 0 (yes, ZERO!)

This is a result of an analysis done by a student in my grad seminar, using a large dataset (N=307,313).

What this result might mean: Nobody's personality is truly "average," and people's personality profiles (at least Big 5) might be more "jagged" than we think.

(🧵 1/5)

Here is a thread showcasing my GitHub repositories: 1) Friends Don't Let Friends Make Bad Graphs. An opinionated essay on good and bad graphs.

My popular one by a long shot with 6.4k stars and 248 forks. github.com/cxli233/Frie...

A brain-wide map of neural activity during complex behaviour - Nature The International Brain Laboratory presents a brain-wide electrophysiological map obtained from pooling data from 12 laboratories that performed the same standardized perceptual decision-making task i...

The two key studies of the International Brain Laboratory @intlbrainlab.bsky.social are out today!

A brain-wide map of neural activity during complex behaviour
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Brain-wide representations of prior information in mouse decision-making
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

This looks pretty cool: ultrasound can now see through the skull! 🧠🔊

The skull has long been a barrier to ultrasound. This reprint shows how to make it quickly transparent → enabling full-depth, high-res fUSI in mice (& humans! 🤯🤯)
Huge congrats to the authors!!!

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

Graphical summary of the analysis pipeline

Decreased similarity within the anterior insula cortex drives group differences between patients with MDD and healthy control participants. This difference is illustrated by shift functions and compared to control regions in the temporal cortex.

Patients with depression can be robustly classified based on functional connectivity profiles, and the accuracy improves with increasing symptom severity.

New preprint...and this one is truly EPIC 🚨.

Using a large group of patients with depression and healthy controls (N>800), we show differences in the functional segregation of insular subnetworks. And we can use it to classify!
Led by @glassybrain.bsky.social #neuroskyence 🩺
osf.io/preprints/ps...

During stimulation, the patient was asked to count from 1 to 20 and was stimulated initially at 1 mA, without any change in her mental status. However when she was serially up ramped to 5 mA, and while counting out loud from 1-20, she became ‘‘emo- tional” and ‘‘teary eyed” and mentioned that she felt a change in her emotional status to becoming ‘‘sad” and had a ‘‘sad tear”, but was able to finish her counting and did not experience any motor deficits. She subsequently asked for a tissue and wiped her tears with it. After the stimulation was stopped, she immediately returned back to her normal state. Time locked sorrowful crying with lacrimation was again reproducible with a repeat stimulation of the same electrode pair at 5 mA. The stimulation was not repeated after, as the patient was emotionally distraught and requested the procedure to be stopped. This is shown in the video in the supplemental digital content.

Crying and sadness induced by stimulation to L anterior insula (a human case study). How remarkable.

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33511338/

Astrocyte expressing eGFP in green showing great morphology of an individual cell. GFAP staining in magenta labelling a blood vessel beside the green astrocyte

Not yet #fluorescencefriday but too excited to wait to share this gorgeous #astrocyte image by student in the lab Camila Cabarcas Arrieta

Astrocyte expressing eGFP in green.
GFAP staining in magenta (labelling blood vessel in this case)

Yesterday I discovered that ChatGPT's PhD-level expertise didn't extend to bird anatomy. This morning I thought, perhaps I was being too hard on the half-trillion-dollar company. Birds are a little weird, anatomically speaking. Let's try something more familiar. A mammal. Behold.

📣Call for applications

We are recruiting the 2nd cohort of PhD students for the international research training group on women's mental health. If you care about translational pharmacoimaging work integrating hormonal states, please apply #neurojobs
jobs.medizin.uni-tuebingen.de/Job/6598/PhD...

Check out our latest paper..

- A simple view of the ageing effect across the full spectrum and the whole head
- Spectra of effect sizes
- Covariates can change effect size
- Replication!

We hope this facilitates synthesis of results across a rich and varied literature of age effects

#neuroskyence

you might have a point; it reminds me of ‘having no preference’ vs. ‘being indifferent between options’

🚨 New Preprint 🚨

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

By Cyr et al.

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

A: Yes!

🧵:

At #ccn2025 and interested in bridging animal and human neuroscience?

Stop by B121 this afternoon to see our investigation of the neural representations in spikes and field potentials and our surprising result that sometimes field potentials are better!

2025.ccneuro.org/poster/?id=t...

🧠📈

I still get chills

Meet Mike
*30+ years severe depression
*first hospitalized @ 13y
*20 meds
*3 rounds of ECT
*2 near-fatal suicide attempts

Mike felt joy for the first time in decades after we turned on his new brain pacemaker or PACE

see videos, read paper, follow thread
doi.org/10.31234/osf...

The long and newly updated story of lithium and its potential role for helping to prevent Alzheimer's disease
erictopol.substack.com/p/lithium-an...

Lithium deficiency and the onset of Alzheimer’s disease - Nature Lithium has an essential role in the brain and is deficient early in Alzheimer’s disease, which can be recapitulated in mice and treated with a novel lithium salt that restores the physiological level.

New @nature.com
The possibility that lithium deficiency is a driver of Alzheimer's disease. Experimental model shows Li depletion impedes amyloid clearance, and repletion in humans could be achieved with low doses
nature.com/articles/s41...

Good schematic on the lithium discovery www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Yellow background with orange border. OpenAI logo top center, "OpenAI's GPT OSS" bottom center. Left side in smaller writing says "From the makers of ChatGPT...A new model is released". On the right and left side are spikey orange announcement banners, reading "Now Open Source!" "Available on Hugging Face! <logo>" url given in bottom right corner is hf.co/openai/gpt-oss-120b

🤖 ICYMI: Yesterday, @hf.co and OpenAI partnered to bring open source GPT to the public. This is a Big Deal in "AI world". Allow me to explain why. 🧵
huggingface.co/openai/gpt-o...

Looking at Van Gogh’s Starry Night, we see not only its content (a French village beneath a night sky) but also its *style*. How does that work? How do we see style?

In @nathumbehav.nature.com, @chazfirestone.bsky.social & I take an experimental approach to style perception! osf.io/preprints/ps...

🧠🚀 Announcing 𝐬𝐄𝐄𝐆-𝐒𝐔𝐈𝐓𝐄 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐁𝐫𝐚𝐢𝐧𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐫𝐦: open-source pipeline for multimodal intracranial ephys /epilepsy research: CT→MRI coreg, GARDEL contact localization, atlas labelling, seizure fingerprinting, source analysis—all in one GUI.
neuroimage.usc.edu/brainstorm/s...

After 3 desk rejects and 2 major rewrites (with a 17-page rebuttal (!), and cutting word count by 25%), I am pleased that my paper on policy appraisals and second-order beliefs in climate policy has found a home in @climate-policy.bsky.social: (1/) @cast-centre.bsky.social
doi.org/10.1080/1469...

Sketchnote of Nora Newcombe's Rumelhart Prize Talk, posing three questions and case studies for cognitive science: (1) innateness (with the geometric module as a case study), (2) representations (featuring cognitive maps vs. graphs), and (3) embodiment (featuring mental rotation)

Notes from @noranewcombe.bsky.social 's beautiful Rumelhart Prize "tasting menu" - congratulations Nora!!! #CogSci2025

Harriet standing by a poster on dementia risk reduction policy at AAIC 2025 in Toronto

A lot of early interest in #denpruQM consensus on dementia risk reduction policy at #AAIC25 presented by our great post-doc @hdemnitzking.bsky.social with the project led by @charlesmarshall.bsky.social Paper available later this year. @qmulpsychiatry.bsky.social @claudiacooper.bsky.social

A neural manifold view of the brain - Nature Neuroscience Recent advances in neuroscience have revealed how neural population activity underlying behavior can be well described by topological objects called neural manifolds. Understanding how nature, nurture...

Check out our new review/perspective (w/ @juangallego.bsky.social & Devika Narain) on neural manifolds in the brain! It was a lot of fun to think through these ideas over the past couple of years, and I'm excited it's finally out in the world!

🔗: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
📄: rdcu.be/ex8hW

Phrenology and IQ tests: the far-right revival of discredited race science Resurging interest in theories of racial exceptionalism is turbocharged amid nuance-light world of social media

“Discredited ideas on race, genetics and IQ have become staple topics of far-right online discourse”

www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...