Eric Yates

Eric Yates

@ericthecurious.bsky.social

On a mission to prove the causal mechanisms of unexplained neurological conditions, starting with my own I’ve built robust software for real-time biosignals over 5 years of SBIR/STTR grants Functional neuroanatomy + insula 🧠🤖💜👋🏻 github.com/neurodevs

120 Followers 131 Following 98 Posts Joined Nov 2024
1 week ago
Alpha and Theta Audiovisual Interventions in a Reflective Chamber Demonstrate Acute Effects on Stress and Burnout Escalating stress prevalence, particularly among essential service personnel whose cognitive compromise threatens public welfare, necessitates rapid, accessible, and non-pharmacological interventions....

Our paper on stroboscopic interventions for burnout was accepted at npj Digital Medicine today. It’s my first!

I suppose that means I still have an h-index of 0 for now 🙃

Preprint: www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-7...

#Neuroscience #MentalHealth #Burnout #EEG #DigitalHealth

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6 months ago

Will check it out, thanks for the share!

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6 months ago

Well, it’s a good thing then that I have Linux, open-source, and data science experience. Bad thing is that I’ve already asked multiple doctors to take a look at it, and not one has expressed the slightest interest 😅

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6 months ago

Nice! I got a 100x WGS from Nebula Genomics a few years ago, although I haven’t really figured out how to properly use it yet. Would love to see if you end up putting something together to explain your process

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6 months ago

Interesting that you say defiance, since Kierkegaard described the despair of willing to be oneself precisely as an act of defiance.

Are you familiar with his book The Sickness onto Death? Old and Christian yet also surprisingly insightful

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6 months ago

I appreciate the directness of your writing. It’s helped me to process these feelings that have been difficult to resolve in the absence of anyone willing to touch these subjects. I honor your courage in doing so. I suppose we both despair at willing to be ourselves, a la Kierkegaard.

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6 months ago

Despair does work quite well here: so no one feels the despair I and so many countless others have felt.

There really isn’t a good word for relief of despair. The closest I could find is solace.

It seems like solace is used to describe “comfort in” or “relief from” despair. The latter works?

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6 months ago

Reflecting here, I realize “dismissed” isn’t quite the right word. It’s more that I want to make sure no one else is left to suffer without hope of relief, the way I once did. I wish there were a word or phrase for that experience.

Does anyone know one?

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6 months ago

Woah, that’s an unusual level of human cross-region specificity. I’m excited to see more!

Since BLA receives visual associative input, do you think external theta entrainment (like stroboscopic flicker) could indirectly influence similar circuits? We’re finishing up a theta stroboscopic study now!

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7 months ago

I like the idea of treating it as a mixin, using data attributes, or “Tailwind-ifying” JS props. In general, I prefer names that people recognize immediately, and “traits” didn’t feel familiar to me at first glance. Data attributes and mixins tend to be more widely understood.

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7 months ago

🧵 5/5

I’ve discussed this with a neurologist, with some hypotheses coming from him and others from me. While many other doctors have told me my disorders have no biological basis, he said this definitely has an organic cause, just one he had never seen or heard of before.

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7 months ago

🧵 4/5
Trial 4 – Right side, eyes closed

Strong motor response. As in previous, absence of visual competition is hypothesized to more freely allow right CT stimulus to propagate through left thalamus to left insula, producing a strong downstream motor response from left cingulate cortex.

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7 months ago

🧵 3/5
Trial 3 – Left side, eyes closed

Strong motor response. With no visual input, thalamocortical gating is hypothesized to be insufficient to block left CT stimulus to right thalamus to right insula, producing a strong downstream motor response from right cingulate cortex.

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7 months ago

🧵 2/5
Trial 2 – Right side, eyes open

Moderate motor response. Visual gating is hypothesized to be insufficient to block right CT stimulus to left thalamus to left insula, producing a modest motor response from left cingulate. This may suggest relative hyperactivity of the left insula to CT input.

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7 months ago

🧵 1/5
Trial 1 – Left side, eyes open

No motor response. A thalamocortical gating effect from competing visual input is hypothesized to block left CT stimulus from sufficiently propagating through right thalamus to right insula, preventing a downstream motor response from right cingulate cortex.

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7 months ago
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TW: Painful facial expressions

These 4 trials show a basic pattern of my response to C-tactile touch. EEG, ECG, and more soon. See thread for hypotheses!

Also, please excuse the very scientific Q-tip. I've...misplaced my Von Frey monofilaments! 😂

#BuildInPublic #Neurophysiology #Biosignals #Nof1

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7 months ago

To add even a little more subjectivity here, I’d rather keep component props atomic and declarative like this:

<Component isDraggable={true} isResizable={true} onLeftSwipe={…} onRightSwipe={…} />

Basically, single responsibility principle applied to props. It’s great for types too.

Thoughts?

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7 months ago

Preclude is the perfect word here. I’ve never quite thought of it that way before. It’s not so much being excluded, as it is that there was never a question of possibly being included. Thank you for the (tragic) perspective.

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7 months ago

I feel you so much here. Like you say, at least we get to be ourselves.

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7 months ago

If these acronyms light up your brain, we should talk :)

SpI/II, Sp5C, VMpo, Idfp, post-IC, mid-IC, vAIC, MCC, PAG, NRA, NA, FMN, VH 🧠

#Neuroscience #Neuroanatomy #FunctionalNeuroanatomy #Neurophysiology #Interoception #EmotionalMotorSystem

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7 months ago

I’ve lived with symptoms that doctors have repeatedly asserted has no biological cause.

It’s made me determined to prove they do have a measurable cause, so no one else is dismissed like that again.

Who else is working towards this change?

#Neurosky #Neuroskyence #ChronicIllness #Psychosomatic

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7 months ago

Spent a lot of time today reading The Emotional Motor System (1996).

It’s funny how often a decades-old textbook is still the deepest, most comprehensive take on a topic.

For another prime example, check out The Midbrain PAG Matter (1991)!

#Neurosky #AffectiveNeuroscience #EmotionalMotorSystem

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7 months ago
Screenshot of a webpage footer displaying a GitHub-style badge labeled "Neurodevs" with "22 repos, 540 tests" in green, positioned below a symmetrical diagram of brain regions labeled left (L) and right (R). Code snippet showing a TestCounterBadge React component with props for title (Neurodevs), githubUrl (https://github.com/neurodevs), numRepos (22), and numTests (540).

Finished building a #ReactJS badge to show (hardcoded) total repos and test counts for a #GitHub org.

Will soon integrate with the node-test-counter package I just built, so it can be updated automatically.

Check it out here!

github.com/neurodevs/react-github-badge ✅

#BuildInPublic #OpenSource

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7 months ago
Terminal screenshot showing a script output for test counts across @neurodevs repos. The script, executed with node build/scripts/demo.js, displays a JSON-like object: total: 536, with a perRepo breakdown. The repo with the highest count is 'react-connectivity-graphs': 78, followed by 'node-ble': 71 and 'node-lsl': 70. Repos with the fewest tests include and 'node-test-counter': 3, 'node-html-loader': 2, and 'node-eeg': 2. Terminal screenshot showing test results for the file CrossRepoTestCounter.test.ts. All 3 tests passed in a total of 6ms:

• createsInstance
• throwsIfRepoNotFound
• resultEqualsExpected

Finally got around to building a small module to count tests across packages.

I've written 536 tests so far across all @neurodevs repos, and it only took 3 of those tests to count the rest!

github.com/neurodevs/no...

#BuildInPublic #TestDrivenDevelopment #TDD #SoftwareEngineering

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7 months ago
Preview
GitHub - neurodevs/node-robotic-arm Contribute to neurodevs/node-robotic-arm development by creating an account on GitHub.

The code doesn’t do much yet, just what you see in the video!

But if you’re curious, here it is:

github.com/neurodevs/no...

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7 months ago
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Started building a #NodeJS adapter for this robotic arm to eventually deliver #C-tactile stimuli in experiments.

It’ll target both sides of my cheeks, forearms, and calves to test for somatotopy using #EEG source localization.

There will be many other tests too!

#BuildInPublic #Neuroskyence

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7 months ago

I actually used SVN from about 2019-2020…on purpose. Client’s request. Still recovering.

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7 months ago
A terminal window displays output from running a Node.js script (node build/scripts/demo.js) for a causal model used in the I-INSULA protocol.

The causal model M is shown as a triple ⟨U, V, F⟩, where U is a set of external variables (like C-tactile, vestibular, thermal, and visual stimuli), V is a set of internal biosignal variables (like source-localized EEG and EMG), and F is a set of causal mechanisms represented as functions. 

A submodel Mx is also shown, where one function in F has been modified to return a constant value (e.g., 1) to simulate activity of an internal variable (in this example, posterior insular cortex activity) to test whether it is sufficient to causally explain downstream activity in the cingulate cortex or EMG muscle activity. A screenshot of TypeScript code in a code editor, showing part of the StructuralCausalModel class implementation. 

The method toSubmodel takes a set of mechanism modifications (Fx), stores them in instance variables (currentF, currentFx), and performs causal mechanism overrides via doMechanismModifications(), replacing the function with a constant-returning one. The new submodel is then created in createSubmodel() and returned.

C-tactile touch (slow, gentle) is normally pleasant.

For me, it's painful (allodynia) and causes involuntary movements / vocalizations under certain conditions.

Hypothesis: C-tactile => #Insula => Cingulate => PAG => Motor

Here’s a partial #causal model to test!

#BuildInPublic #EEG #Nof1

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8 months ago

I'm writing a preregistration! Mostly anatomy / causality so far.

The aim is to define causal mechanisms in terms of expected biosignal patterns prior to data collection, using case observations + known human neuroanatomy.

It's going to take while from scope, and I'll keep sharing along the way :)

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8 months ago
Screenshot of a TypeScript class named StructuralCausalModel implementing Judea Pearl’s formalism of a structural causal model. The class defines private readonly fields U, V, and F for external (exogenous) variables, internal (endogenous) variables, and causal mechanisms, respectively. It includes a static Create method, a toTriple method, and supporting interfaces for typing the causal model components. The code structure reflects a modular, type-safe design for executable causal modeling.

I’ve been building these graphs to show likely neuroanatomical pathways of my unexplained condition.

Tonight, I started building the causal engine to move from unexplained to explained.

I'm becoming a falsifiable model, one mechanism at a time.

#Neuroscience #Causality #EEG #Nof1 #BuildInPublic

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