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Our pre-print is finally out!
Here's my first #paperthread 🧵
In this work, co-authors and I clustered ischaemic stroke patients profiles, and recovered common patterns of cognitive, sensorimotor damage.
...Historically many focal lesions to specific cortical areas were associated with specific distinction, but most strokes involve subcortical regions and bring multivariate patterns of deficits.
To characterize those patterns, many studies have turned to correlation analysis, factor analysis, PCA, focusing on the relations among variables==domains of impairments...
Your brain can reveal if you’re rightwing – plus three other things it tells us about your politics
e.g. if you are open to authoritarianism, your brain may show signs of damage to the "entro-medial prefrontal cortex, an area that is associated with social intelligence & tolerance".
The #HHMIJanelia FlyEM MANC #connectome is now available on NeuronBridge.janelia.org. #Drosophila#Neuroscience researchers can use this tool to match the MANC electron #microscopy (EM) data against light microscopy (LM) data, like that from the Janelia FlyLight project. A user can interactively examine matches right in the browser by clicking the "View in 3D" button. Interactive views are sharable, too... (1/3)
Babies Learn Language Best Through Sing-Song Speech, Not Phonetics
Source: University of Cambridge
Parents should speak to their babies using sing-song speech, like nursery rhymes, as soon as possible, say researchers. That’s because babies learn languages from rhythmic information, not phonetic information, in their first months.
Interested in #neuroscience , I teach myself in the field, and is currently working on a #bci project, planning on a Master's program in related fields.
I care about economic #equity very much, and my vision for the future would be something like cybernetic communism. I would love to know more thinkers and activists having radical ideas on building societies!
I selected this instance as my home because I do have a lot text to share. I long to see constructive long conversations happening here.
And I decide to hop into the Fediverse because I have high standards and many feelings about my digital presence. It would be natural to live somewhere as federated as the human society. It would NOT be natural to borrow a slot for myself in some corporate servers.
Nice to meet everyone! Attached is the virtual figure I commissioned to represent me, so this is what I look like, digitially :P
Pretty even-handed assessment of the success and failure of the EU-funded Human Brain Project, which is ending. Probably the most impressive thing is that, given its troubled inception, it produced some meaningful, if rather ad hoc, brain science. #HBP#brain#simulation#neuroscience
In Kandel's 2005 book, he lays out 5 tenants to "outline an intellectual framework designed to align current psychiatric thinking and training of future practitioners with modern biology". I regard this as a good snapshot of the "reductionism" that many quibble with, as it is practiced by the neuroscientists who adopt it. Would anyone disagree (either that this is reductionism or that this is a good snapshot of it?). Here are the principles.
Principle 1. All mental processes derive from operations of the brain.
Principle 2. Genes and their proteins are important determinants of the pattern of interconnections between neurons and how neurons function.
Principle 3. Alerted genes do not, by themselves, explain all of the variance of a given major mental illness. Social or developmental factors also contribute very importantly. Just as combinations of genes contribute to behavior, including social behavior, so can behavior and social factors exert actions on the brain by feeding back upon it to modify the expression of genes and thus the function of nerve cells. Learning, including learning that results in dysfunctional behavior, produces alterations in gene expression. Thus all of "nurture" is ultimately expressed as "nature".
Principle 4. Alternations in gene expression induced by learning give rise to changes in patterns of neuronal connections. These changes ... are responsible for initiating and maintaining abnormalities of behavior that are induced by social contingencies.
Principle 5. Insofar as psychotherapy or counseling is effective and produces long-term changes in behavior, it presumably does so through learning, by producing changes in gene expression ...
I've spent a lot of time over the last couple years thinking about #sciComm, both in sharing research with the public and other scientists.
Doing research for my latest Penn NeuroKnow post debunking common myths about the brain was fascinating as I traced through where several of these myths originated. Oftentimes they start with real #neuroscience results that get twisted into something overly generalized or not quite accurate. In some cases, as with the "tongue map" myth, we have a pretty clear idea of what single decision or moment in time caused the confusion, but in other cases it's less clear how we got to such widespread misconceptions.
In my post I briefly talked about how anyone can help stop this cycle of miscommunication, but I'm eager to hear other opinions about where the responsibility to prevent future neuromyths lies and what we as neuroscientists can do to stop them.
Finally made the jump to neuromatch so time for re-#introduction:
Hi #ScienceMastodon! I'm a neuroscience PhD working in science administration. During my PhD, I studied emotion and decision-making in patients with chronic focal brain damage and those undergoing surgery for epilepsy.
After my PhD I completed the AAAS Science and Technology Policy fellowship and made the jump from bench to science policy. These days I'm involved in cognitive and affective #neuroscience as it relates to #aging and #Alzheimers.
Neuroscience folks want discussion on this platform? Here's one for you: Hippocampus is for spatial navigation in primates too! https://doi.org/10.1002/hipo.23499
That phrase is just so great. It's easy to see how it's counterpart slipped through the cracks. "Judicious model robustification" - who can claim not to aspire to that as well?
To all modelers out there, may your model be judiciously robustified!
I don't think everyone realizes how much #neuroscience#opendata is really downloaded and reused...
e.g. our dataset of responses to visual stimuli has 18,000 downloads; wholebrain #zebrafish neural activity from the Ahrens lab has 7,000 downloads; Nick Steinmetz's eight-probe Neuropixels data has 6,500 downloads. and there are many commonly used neuro datasets on websites that don't count downloads that must have thousands too!
Ready to start an exciting PhD journey at Cambridge University, a hub of scientific discovery and inspiration?
See our two PhD projects on neural circuits of self-motion and spatial orientation including application details here: https://www.fens.org/careers/job-market/job/111337