Sarang Dalal

Had a great time at the MEG Nord conference in Aarhus, Denmark presenting the latest work of @pandonaude.bsky.social and myself on the cerebellum in Parkinson's disease, which is more than just basal ganglia.
Poster: laumollerandersen.org/poster.pdf
Preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
🧠📈

MEG Nord topics span perception, cognition, brain development, disorders, and quantum sensors. Abstract/reg deadline will be October 30, 2025.

We expect to have a few travel grants available for early career researchers travelling from Europe who submit an abstract or are invited for a talk! 🧠📈

MEG Nord returns to Aarhus, Nov 26-28, inaugurating our new OPM lab! Keynotes from @olejensen.bsky.social, James Bonaiuto @danclab.bsky.social, Sophie Scott; sessions will feature both group leaders + early career researchers.

Registration & abstract submission now open:
cfin.au.dk/meg-nord-2025

If you can't quite place where we are – Aarhus is Denmark's second largest city with a lovely Scandi seaside vibe. Plus, the city's landmarks appear to take inspiration from magnetometer designs. 🤓 We're lucky to have the chance to live and work here!

Positions can start in winter or spring and are based here at Aarhus University in Denmark. This project will be In collaboration with @larshpedersen.bsky.social and @ana-namburete.bsky.social.

Many thanks to @lundbeckfonden.bsky.social & @carlsbergfondet.dk for their support!

schematic of fetal OPM-MEG

📈🧠 We're looking for brains! 🧠📈
Postdoc + PhD positions are available to help pioneer fetal MEG with optically pumped magnetometers, measuring prenatal responses to sound and light to understand how we start making sense of the world even before we're born. 🐣

Please get in touch to hear more!

Our open-access article - Testing circuit-level theories of consciousness in humans - together with Yunkai Zhu, Carolina Fernandez Pujol, @dvwz.bsky.social, @jonescompneurolab.bsky.social, @tmarvan.bsky.social, and @danclab.bsky.social, was just published @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social.

So great to see so much OPM-MEG showcased at #FITNG2025! Come see my own contribution demonstrating fetal OPM-MEG with visual stimulation responses at poster P2-H-96. We plan to take this much further in the next few years, also happy to chat about the postdoc or PhD position we have available!

Dr. Margot Taylor is giving an inspiring talk about how to expand the frontiers of neuroimaging in toddlers with wearable OPM-MEG (Optically Pumped Magnetometer - Magnetoencephalography) 🧠
@sickkidsto.bsky.social
#FITNG2025

Wonderful to see fetal OPM-MEG developing nicely. Congrats to Chiara Capparini for a wonderful talk and her young investigator award! #FITNG2025

Cognitive science in popular film: the Cognitive Science Movie Index HAL 9000. Morpheus. Skynet. These household names demonstrate the strong cultural impact of films depicting themes in cognitive science and the potent…

You can find the top 10 as of 2013 in the TICS publication!
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Btw there's a Cognitive Science Movie Index that rates films for accuracy – unfortunately it's down right now, I hope just temporarily ...
cogfilms.sitehost.iu.edu

Pixar's Inside Out is surprisingly good about memory formation and forgetting – Dacher Keltner and Paul Ekman are in the credits!

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. They must have done background research with a real MEG lab, reimagining it as steampunk – they even marked fiducials the way we do! They only lose a point for confusing an MRI scan for a CT. 😚

Launched in 2023, Imaging Neuroscience is now firmly established, with full indexing (PubMed, etc.) and 700 papers to date.

We're very happy to announce that we are able to reduce the APC to $1400.

Huge thanks to all authors, reviewers, editorial team+board, and MIT Press.

enshittification | noun | when a digital platform is made worse for users, in order to increase profits

That's all? That'd be a criminal reckless driving charge in much of the world. Here in Denmark you'd lose both your license and your car on the spot...

The first plot of EEG topography on the scalp, published in 1944 by Kōiti Motokawa.

They found it! Here's the correct citation:
Motokawa K (1944). Die Verteilung der elektrischen Aktivität auf der Kopfschwarte und ihre Beziehung zur Cytoarchitektonik der Großhirnrinde des Menschen. Japanese Journal of Medical Sciences, III Biophysics, 10:99–111.

Actually stay tuned, it seems he might have published two articles in the same journal volume! I've asked my library to see if the other one is there too. :-)

My library found this article (auf Deutsch!) but this plot isn't in there. 😔

BTW a fellow PhD student back in the day, Erik Edwards, became obsessed with Motokawa and summarized much of his work in his thesis. You might be interested to have a look! faculty.washington.edu/seattle/brai...

We fed cows the ground-up remains of other cows.

We got BSE.

Now we're feeding LLMs the ground-up outputs of other LLMs.

🤷‍♀️

Decoding the Temporal Structures and Interactions of Multiple Face Dimensions Using Optically Pumped Magnetometer Magnetoencephalography (OPM-MEG) Humans possess a remarkable ability to rapidly access diverse information from others’ faces with just a brief glance, which is crucial for intricate social interactions. While previous studies using ...

www.jneurosci.org/content/44/4...

Measuring the neurodevelopmental trajectory of excitatory-inhibitory balance via visual gamma oscillations Abstract. Disruption of the balance between excitatory and inhibitory neurotransmission (E-I balance) is thought to underlie many neurodevelopmental disorders; however, its study is typically restrict...

direct.mit.edu/imag/article...

Screenshot of the original tweet announcing our move, with 5K likes and 2M views.

On this day 2y ago we announced our move away from the huge profits that NeuroImage makes for Elsevier.

Things at Imaging Neuroscience have progressed fantastically thanks to the support for this move by the brain imaging community and @mitpress.bsky.social. 565 papers published already!

Unauthorized ideas are no longer allowed entry into U.S. thought...
bsky.app/profile/jess...

Be sure to delete all research proposals from your devices and brains before attempting entry to the U.S. They're full of ideas! 🫠

striking to me that this interview ends with him plaintively pleading for other university leaders to speak up: "I don’t think this is all about Princeton. It’s about what’s happening in the United States. I think this would be so much stronger if many more of my fellow presidents were speaking up."

Columbia University caves to demands to restore $400m from Trump administration Measures include empowering security officers to arrest people, and reassigning control of Middle East department

Exclusive: NIH freezes all research grants to Columbia University Amid negotiations with Trump, the university could risk losing nearly $700 million

How it started / How it's going

Btw this would be the direct link for people to add it to their feeds.
bsky.app/profile/did:...

Thanks for setting this up! It's working and looks good on my end.