Christopher Whyte
Theoretical neuroscientist. Postdoc in the Adaptive Dynamical Systems group at USYD. Interested in spikes, (nonlinear) neural dynamics, decisions, and consciousness.
www.ChristopherJWhyte.com
- Reposted by Christopher WhyteThe extended version of my thesis procrastination project/subcortex visualization package is out now in both Python and R, now that I’ve graduated 🤠 This figure shows the 9 atlases included (and counting)! Preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Website: anniegbryant.github.io/subcortex_vi...
- Reposted by Christopher WhyteFinally, after much delay from the BBC, Marnie Chesterton's "What Is Quantum?" is being broadcast at 9.30 am on Radio 4 on Tues 30th Dec. Recorded on Helgoland in the summer, with input from the leading figures in quantum mechanics (and me). www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m...
- Reposted by Christopher WhyteReally hoping bifurcations are the new manifolds. What a time to be alive 🥲
- My co-authors have yet to move to Bluesky, so I'm pleased to announce our latest work has just been published in @nature.com Neuroscience. Amazing work led by Junheng Li, revealing that falling asleep follows a predictable bifurcation pattern #neuroskyence #sleep www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- Reposted by Christopher Whyte1/ "Hemispherotomy leads to persistent sleep-like slow waves in the isolated cortex of awake humans" - out now in @plosbiology.org, led by Michele Colombo, Jacopo Favaro, & Marcello Massimini. 🧠
- The final paper of my PhD is now out as a preprint. This is a follow-up piece in series of two companion papers modelling awareness and suppression in a new variant of continuous flash suppression. arxiv.org/abs/2510.17154 🧵 1/3
- TLDR? We derive a closed-form expression for the hysteretic difference between contrast thresholds for awareness and suppression, and test a prediction of the expression in human psychophysical data. 2/3
- This was a whole lot of fun. The paper is unapologetically nerdy (even by vision science standards), and it was also a dream come true to work with Hugh Wilson extending his model to a new domain. The first paper in the series ⬇️ www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
- Reposted by Christopher WhyteWhat changes and what stays the same as you scale from single neurons up to local populations of neurons up to whole brains? Michael and Mac @macshine.bsky.social on the systems approach to study brains across scales. braininspired.co/podcast/220/
- Reposted by Christopher WhyteThank you so much for having me!! I always have a blast chatting with @bethfisher.bsky.social and this time was no different! 💕 Also I loved your reflections in the end and how both of you have change your mind perhaps a bit through sharing your experiences with each other. So cool and precious!
- Reposted by Christopher WhyteThe first major output of the @templetonworld.bsky.social @arc-intrepid.bsky.social adversarial collaboration testing IIT & predictive processing theories of consciousness is out now arxiv.org/abs/2509.00555
- Reposted by Christopher WhyteAdaptive learning is coordinated across behaviour, time and neurobiology (from synapses and dendrites, to astrocytes and the systems level). If you’ve ever wondered how noradrenaline helps shape these multiscale learning processes, you might like this: www.cell.com/trends/cogni...
- Reposted by Christopher WhyteOHBM Oz rego + abstracts now open. Get amongst it!
- ✨✨ We are excited to announce the OHBM Australian Chapter 2025 Annual Meeting! 🧠🇦🇺 📢 Abstract submissions & registration now OPEN (abstract submission closes September 15th at 5pm) 📍 Melbourne 🏙️☕ 📅 Wednesday, November 12, 2025 ohbm-aus.github.io/posts/2025-a... We hope to see you there! 🤩
- Reposted by Christopher WhyteI wrote a Comment on neurotheory, and now you can read it! Some thoughts on where neurotheory has and has not taken root within the neuroscience community, how it has shaped those subfields, and where we theorists might look next for fresh adventures. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- Reposted by Christopher WhyteIt’s touching and wonderful the amount of people saying reading Pratchett has made them a better person, myself included. Was it @adamchapman.bsky.social I remembering saying that his downstream positive effect on UK society is something we should increasingly be considering as his readers age?
- Reposted by Christopher Whyte🎊Ain’t no party like a thesis submission party🎊 Honored to have submitted my PhD as a recipient of the Paulette Isabel Jones Career Development Award from The University of Sydney! Thank you x1000000 to MVP supervisor @bendfulcher.bsky.social & co-supervisor @macshine.bsky.social 😊
- Reposted by Christopher WhyteI need some help from the #neuroskyence Bluesky-verse. Anyone know the source of this ~quote from Walter J. Freeman Jr.: "the secrets of the brain are hidden by two of God’s own firewalls: neurobiology and non-linear dynamics". I read it yrs ago but can't seem to find my way back to the source.
- Reposted by Christopher WhytePosition open for a neuroimaging focused postdoc to come work with us in Sydney Feel free to get in touch for a chat if you have any questions about it :) usyd.wd105.myworkdayjobs.com/en-GB/USYD_E...
- Reposted by Christopher WhyteInterested in cortical wave dynamics? Check out our new preprint led by J Cruddas with @jchrispang.bsky.social where review the physics and physiology of cortical waves and their implications for psychological function: osf.io/preprints/ps... @nsb-lab.bsky.social
- Reposted by Christopher WhyteNew electron microscopy study in @nature.com Neuroscience finds that layer 5 ET neurons mostly connect to inhibitory cells locally, esp. those suppressing other excitatory cells, suggesting a "winner-take-all" system. 🧠📈 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- Reposted by Christopher WhyteAfter five years of confused staring at Greek letters, it is my absolute pleasure to finally share our (with @smfleming.bsky.social) computational model of mental imagery and reality monitoring: Perceptual Reality Monitoring as Higher-Order inference on Sensory Precision ✨ osf.io/preprints/ps...
- Reposted by Christopher Whytefinally recovered from all the thought provoking discussions I had at @assc28.bsky.social! presented a meta analysis of the current state of consciousness science and why we should leave theory convergence behind (based on work with @mnoichl.bsky.social & @niccolonegro.bsky.social)
- Reposted by Christopher Whyte📜🪇[PUBLISHED]: NEW PREPRINT!🪇📜 I am incredibly excited to announce that we have published our paper on how "Dynamical independence reveals anaesthetic specific fragmentation of emergent structure in neural dynamics" w@thomasandrillon.bsky.social @anilseth.bsky.social Barnett, Carter Strap in! 1/n
- Reposted by Christopher WhyteA new study led by @timothysit.bsky.social reveals that different layers of mouse V1 integrate visual and non-visual signals differently. Activity is dominated by vision (or spontaneous fluctuations) in L2/3 and by movement in L5. This leads to different geometries. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
- Reposted by Christopher WhyteNew paper! We introduce an efficient set of statistical features for fMRI time series (calibrated on mouse manipulation experiments and tested on mouse and human data): catchaMouse16. Paper: doi.org/10.52294/001... Code (python/Matlab/C): github.com/DynamicsAndN...
- Alam et al. develop a canonical time-series feature set for characterizing biologically informative dynamical patterns in fMRI: doi.org/10.52294/001... @bendfulcher.bsky.social @fmri-today.bsky.social @mallarchak.bsky.social @ohbmofficial.bsky.social
- Reposted by Christopher WhytePairs well with www.nature.com/articles/s41... “Our results indicate that individual V1 neurons do not signal how the actual visual input deviates from the animal’s predictions, as postulated within the predictive coding framework” Thrilling to see a major theory get tested!
- Reposted by Christopher Whyte1/3) This may be a very important paper, it suggests that there are no prediction error encoding neurons in sensory areas of cortex: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... I personally am a big fan of the idea that cortical regions (allo and neo) are doing sequence prediction. But... 🧠📈 🧪
- Reposted by Christopher WhyteCongratulations to Abhilash Dwarakanath who won this year's William James Prize for his brilliant work on the b istability of prefrontal states gating access to consciousness. You can read his paper here: www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...
- Abhilash Dwarakanath, winner of this year's William James Prize, paying homage to his mother at the end of his talk. Congratulations on a wonderful achievement and fantastic paper! www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...
- Reposted by Christopher WhyteNew paper @pnas.org with Lola Beerendonk, Jan Willem de Gee, Simon van Gaal and others, on pharmacological shifts of performance. We combine psychophysics and pupillometry with computational modeling to provide interesting insights linked to PV-SST-VIP circuits: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
- Reposted by Christopher WhyteMindscape 320 | Solo: Complexity and the Universe. Our cosmos was once simple, and someday will be simple again. We currently live in the complicated, exciting era of universal history! Enjoy it while it lasts. #MindscapePodcast www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2025...
- Reposted by Christopher WhyteNew preprint! Why are long-range connectomic interactions in the cortex dominant in shaping dynamics in some experiments but apparently negligible in others? We (w/ R Maran, @elimuller.bsky.social) address this question by studying a new hybrid model of cortical dynamics. arxiv.org/abs/2506.19800
- Reposted by Christopher WhyteThis paper, from @smellosopher.bsky.social et al, is a well-designed spherical cow with a lot of 🥛 to give. Has been quite influential in how I think of #NeuroAI and ANNs as models for the brain 🐮 onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
- Reposted by Christopher WhyteWe just pushed “Memory by a 1000 rules” onto bioRxiv, where we use clever #ML to find #plasticity quadruplets (EE, EI, IE, II) that learn basic stability in spiking nets. Why is it cool? We find 1000s!! of solutions, and they don’t just stabilise. They #memorise! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
- Reposted by Christopher Whyte#OHBM2025 was a blast -- the perfect way to celebrate submitting my PhD thesis with y'all 🎉 It was an honor (and so fun!) to represent the Aussie imaging community alongside a fab panel in the LOC Symposium, sharing my final thesis work on homotopic connectivity: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
- Reposted by Christopher WhyteI'm excited to announce that my lab's open textbook on Scientific Computing for Cognitive Neuroscience (v1.0) has just gone live! Our goal is to help mend the gap between the computational skills needed by cognitive neuroscience, and typical curricula that don't yet include it. 1/3
- Reposted by Christopher WhyteI am so excited to share that our paper 'A neural basis for distinguishing imagination from reality' is now published in @cp-neuron.bsky.social! 🧠✨ See thread below! doi.org/10.1016/j.ne...
- I am beyond excited to share our new preprint ‘A neural basis for distinguishing between imagination and reality’ with Thomas von Rein, @peterkok.bsky.social and @smfleming.bsky.social! osf.io/preprints/ps... a thread 🧵
- Reposted by Christopher WhyteNew pre-print with Rebecca Brady on mathematical models to simulate audio-visual reaction time tasks. This debutant paper has three main goals: 1. To simulate different mechanisms of multisensory integration and compare with the behavioural findings 1/8
- Reposted by Christopher WhyteCIFAR invites applications for senior PhD and postdocs to participate in the Neuroscience of Consciousness Winter School, held in Montebello, Canada Dec 10-12, 2025. The Winter School is hosted by members of CIFAR’s Brain, Mind, and Consciousness program. Please repost. cifar.ca/next-generat... 🧠🧪
- Reposted by Christopher Whyte[This post could not be retrieved]
- Reposted by Christopher Whyte🚨🚨🚨PREPRINT ALERT🚨🚨🚨 Neural dynamics across cortical layers are key to brain computations - but non-invasively, we’ve been limited to rough "deep vs. superficial" distinctions. What if we told you that it is possible to achieve full (TRUE!) laminar (I, II, III, IV, V, VI) precision with MEG!
- Reposted by Christopher WhyteNew “version of record” in @elife.bsky.social! We recorded neurons in the thalamus and subthalamic nucleus of humans and found both sensory- and perception-selective neurons with two distinct latencies! 7-year project with @nfaivre.bsky.social + @foscobernasconi.bsky.social. A short thread 👇
- New preprint modelling suppression depth in binocular rivalry and continuous flash suppression with Hugh Wilson, @macshine.bsky.social, & David Alais
- A Minimal Physiological Model of Perceptual Suppression and Breakthrough in Visual Rivalry biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/202…
- Reposted by Christopher WhyteOur latest "Dynamic Landscape Analysis of Cell Fate Decisions: Predictive Models of Neural Development From Single-Cell Data" A rigorous mathematical foundation for Waddington's landscape to study cell fate decision making Applied to ventral neural tube development www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
- Reposted by Christopher Whyte📢Alain Destexhe and colleagues from @neuropsi.bsky.social introduce a computational framework to study how molecular changes impact brain activity. #compneurosky #Neuroskyence www.nature.com/articles/s43...
- Reposted by Christopher WhyteHave recent changes led to uncertainty in your future scientific career? Wonder it's like in Australia? Good news! Monash's is seeking to hire talented EMCRs from other countries. Come join a wonderful community of brain mappers & modellers! www.monash.edu/research/eme...
- Reposted by Christopher WhyteThis looks great! 👇
- Together with @macshine.bsky.social & @elimuller.bsky.social we have a cool interdisciplinary project on compositional cognition, and we’re looking for a PhD student. More details here www.findaphd.com/phds/project... DM or email any questions Please RT or pass on to interested students. Thanks!
- Reposted by Christopher WhyteTogether with @macshine.bsky.social & @elimuller.bsky.social we have a cool interdisciplinary project on compositional cognition, and we’re looking for a PhD student. More details here www.findaphd.com/phds/project... DM or email any questions Please RT or pass on to interested students. Thanks!
- Reposted by Christopher WhyteThe belief that artificial consciousness is coming crucially depends on the assumption that consciousness is a computation. In this new paper, we'll try to convince you that consciousness cannot be a computation w Albert Gidon and M.Larkum www.frontiersin.org/journals/neu... #neuroAI #consci
- Reposted by Christopher Whyte5 years since our first pilot, and 25,000 participants later, I'm super happy this work with Makaela Nartker, @chazfirestone.bsky.social and Howard Egeth on inattentional blindness is now out in eLife! A little 🧵 of what we found... 1/12 elifesciences.org/articles/100...
- Reposted by Christopher WhyteInfo theory offers powerful measures for capturing complexity & interaction among elements of a complex system, like the brain! 🧠 Here's our new unified reference for key info-theoretic time series measures ft. 📊 visuals, ➗equations, & 💬descriptions: arxiv.org/abs/2505.13080
- Reposted by Christopher WhyteNew pre-print reviewing time-series analysis methods based on information theory, with an aim to be accessible, and with a broad focus on applications in neuroimaging. Congratulations @anniegbryant.bsky.social
- Info theory offers powerful measures for capturing complexity & interaction among elements of a complex system, like the brain! 🧠 Here's our new unified reference for key info-theoretic time series measures ft. 📊 visuals, ➗equations, & 💬descriptions: arxiv.org/abs/2505.13080
- Reposted by Christopher WhyteMind-wandering is associated with late modulation of the heartbeat-evoked potential; mind-blanking is associated with greater decoupling of heart-brain phase coupling. New findings from our radically-revised study of spontaneous cognitive & physiological dynamics www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
- Reposted by Christopher WhyteI look forward to presenting and discussing this work www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... in the Soft Matter and Biophysics Seminar of the Institute of Theoretical Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences! More info and link to join here: english.itp.cas.cn/activities/T...
- Reposted by Christopher WhyteExcited to share my PhD paper! In it, we use targeted 2-photon optogenetic stimulation to determine how V1 activity is read-out in a detection task. We found that network influence, not visual coding properties, predicted the impact of ensembles on behavior - contradicting our expectations (1/5).
- Reposted by Christopher WhyteAre you coming to #ASSC_2025? If so, you might want to stick around for a couple more days for this symposium where the results of the INTERPID adversarial collaboration will be revealed! (+some meta-questions on the adversarial collaboration approach will be discussed) arc-intrepid.com/symposium/
