Alina Studenova

How dynamics arise from the structure is my biggest interest. In this study, we started with a small step and asked how structure constrains dynamics. Spoiler: would that it were so simple… (1/6)

Patients with epilepsy were measured simultaneously with iEEG and high-density EEG (256 electrodes). EEG was source-reconstructed to iEEG electrode locations. eLoreta/sLoreta won over LCMV. Delta/Theta/Alpha were reconstructed somewhat similarly, but better than beta. Cool!👏 Well, I never liked LCMV

I read a book, "An Evolutionary Story of Agency" by Á. Moreno and J. Peretó. Fun and entertaining🦠! Read my summary here www.alinastudenova.com/home/blog/bo...

Total brain volume (TBV) is associated with brain signals. The first time I saw this was on Andrew Quinn's poster some years ago. Here, I plotted data from the LEMON dataset (202 participants). TBV was residualized on age and gender. So, add TBV as a covariate whenever possible. #brainmovies

Cross-talk is a known issue in EEG, but it also occurs in spikes. Extremely synchronized spikes with v. similar waveforms should be inspected, as they could be artifacts or, as this paper calls them, synchrofacts. Whitening can reduce those. Nice!👏 Lesson: look at raw signals before transformations!

Binocular flash suppression: show img1 to one eye, then img2 to the other eye. Humans report seeing img2 while img1 is suppressed. In this study, same design but monkeys. During suppression, neurons alternated between representations of img1 and img2 with a dwell ~60ms. Nice! But why neurons bother?

I recently received an interesting email that turned out to be an LLM-powered funneling scam. Here I describe the story and how LLMs also turned out to be a powerful forensic tool. russpoldrack.substack.com/p/digging-in...

Huge multimodal data release: Brain signals, Cardio, Gaze, Head, Gut, Respiration, 178 participants watching videos = 110 hours. Lots of interest, so @jens-madsen.bsky.social did a massive update of the meta data. I have to say, I have not seen a data this well organized. bbbd.pythonanywhere.com

Stimulation of M1 elicited learned movements in mice. But the stimulation needed to be of the right ~20 neurons, with the right interconnections, at the right time, at the right initial brain state, and in the right behavioural context. V. cool!🤩 Something to think about for rehabilitation efforts.

Sensory buffer has been researched, but what about long-term sensory memory? This study provides evidence for tactile LTM, showing BOLD activation in S1/S2 upon recognition and increased coupling between hippocampus and S1/S2 during successful retrieval. Cool!👏 Then tactile imagery = tactile memory?

Evoked responses (ERP) can be generated via phase reset of ongoing oscillations. Here, simulated oscillatory phase is reset to 90° at t=0. When averaged over trials, incoherent oscillations cancel out, but consistent part persists. After all, ERP is just an event with phase consistency. #brainmovies

Today I'm (virtually) at the Erwin L. Hahn Lecture & Workshop on ultra-high-resolution MRI/fMRI. Extremely interesting program!🤩 hahn-institute.de/en/info/hahn...

Fine motor skills are important at any age. Over the weekend, I crocheted this alpha motor neuron innervating a muscle.☺️

Our Next Q&A sessions are taking place this week on Tuesday and Wednesday ! Register here: cognition.maxplanckschools.org/en/applicati... #passionforscience #maxplanckschools

Today at #Bernsteinconference is Anna Levina on intrinsic timescales of neural dynamics👏. Timescales can be estimated from any brain signals, spikes, local field potentials, rhythms(?). Longer time-scale dynamics is closer to the critical point, but sometimes having a shorter is useful behaviorally.

Today's highlight of the #Bernsteinconference is Richard Naud on learning. V. interesting!👏 1) bursting spiking can serve as a mechanism of learning, 2) errors are addressed by the neuron that should have been involved in the right choice and not by the neuron that was involved in the wrong choice.

Second day of the workshop "Bridging the species divide: comparative approaches to study neural signatures" at #Bernsteinconference. Yesterday, we listened to talks about theta and alpha, today more alpha and gamma. Exciting!🎉

Interested in #NeuroAI? Max Planck Schools Biomedical AI applications are open until Dec 1. Info: biomedicalai.maxplanckschools.org/4056/applica... If you’re looking at mentors, I think Arno Villringer is worth checking out :)

I'm at workshop "Bridging the species divide: comparative approaches to study neural signatures" at #Bernsteinconference organized by Natalie @nschawor.bsky.social and Dennis @neuralnestbird.bsky.social Excited to be here😍 We started with Natalie explaining the challenge. Room 3.101.

On my way to Frankfurt for this year’s #BernsteinConference! 🚆✨ Especially excited to dive into this workshop on neural signatures — looking forward to insightful, fun discussions and connecting with awesome folks in neuroscience! 💡🧠🤓 #Neuroscience #BrainScience

Greatly enjoyed the Symposium on laminar MEG at #BIOMAG2026 in 北京. 🧲🧠📝 Talks: @danclab.bsky.social @jan-sch.bsky.social Matteo Maspoldi @studenova.bsky.social

I read an old book, but not *really-really* old, from 1934: “The Organism: A Holistic Approach to Biology Derived from Pathological Data in Man” by Dr. Kurt Goldstein. Overlaps quite a lot with current discussions. Read my summary here www.alinastudenova.com/home/blog/bo...

Today I attended the talk by Tommy Clausner on his recent paper on the laminar distribution of visual alpha ERD and gamma ERS. Very cool study🤩👏! Many insights for me! But also, method-wise, interleaved EEG-fMRI is so much better than parallel EEG-fMRI. elifesciences.org/articles/108...

How do philosophers and scientists of mind actually work together, and where does the collaboration break down? ISPSM is launching In Conversation, a new online series that aims to bring philosophers and scientists together to work through questions like these. 📅 23 Oct 2026, 1pm BST/8am EDT

AI psychosis hits the AI field? Folks are talking about an increase in submissions to journals like TMLR and 60K submissions to ICML, especially new single author papers. Any professor will tell you they receive emails from random people describing the "discovery" they've made.

Some oscillations have an asymmetric shape (or non-zero mean). Their troughs are peakier than peaks (or the other way round). These oscillations, when modulated in amplitude (literally always), will have their modulation "copied" in the lower-frequency signal. Here's simulated example. #brainmovies

currently preparing for a Bernstein pre-conference workshop that I co-organized with @neuralnestbird.bsky.social. we will be looking at different electrophysiological signatures (= 〰️〰️〰️) across species. come by and say hi if you are there. 🙂 bernstein-network.de/bernstein-co...

📢 A great opportunity for candidates interested in cognitive neuroscience, neuroimaging methods, and translational neuroscience 🧠 IMPRS CoNI is now accepting applications for its 5th cohort! 👇

Absolute beta power is different between patients with Parkinson's disease and healthy controls, but not periodic beta power. Turned out what is different between patients and controls is the aperiodic offset and slope. Nice!👏 Lesson from that: always plot the full spectra and actually look at it.

More data to enable more discoveries in the fight against Parkinson's disease. 👇 www.nature.com/articles/s41... @crchum.bsky.social @theneuro.bsky.social

Version 2.0 of #OpenNeuro multi-subject, multi-modal (sMRI+fMRI+MEG+EEG) face-processing dataset now available, thanks to @dcdace.bsky.social, with changes listed here: openneuro.org/datasets/ds0...

Preprint with a survey among the biomedical community about preprint use. Fun!😃 Some thoughts are similar to mine. Would be even more fun to see the facts. For instance, 38.8% reported in free-text comments that preprints negatively impacted researchers' careers. Is it merely perceived, or actual?

The 2026 Berlin Summer School on Artificial Intelligence and Society opened today, September 14, and runs through September 17, 2026, in a new setting: for the first time, the summer school takes place in BIFOLD's own premises. @tuberlin.bsky.social @weizenbauminstitut.bsky.social

Our graduate school IMPRS CoNI is calling for applications at imprs-coni.mpg.de/90532/call-f.... If you are interested in doing a PhD with me within the scope of ERC CoG BALANG (cordis.europa.eu/project/id/1...), let us talk about your application to the school.

New paper alert: “Stimulus-driven selection precedes and dominates top-down attentional control: Behavioral and electrophysiological evidence” is out now in NeuroImage! doi.org/10.1016/j.ne... 1/5

Consciousness is defined differently: embodied, narrative, perceptual, or executive. This paper says it's not one but a mixture, and it's context-dependent and possibly diverges across paradigms. Nice!👍 But the ground assumption is that regions specialize, e.g., insula=bodily processing. Well, maybe

Very happy to share our new results: cardiac activity around feedback dynamically reflects expectations. Led by Maria Azanova, with Alina @studenova.bsky.social , Esra Al, Vadim Nikulin and Arno Villringer www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

New round of applications for Max Planck School of Cognition has started. Besides Q&A sessions, applicants may ask for an assessment of their application (CV and motivational letter) by one of the current students (me, for example😊). We are always happy to help! Request this via application portal.

Fun little game in which a human life is randomly drawn for you. I ended up a girl, born in the Yangtze Basin in 670 CE. Died in infancy at 6 months 🥲 anyhumanever.com

M\EEG signals are autocorrelated. Here, I cut the resting-state data into trials and correlated the "pre-stimulus" window with other windows, like correlating two ERPs across trials. High correlation persists for some time. Also, some participants have larger and longer autocorrelation. #brainmovies

Neurons are multifunctional and can play different "tunes". Brain waves emerge from neuronal activity but also orchestrate it. "Orchestration" is realized via ephaptic coupling. Thus, brain waves top-down control the spiking "orchestra". Cool!🤩 It's music to my ears🎶