Mac Shine
Computational Neurobiologist from Sydney, Australia. https://shine-lab.org. Banner image from https://www.gregadunn.com.
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- Doesn't even need an ensuite...
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- Would love to revisit this idea if ppl are still keen. Was a fun project to work on.
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- Thanks Deb!
- random neuroimaging question: does anyone in bluesky-land have access to the loadings for neurosynth topics in schaefer 400 (yeo7) space? #neuroskyence @misicbata.bsky.social @richardfbetzel.bsky.social @borismontreal.bsky.social @sofievalk.bsky.social
- update - i found a copy. thanks all for boosting!
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- There's lots of opportunities in the brain for closures of these kinds, though I fear that this ultimately raises another set of even-more challenging questions: namely, how do our brains decipher between different circuit closures if they differ in their constraints? Fun to think about...
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- The short answer is yes, but we were quite limited in writing that paper to keep the text short and the references mostly to the last few years. I'm certainly not an expert on circular causality/constraint closure, but I do very much like the implications of the ideas
- great episode! covered lots of cool territory -- great to see the concept of affordances coming back into the spotlight
- 🎊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 😊
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- Massive congratulations Annie! Thoroughly well-deserved!!
- I 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.
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- Should have guessed that you would know the precise quote ;)
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- Haha yep. The son of the lobotomist... news.berkeley.edu/2016/04/27/n...
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- thanks mate! much appreciated
- Another great article from @thetransmitter.bsky.social and Laura Lewis, who has been working painstakingly over the last few years to help ramp up the spatiotemporal resolution of fMRI so that we can really start to dig into whole-brain signals in vivo.
- ICYMI: Recent technological advances in functional MRI provide a range of new information about brain physiology. Collaboration between engineers and neuroscientists will help maximize these gains, writes Laura Lewis. www.thetransmitter.org/human-neurot...
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- agreed. makes it really tricky to bounce between sessions effectively...
- Thrilled to announce I'll be starting my own neuro-theory lab, as an Assistant Professor at @yaleneuro.bsky.social @wutsaiyale.bsky.social this Fall! My group will study offline learning in the sleeping brain: how neural activity self-organizes during sleep and the computations it performs. 🧵
- Major congrats, mate! I can't wait to see what you and your group come up with...
- Fantastic article from one of the leaders of the burgeoning field or layer-resolved functional MRI. A pleasure to read!
- ICYMI: In this essay for our Future of fMRI series, Laurentius Huber @layerfmri.bsky.social explains how new advances in functional MRI could help to connect cells and brain areas at the mesoscopic scale. #neuroskyence #OHBM2025 www.thetransmitter.org/future-of-fm...
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- Oh cool. I really love Matthew Larkum's work on the neural substrates of consciousness too, though he and I have not yet had a deep discussion about intralaminar thalamus just yet ;)
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- Not really. But you might find some of our work insightful in this respect: shine-lab.org/wp-content/u... or shine-lab.org/wp-content/u.... Happy to answer any Qs
- Hard agree. Great article on a timely issue by @neuralreckoning.bsky.social for @thetransmitter.bsky.social
- Large-scale projects run the risk of stifling scientific independence. Instead, let’s explore alternative mechanisms of collaboration, writes @neuralreckoning.bsky.social. #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/funding/neur...
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- Chris and I were talking about these kinds of circuit-level details a couple of weeks ago. Amazing to see the work being done.
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- There are plenty, if you know where to look ;)
- #neuroskyence people (maybe vision people in particular): how do you think information is "read out" from the visual system? Do downstream areas like PFC get to query anything from V1 to IT? Or just later areas? How plastic are these readouts? Etc. IMO this is always under constrained in modeling.
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- No, I haven't. Thanks for the tip!
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- I didn't take your position to be extremist - I'm honestly still trying to figure out the best way to frame some of these ideas too. Also likely that the relative role that subcortex vs ctx play in diff behaviours could change over phylogeny too, which makes cross-species comparison tricky
[Not loaded yet]- Gotcha. I'm clearly still stuck in the Braitenberg hole I fell into a few weeks ago. Still can't get my head around how far ahead he could see...
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- I don't fully agree with all of the interpretations herein, but this is a really lovely paper from back in the day that you might like as a good starting point: academic.oup.com/cercor/artic.... LMK if you want to chat through some of the concepts after you read.
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- Along the lines of what James Houk called 'forcing functions'
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- I don't know that literature v well, but my guess is that there are likely major subcortical systems that play a demonstrative role in the process.
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- Selectivity is v hard to come by in the cortex alone. As Braitenberg argued over 20y ago, it's basically a big associative memory network that almost certainly inherits it's functional prowess from its subcortical connections. Like the trust fund baby of the brain ;)
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- A standing wave death knell for mammalian life on our planet...
- I recently had the great pleasure of interviewing Michael Bruchas about an absolutely banger recent paper from his group that tracked down cells in the brainstem that subtlety and precisely control the output of the locus coeruleus. Check out my interview here. I hope you like it as much as I did!
- Far from being a passive neighbor to the locus coeruleus, the pericoeruleus appears to act as a kind of micromanager of arousal, selectively inhibiting different subgroups of locus coeruleus neurons, writes @macshine.bsky.social. #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/attention/th...
- Can an LLM system become conscious? This question has generated significant debate and too much hype. Here's a paper from @cp-trendsneuro.bsky.social on what neuroscience has to say about that shine-lab.org/wp-content/u...
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- I know those guys!
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- This sounds like it's on the right track, but way too cortically-centric to capture the whole process effectively. Would be great to proscribe Bjorn Merker's lovely texts for the whole field.
- new preprint: osf.io/preprints/ps... aphantasics reported to feel less 'absorbed' as they read stories, but they dwelled just as much on words that typically evoke imagery. so perhaps they just didn't realize they have (non-conscious) imagery too Ali Moharramipour's 1st paper as senior author 🧠📈
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- Yup
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- I'm both a neuroscientist and a card-carrying aphantasic, and I am confident in my assertion that I don't experience imagery as an overt sensory phenomena, but I am still quite an absorb-y individual
- Completely agree w/ everything @avramholmes.bsky.social lays out here. fMRI has a big role to play in helping link across scales of measurement, neural organisation and species. But for that to work, we need to incentivise the growth and development of scientists that can translate across domains.
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- Legend! Well done, mate
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- Connectomouse?
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- The analogy is actually closer to arguing that the 'flavour profile' is the only true way to appreciate a pizza, whereas saying that the ingredients involve specific combinations of tomato, dough and cheese are somehow not informative.
- I still don't understand how were they ever separated?!?
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- Yeah, isn't this so cool? Haven't had a chance to read deeper than the thread, but awesome to see Guy Elston's original ideas holding up to modern scrutiny.
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- What an awful thing to read. Keep fighting!
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- When you step back and think about it, they treat us like misbehaving children. I've yet to meet a scientist that spends their hard-earned grant money on anything other than what they need to move forward their research program. And if they trust us to spend our own funds, they'll save money!
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- #gamestop but in 2025
- 🚨 🧠 We have a new preprint out where we studied which brain networks are engaged during mental imagery and self-generated thought. We used a precision fMRI approach along with multidimensional experience sampling (mDES) to get trialwise self-reports from each participant about what they imagined.
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- Maybe next time I'm in Chicago...
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- Also absent. Completely silent in there...
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- Cool stuff, Rod. Did you ask folks how vivid their visual imagination was in general beforehand. Asking on behalf of all us aphantasics...
- I am incredibly proud to share my first, first-author paper as a postdoc with @benhayden.bsky.social . How does the human hippocampus, known for encoding concepts, represent the meanings of words while listening to narrative speech? www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
- Great work! Any interest in presenting the project to my group over zoom (~journal-club style)?
