Mara Mather

New paper with Andy Kim, @santimoralesphd.bsky.social, and Josh Senior just published! "Electroencephalography, pupillometry, and behavioral evidence for locus coeruleus-noradrenaline system related tonic hyperactivity in older adults" authors.elsevier.com/c/1mCryivP7S...

Various lines of evidence indicate that there should be influences of breathing on locus coeruleus activity (and therefore on pupil dilation) yet demonstrating these relationships has been challenging. Kluger et al. used phase coherence to quantify oscillatory coupling between the two signals.

A Dynamic Link between Respiration and Arousal - PubMed Viewing brain function through the lens of other physiological processes has critically added to our understanding of human cognition. Further advances though may need a closer look at the interactions between these physiological processes themselves. Here we characterize the interplay of the highly …

Another paper I reviewed in 2024 that I thought was outstanding is also now published: www.jneurosci.org/content/44/4...
‪by @danlikesbrains.bsky.social‬
@jgross.bsky.social
@ckeitelsci.bsky.social

Evidence from 7 Tesla fMRI of intrinsic network supporting allostasis in the human brain Nature Neuroscience - Functional connectivity analyses using ultra-high precision 7 Tesla functional MRI identified a unified system for allostasis and interoception that included more than 96% of...

Neat that my review of Zhang et al.'s "Cortical and subcortical mapping of the human allostatic–interoceptive system using 7 Tesla fMRI" was quoted in this Research Briefing. It was one of my favorite papers I reviewed in 2024! rdcu.be/eOlTT by Jiahe Zhang, @lisafeldmanbarrett.com and others

I will be recruiting 🌟PhD students🌟 for my newish lab! If you're interested in learning & memory mechanisms applied to individual, interactive & collective behavior using computational modeling, real-world experiments and fMRI, email me! RTs much appreciated 🙏 rouhanilab.com

Kudos to this amazing resource!

A randomized clinical trial reveals effects of mindfulness and slow breathing on plasma amyloid beta levels Prior research suggests that meditation may slow brain aging and reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s disease (AD). However, we lack research systematically examining what aspect(s) of meditation may drive ...

Our paper showing opposing effects of mindfulness alone and mindfulness + slow breathing on the Alzheimer's-related amyloid-beta peptide was just accepted for publication at Psychophysiology!
www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

Just came across this face image database that lists different databases from A-Z libguides.princeton.edu/facedatabases A very nice collection, thanks to
@mtesterman.bsky.social

Great to see more steps towards eliminating dependence on journals that charge large fees.

I have taken
the Tylenol
that was in
the medicine cabinet

and which
they think probably
is the reason
you like trains

forgive me
but that’s bullshit
you got autism
from your dad

I strongly second this! 👏🏾

When talking about science communication, I also always stress that *all* forms and forums of communication matter 🔄

Whether it’s a big, factually correct but details-lite TV show or movie…or just chatting to granny or your mates in a pub 🗣️

Look at academia giving me a little hope

Project Assistant (Fixed-Term) The University of Southern California (USC), founded in 1880, is located in the heart of downtown Los Angeles and is the largest private employer in the City of Los Angeles. USC is consistently ranked...

We are hiring a full time project assistant! Please forward to any bright, curious team players you know who might be interested in applying:

usc.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/ExternalUSCC...

Check out our new article for young readers (ages 8-15) on heart-brain interactions and interoception! 🧠🫀

I had so much fun co-writing this with @agatapatyczek.bsky.social @el-rei.bsky.social with the support of @michaelgaebler.com ✍️

👉 Share it widely with curious young minds
Yay for #scicomm ✨

GitHub - jmumford/randomise-prep: Generate design matrices, contrasts, and scripts to set up FSL randomise analyses. Generate design matrices, contrasts, and scripts to set up FSL randomise analyses. - jmumford/randomise-prep

Do you ever wish you could just use python to pull together the files and code for running FSL's randomise? Me too! I made this: github.com/jmumford/ran... It will even replace the numbers in the file outputs with contrast names of your choosing (and replace corrp with 1minusp).

House LHHS Subcommittee Approves FY26 Budget for NIH, IES – FABBS Upon returning from the August recess on September 2, the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies

Here is an informative report on the current status of NIH's budget for next year.

fabbs.org/news/2025/09...

IJFMR -Academic Journal Submit Paper for Publication

This is harassment! Checking the tennis scores on ESPN and look at the presumably personalised banner ad.

An abbreviation (ABB) in a journal article (JA) or Grant Application (GA) is rarely worth the words it saves. Every ABB requires cognitive resources (CR) and at my age by the time I'm halfway through a JA or GA I no longer have the CR to remember what your ABB stood for.

This simple visualisation is great for understanding one reason why LLMs provide completely wrong answers. (I don't recall the source for this, AI would probably know ironically)

Figure 1 of the paper

🚨New paper!🚨

Meta-analysis on 4M p-values across 240k psych articles: How has psychology changed since the replication crisis began? How is replicability linked to citations, impact factor, and university prestige? 🧵

Paper: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Interactive: pbogdan.com/meganal

Norepinephrine signals through astrocytes to modulate synapses Locus ceruleus (LC)–derived norepinephrine (NE) drives network and behavioral adaptations to environmental saliencies by reconfiguring circuit functional connectivity, but the underlying synapse-level...

Thought this would be a nice way to enter the bsky community👇Delighted for Katie (now in Chris Dulla's lab at Tufts). Thank you to our collaborators, to the reviewers and to Cagla Eroglu for the highlight!
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Home | DORA The Declaration on Research Assessment recognizes the need to improve the ways in which the outputs of scholarly research are evaluated.

For anyone concerned about tenure and promotion, there is a global movement of responsible research assessment that you may want to connect to.

You may want to check out DORA and try to get your department or university to sign.

sfdora.org

I don’t think they ruled out that latter possibility.

My paper reviewing how different neurodegenerative diseases affect autonomic function was just published.

Effects were stronger in women than in men. But one open question is whether the effects are specific to the older live-attenuated herpes zoster vaccine that was given to those in the analysis, or whether they will extend to the current preferred recombinant vaccine.

A natural experiment on the effect of herpes zoster vaccination on dementia - Nature Using a natural experiment that avoids common bias concerns, this study finds that the live-attenuated shingles vaccine reduced the probability of a new dementia diagnosis within a follow-up period of...

Wales rolled out their shingles vaccine with a strict birthdate cutoff. Interestingly, those born immediately after the cutoff were 20% less likely to get diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease in the next 7 years than those born immediately before the cutoff. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Congrats Nanthia! We will miss you in LA.

Butterflies on a blue sky

THREAD

The numbers are in. @bsky.app research sharing volumes vs X Formerly Twitter

In March 2024, on most days, Bluesky hosts more posts linked to research published in 2025 than X.

By quite a lot.

Release the Kraken...

#AcademicSky #HigherEd #Altmetrics
1/11

Daily mindfulness practice with and without slow breathing has opposing effects on plasma amyloid beta levels https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.03.10.25323695v1

The findings suggest that different meditative practices could have different effects on Alzheimer's disease pathways.