Alina Studenova
PhD candidate, MPI CBS, MPSCog,
brain oscillations, cortical microstructure
alinastudenova.com
- If oscillations are modulated in amplitude from trial to trial, and those oscillations have a non-zero mean, they "create" an evoked response. It is a baseline-shift mechanism for ERP/ERF generation. Here is a simulated example of how alpha oscillations may generate readiness potential. #brainmovies
- Activity-dependent and injury-induced myelination is carried out via different routes. In healthy zebrafish, activity-related plasticity was linked to recently proliferated oligodendrocyte precursor cells (OPCs). But during demyelination, OPCs without prior proliferation were also recruited. Cool!👍
- Energy pathways from whole-brain transcriptomics have certain spatial distributions. 4 out of 5 maps look similar, while pentose phosphate pathway looks different. Interesting that energy maps only partially agree with PET data. Nice!👏 I wonder how those maps correlate with vascular architecture.
- How are energy #metabolism pathways distributed across the #cortex? @alaindagher.bsky.social &co map five pathways in the human #brain, linking metabolic organization with brain structural & functional properties, as well as developmental dynamics @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/4c1JVp8
- I read a book. “Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies” by Nick Bostrom. It's from 2014, but very much present-day. Read my opinion here www.alinastudenova.com/home/blog/bo...
- LC - a tiny structure Located in midbrain; Observed in MR image, Quite clear on axial plane. Produce it noradrenaline Attention to sustain, And after night of sleep Arousal to regain, To manage more proficiently Emotional domain, And somewhat plausibly A memory to retain.
- Amazing workshop "Panpsychism, Non-Physicalism and the Causal Powers of Consciousness" with Prof. Hedda Hassel Mørch on her recent book organized by Tobias Schlicht (wait, what?) at Ruhr-Universität Bochum and also online at www.pe.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/philosophie/... V. interesting!🤩
- Simulated travelling waves reproduce functional connectivity (FC) in fMRI better when cortical heterogeneity is taken into account. This paper shows that two variational characteristics provided the most improvements: T1w/T2w ratio (myelin) and E:I balance. Alright!👍 If so, then what is FC actually?
- Toolbox with subcortical atlases. V. useful! Please add brainstem🙏
- I have been trying to simulate event-related alpha amplitude decrease with the Jansen-Rit model. Turns out adding external inhibitory input abolishes alpha. Pretty obvious. But how does it agree with more alpha = more inhibition? #brainmovies
- Some ripples result from filtering 1/f noise (because when you filter noise you always get oscillations). Somewhat expected, but nice to have it spelled out and thoroughly investigated.👍
- Ripple oscillations are central for memory and sleep. But ripple detection in humans remains challenging. Here we introduce a simulation approach in @natcomms.nature.com as common ripple detectors mainly pick up 1/f noise and not genuine oscillations 👇 www.nature.com/articles/s41... #neuroskyence
- Movement is a confounding factor in correlation between readiness potential and respiration. The authors provide careful analysis of original Park et al. 2020 dataset and their collected dataset, suggestions how to avoid the confound, and generally many other thoughts. V. cool and v. interesting!👏
- Brain-body communication is impaired in people with schizophrenia (SSD), contributing to symptoms such as depersonalization. Deniz and her colleagues did a vast amount of work to provide a better understanding of interoception in SSD. A nuanced and intricate picture has emerged. Well done, Deniz!👏👍🎉
- How the brain listens to the body matters. Our new preprint investigates interoceptive processing in schizophrenia spectrum disorders across phenomenology, behavior, and heartbeat-evoked brain responses. 🧠🫀DOI: doi.org/10.64898/202...
- A physical theory of interest can be formally assessed to determine whether it is deterministic, in the metaphysical sense. It is tricky, though. In this paper, the authors survey earlier proposals and develop their own approach. So, it turns out that determinism is somewhat undetermined.🧐
- The brain is critical, they say; It could not be the other way. External information rate And inner things manipulate, For system whose internal state Is critical, it’s very straight.
- Reposted by Alina Studenovamain goal for this year: find a new job! 🙂 looking for a role with fun & complex technical challenges & within a great community. my main expertise is in signal processing/EEG/MEG, but topic-wise I am quite flexible. science/industry both great! starting mid-year. nschawor.github.io/cv
- This commentary paper concerns those who develop clinical models (to be used in hospitals). It has a checklist to go through to answer if the model may be useful in clinics. It seems to me, broadly, we all (who do simulations and modeling) may benefit from asking ourselves if our models are useful.
- If the brain operates in a critical regime, it's said to be beneficial for information manipulation. In this paper, criticality of motor cortex of Parkinson’s disease patients was compared with controls. So patients' brain is closer to (not farther from) the critical point, regardless of the meds.🆒🆒
- I have been trying to understand how the depth of a "source" influences its topography. Here are short and exaggerated simulations of EEG data (no real dipoles in white matter). Note that each frame of the topography was z-scored. So the deeper, the more spread out? #brainmovies
- Population spiking in monkeys is not aligned with evoked responses but aligned with high gamma activity (HGA). Albeit, the alignment between spikes and HGA is also not ubiquitous and depends on the neural code. Nice!👍 But somewhat discouraging for non-invasive data. Is spiking really all there is?
- BOLD response is a Schrödinger cat, It might be alive, or might be dead. 👇Interesting tread explaining main outcome of the recent paper (where BOLD was claimed to be not always related to metabolism). Amazing! 👏
- If I lift my finger to type, I know that I lifted my finger. It's bodily agency. If I type a word and look at the screen, there is the word that I typed. It's outcome agency. This v. cool study shows that those are distinct👏! Of course. When I play tennis, I blame my partner only for the outcome.
- Which parcellation to use? The authors here propose to build theories on gradient-based, connectivity-based and population-level explanations instead of focusing solely on areas. True👏, but also cytoarchitectonic areas vary considerably between individuals, which limits how much we can rely on them.
- New Perspective from myself, Sarah Heilbronner and @myoo.bsky.social . “Rethinking the centrality of brain areas in understanding functional organization” in Nature Neuroscience. 🧵 rdcu.be/eVZ1A
- Happy New Year and happy learning (new motor skills)!
- Arousal influences many behavioral outcomes. This paper suggests that arousal is more. It is a latent dynamical process, which is possible to observe "propagating" in time and space and interacting with other systems. Good!💯 Note to self: record pupil diameter in the next experiment.
- I continue to read about freedom and determinism🤔🫠. This time, I read “A Metaphysics for Freedom” by Helen Steward. My opinion here www.alinastudenova.com/home/blog/bo...
- Evoked response is how the brain responds to finger tap, Presented when someone's awake or in the midst of nap, Or to the picture or the face, that’s shown to the eyes, Or to the auditory tone, or to the smell of fries.
- Homeostasis is often described as maintaining a stable 'set-point'; allostasis is adjusting some quantities to meet demands. Both involve feedback control. The author sells the idea that dynamical causal models can be used to analyze homeo- and allostatic mechanisms. Helpful!👍 Where do I start...
- New on the Archive: Weinberger, Naftali (2025) Homeostasis and Causal Control. [Preprint] philsci-archive.pitt.edu/27481/
- Reposted by Alina Studenova📆 updated for 2026! list of summer schools & short courses in the realm of (computational) neuroscience or data analysis of EEG / MEG / LFP: 🔗 docs.google.com/spreadsheets...
- Intracranial recordings during auditory oddball showed 2 types of high-frequency responses (more pronounced for target tones): phasic and sustained. Phasic occurred in sensory-motor Yeo network, while sustained - in salience network. Nice!👍 Notably, only 22% of recorded sites showed the effect.
- I'm interested in individual differences. Regarding resting-state alpha power, it is usually said that the power is high in occipital areas. However, not for everybody. Here, resting-state alpha power with eyes closed from participants of the LEMON dataset doi.org/10.1038/sdata.2018.308 #brainmovies
- Reposted by Alina StudenovaThis week is ideal to draft your submission for the #MindBrainBody Symposium 2026 so that you can let it rest over the (potential) holidays and finalise it first thing in 2026 (deadline: January 8, 2026). 😉 Looking forward to seeing you there and - in case - happy holidays! 🎄🧠🫀🫁
- *13th MindBrainBody Symposium* 📆 Mar 9-11, 2026 🏠 #Berlin & virtual (deadline: Jan 8, 2026) Keynotes: - @ulrikebingel.bsky.social - Karl Friston (online) - @tinalonsdorf.bsky.social - Sonja Kotz - Julian Thayer ...& so much more: prizes, posters, talks, food, drinks, encounters. Let's meet!
- fMRI can be measured quantitatively to estimate oxygen metabolism. This study compares classical BOLD with quantitative BOLD. And they are different, and the difference is both region and task specific. Negative BOLD not🟰 reduced metabolism. Cool!👏 High alpha power was associated with negative BOLD😬
- fMRI signals “up,” but neural metabolism might be going “down.” In our @natneuro.nature.com paper, we demonstrate that about 40% of voxels with robust BOLD responses exhibit opposite oxygen metabolism, revealing two distinct hemodynamic modes. rdcu.be/eUPO8 funds @erc.europa.eu #neuroskyence 🧵:
- Reposted by Alina StudenovaOk, this is nuts. Once you see it you cannot unsee it. Do you see it? (OP @drgbuckingham.bsky.social )
- It is possible to differentiate left and right hemispheres using resting-state fMRI. Not surprising. Surprising is that classificator used not only language network but also default mode network (DMN) and frontoparietal network. Cool!👍 I wonder whether lateralization of DMN matters for cognition.
- Reposted by Alina Studenova[Not loaded yet]
- Reposted by Alina StudenovaThank you for the great work @willenjoy.bsky.social ! An important step towards understanding and correcting bias in source localizations and functional connectivity due to source leakage.
- Our new preprint on promises and caveats of the extraction of M/EEG activity from ROIs is out (see more details in the reposted thread): www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Huge thanks to @studenova.bsky.social, Ruben Eguinoa, Guido Nolte, @sparsity.bsky.social, Arno Villringer, and Vadim Nikulin!
- Reposted by Alina StudenovaOur new preprint on promises and caveats of the extraction of M/EEG activity from ROIs is out (see more details in the reposted thread): www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Huge thanks to @studenova.bsky.social, Ruben Eguinoa, Guido Nolte, @sparsity.bsky.social, Arno Villringer, and Vadim Nikulin!
- I use EEG/MEG. When I meet like-minded researchers at conferences, the discussion always circles back to one thing: admitting that results may be confounded by leakage (also known as remaining field spread—RFS). In our new preprint, we quantify RFS in parcellated data using cross-talk function—CTF.🧵
