NeuroTechX Reports

I've written fmriprep-skills, a lightweight harness to help beginners use fMRIPrep more easily

Hi everyone, I just released a small project called fmriprep-skills: two agent skills ($fmri-process, $fmri-followup) that help beginners who are processing a BIDS dataset for the first time avoid common mistakes and get a successful run with fewer retries. I made it because a lot of fMRIPrep failures are not really about fMRIPrep itself. A local run can produce a few hundred GB of derivatives and work files, which can fill the disk quickly. Someone may put the output on an external drive, only to find out later that it is exFAT and FreeSurfer cannot create symlinks there. Running too many sub

Shift in PE direction after processing with dwifslpreproc

Summary of what happened: Hi everyone, I’m trying to preprocess DWI phantom data for a test acquired at fairly high b-values (bmax=8000) using mrtrix dwifslpreproc tools for Topup/Eddy correction tool. The data is has a total of 6,6,15,15 shells for b=500, 1500, 4000 and 8000 with additional 6 b-zeros spaced across the acquisition. A large shift in the PE direction appears for the higher b-shells that is not visible in the unprocessed images. Command used (and if a helper script was used, a link to the helper script or the command generated): The dwifslpreproc is ran after a basic denoising us

[job posting] Fully Funded PhD Fellowship in Computational Neuroscience in Rome

A PhD position is available at the Italian National Institute of Health (Rome) in the group of Maurizio Mattia _____________________________________________________________ PhD (Rome) – Computational Neuroscience / Dynamical Systems / Epilepsy Sapienza University Project: Multiscale Digital Twin for Pediatric Focal Epilepsy Based on Recurrent Neural Networks. Focus on: Data-driven modeling of brain dynamics Analysis of clinical time-series Inference of dynamical systems from experimental data Looking for candidates with strong background in: physics / applied math / theoretical neuroscience, a

Add membership card to apple wallet

Hi everyone, I’m working on a tool under the Membership Anywhere project that helps neuroscience institutions and research networks issue digital membership cards to their members, with the goal to add membership card to Apple Wallet so researchers can carry their institutional access credentials directly on their iPhone. The use case is fairly common in our community conference badges, lab access passes, INCF member credentials but the tooling around how to properly add membership card to Apple Wallet in a programmatic, scalable way is still quite scattered. Most solutions I’ve found are eith

NITRC v2.1.75 released

We are pleased to announce the release of NITRC v2.1.75. This release addresses a number of usability issues and bugs. Full release notes can be found at https://www.nitrc.org/plugins/mwiki/index.php?title=nitrc:NITRC_Release_Notes#NITRC-R_Release_v2.1.75-6_-_5.2F26.2F2026

fMRIPrep 25.2.3 cannot find T1w when using --session-label for sessions without anat

Summary of what happened: Hi everyone, I’m processing a longitudinal/multi-session dataset with fMRIPrep 25.2.3. Subject sub-02 has a single anatomical scan acquired in ses-01, while functional runs were acquired across multiple sessions (ses-01 to ses-05). My BIDS structure is: sub-02/ ├── ses-01/ │ ├── anat/ │ │ ├── sub-02_ses-01_T1w.nii.gz │ │ └── sub-02_ses-01_T1w.json │ ├── func/ │ └── fmap/ ├── ses-02/ │ ├── func/ │ └── fmap/ ├── ses-03/ │ ├── func/ │ └── fmap/ ├── ses-04/ │ ├── func/ │ └── fmap/ └── ses-05/ ├── func/ └── fmap/ I would like to preproces

SPM Multi-echo Preprocessing

I am running tedana v25.1.0 on multi-echo fMRI data (3 echoes, TE=13.80/32.06/50.32ms) as part of an SPM preprocessing pipeline. I am comparing the optcom and denoised outputs. I expected optcom to preserve more voxels in dropout-prone regions (e.g. OFC/PFC) due to its more liberal masking. However, quantitative comparison of voxel counts shows the two outputs have identical spatial coverage. In the final preprocessed output overlaid on MNI152, I consistently see a sliver of signal dropout and missing coverage in the PFC/OFC region across both approaches and all subjects. My questions: In teda

Processing diffusion data with only one PE direction

Hi all! Best, Sofie 2 posts - 2 participants Read full topic

Scan, Decide, Act: How Brainomix Is Closing the Gap Between Imaging and Treatment

How to download the template brain of a statistical map on NeuroVault?

I am trying to use a biomarker from this collection on NeuroVault: Decoding Activity in Broca's Area Predicts the Occurrence of Auditory Hallucinations Across Subjects. I’d like to be able to register my participant data to the same space that the biomarker is registered to, but I cannot figure out which template they’re using (the associated paper says MNI space, but doesn’t specify a specific template, e.g., MNI152NLin2009cAsym or something similar). Does NeuroVault have an option to directly download the brain that the map is registered to? Or is there another way to access that informatio

fMRIPost-AROMA command specifications and troubleshooting documentation

Summary of what happened: I am attempting to use fmripost-aroma but am encountering difficulties with some of the specifications that I previously had not encountered when ICA-AROMA was still integrated in fmriprep. I have gotten various errors (related to dummy scans, extraction of motion parameters, etc.), which leads me to think that my initial specification within the command is incorrect/incomple. I did not yet find a clear documentation for troubleshooting with fmripost-aroma. I based my specification based on this post but know it may differ. Any ideas what aspects of the command may be

Best fMRIPrep practice for pooled resting state analysis: fieldmap-less approach?

Hi I am running an analysis pooling resting-state scans from 3 studies from the same site (conducted on the same MRI scanner, but with slightly different acquisitions). Of the three studies, two have fieldmaps associated (one with a directly acquired B0 map and the other with blip-up blip-down EPI), whilst the third study has no fieldmaps at all. For consistency I am wondering if applying a fieldmap-less approach (using --force-syn-sdc) might be the best practice to ensure consistency across all sites? Thanks 2 posts - 2 participants Read full topic

How can I implement an automatic QA procedure on metrics derived from QAP package?

Hello everyone. There is a publicly available QA metric derived from the QAP package of the ABIDE II dataset in a CSV file. How can I choose the good quality images among them? Is this procedure plus a visual inspection enough, or should I perform the QC using MRIQC? @oesteban 1 post - 1 participant Read full topic

--bids-filter-file configuration file specification with multiple bold tasks

Summary of what happened: I am using --bids-filter-file with fmriprep. I have some participants that have multiple bold runs for one task in func (because they task was started, stopped, restarted), as well as two T1w images (raw and prenormed as generated by the scanner) in my anat folder. Rather than manually removing the files I dont want, I saw --bids-filter-file can be used. I do not get a reported error with my .json file, but two of the bold runs (the task runs) are not preprocessed (i.e., fmriprep only processed the resting state bold and not the tasks bold, despite it finding all thre

The World is Unraveling: A 3-Step Guide to Staying Sane & Useful

MindBlog has now put out a series of AI assisted posts on the disintegration of the world we have known and the infusion of LLMs into our possible futures. This is the final entry in this series, and takes on the Nate Nagins essay "What to do as the world falls apart: A frame work for action."  As usual, I would urge you to read the entire article as I have.  But again I asked the usual culprits (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and DeepSeek) to reduce Hagins' text to provide a title and text for a MindBlog post of moderate length, and for the first time, preferred the quirky terse response from Deep

Post-Doctoral Position in Neuroimaging Data Science, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai

We are recruiting a Postdoctoral Fellow in Neuroimaging Data Science to work on CentileBrain, a large-scale neuroinformatics and normative modelling project. The role focuses on multi-site MRI data harmonisation, quality control, feature extraction, machine learning/AI methods, statistical modelling, and reproducible analytic pipelines. Candidates should have strong quantitative and programming skills, with experience in neuroimaging, biomedical data science, machine learning or computational neuroscience. The position is full-time and based in New York. Apply here https://careers.mountsinai.o

NIMH Data Science & Sharing Team Lunch & Learn series: Dr. Yaroslav O. Halchenko presents "BIDS 2.0"

The NIMH Data Science & Sharing Team Lunch & Learn (DSST L&L) series is hosted on most Tuesdays at 12pm-1pm Eastern! Please distribute this announcement to anyone who might be interested. Anyone can subscribe to (or unsubscribe from) our free email distribution list. Expect calendar invites on the email distribution list with event details less than a week from each event. Planned schedule emails will be sent about once a month. Here is our June 2nd, 2026 announcement to NeuroStars because there might be folks who are interested out there: Have you ever wanted something different out of the Br

Important RBC update: Processed Functional Data+Pipeline TR Issue

Dear RBC User Community, We are writing to inform you of a recently identified TR metadata issue in the RBC preprocessing pipeline that affected bandpass filtering for publicly released RBC functional derivatives, with larger deviations for datasets with longer TRs. Specifically, during one-step spatial normalization/resampling, the TR value was reset to 1.0 second rather than preserving the true acquisition TR. As a result, bandpass filtering was applied using an incorrect TR. Summary Unaffected / remains safe to use: Unprocessed data (BIDS), all structural derivatives and anatomical measures

Call for participants: Getting Involved with BIDS (Brainhack 2026)

Dear BIDS Community, Friday June 12 at 2:20pm, at BrainHack Bordeaux, we’d love to have BIDS community members come talk about their experience getting involved with BIDS, during a 45 minute panel and Q&A. There will be stickers! Are you any of the following? An “occasional” contributor (led a discussion, wrote a tool/tutorial/example, submitted a spec PR, …) A (current or former) BEP lead A (current or former) steering member or maintainer Reach out to us at bids.maintenance@gmail.com if you’re keen to join the panel or suggest a panel participant. More details on the workshop can be found at

Reusing sMRIPrep derivatives for fMRIPrep and ASLPrep

Hi i would like to preprocess a large fMRI and ASL dataset using fmri/ASLprep, so i’m trying to figure out what is the most efficient way to do so. I understand that both fmriprep and ASLprep can make use of precomputed smriprep derivatives. I have a couple of questions: if i’ve previously run fmriprep, do i set the -d flag to the fmriprep output directory when running ASLprep? Currently fmriprep uses smriprep 0.18, whereas ASLprep uses smriprep 0.19.1 will this be an issue when running fmriprep first then ASLprep, or vice versa? Do I need the freesurfer subject directory i.e., /so

New EEG Handbook! (+ meet and greet @ OHBM 2026)

Courtesy of our friends at Brain Products (https://www.brainproducts.com/): After two years of hard work, we are very proud to present the “The Handbook of EEG: From Principles to Practice”. It’s a new comprehensive resource built on over 25 years of expertise from Brain Products and leading EEG scientists. This book combines essential theory with practical insights to help you master real-world EEG research. From experimental setup to data analysis and scientific reporting, it walks you through every stage of the workflow while strengthening critical research skills. Published by Springer, th

PCNtoolkit version 1.3.0 is out!

You can update by running pip install --upgrade pcntoolkit Here are the highlights: Improved evaluation metrics (MLL and MACE) - and there’s now a tutorial on the website walking through what each metric actually does You can now load pre-trained models saved with older PCNtoolkit versions and use them in the newest pcntoolkit version More detailed, user-friendly tutorials on model merging and federated learning Better contribution guidelines and GitHub standards Bug fixes, bug fixes, bug fixes Thanks to everyone who contributed! And looking forward to more contributions! Full changelog Major

The Counterintuitive Need to Slow Down and Find Spaciousness

I pass on the following edited clips from ChatGPT and Claude condensations of a conversation between Nate Hagens and Iain McGilchrist.  While I think McGilchrist's left-hemisphere/right hemisphere distinctions are a bit simplistic, the take home messages are appropriate regardless of the particular brain activity correlates that are invoked:  In episode 217 of Nate Hagens's The Great Simplification, Hagens is rejoined by philosopher and neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist — best known for The Master and His Emissary and The Matter With Things — for a wide-ranging conversation about what our curren

Has Anyone Used the Membership Anywhere Platform?

Hello everyone, I recently came across the Membership Anywhere platform, which provides digital membership cards and mobile-based access systems for non profit organizations, museums, science centers, and member communities. It made me wonder whether similar digital membership systems could also be useful in neuroscience or research communities for things like: conference and event access student/researcher verification lab or institution memberships science museum partnerships digital academic identity management With research communities becoming more global and technology-driven, digital me

Confused from attempts at converting composite h5 from fmriprep into fsl warp -- one way's fine but not the other?

Conveniently, fMRIPrep produces both a from-T1w_to-${template} and from-${template}_to-T1wcomposite transform. I need to convert these into a format for use by FSL. I’m decomposing these with ANTsand then converting them with wb_command. This works great in one direction, but not the other, and I’m not sure why. It seems like there’s a missing affine, but I don’t see where. #!/bin/bash sub=002 standard="MNI152_T1_1mm_brain_mask.nii.gz" highres="sub-${sub}/anat/sub-${sub}_desc-preproc_t1w.nii.gz" # this works standard2highres_h5="sub-${sub}/anat/sub-${sub}_from-MNI152NLin6Asym_to-T1w_mode-im

Getting Gooier: How AI Is Reshaping Human Nature

This post is the result of my back and forth interaction with Claude Sonnet 4.6 that has yielded the following summary of  Venkatesh Rao's recent essay, "Getting Gooier", followed by some perspectives that Rao does not address on Friston's active inference framework and the physiology of agency: Venkatesh Rao's recent essay "Getting Gooier" makes a point worth sitting with: most AI commentary obsesses over how the world will change, while quietly assuming that humans stay essentially the same — just reshuffled among familiar roles (generalists thrive! storytellers inherit the earth! software e

NODDI for single-shell DWI

Hello everyone, I am working with a dataset that is single-shell DWI. I know that standard NODDI is designed for multi-shell DWI, so I wanted to ask if there are any methods for estimating NODDI-like metrics from single-shell data that are considered standard practice and reliable, or whether they should still be treated as experimental. Thank you in advance! 3 posts - 2 participants Read full topic

The Memory Machine: Dan Rizzuto on Closed-Loop BCIs, DARPA, and the Long Road to Restoring What We…

Postdoc position at MGH: cognitive computation modeling and fMRI in Alzheimer's disease

Postdoctoral fellow position: Understanding how the noradrenergic system contributes to Alzheimer’s disease using cognitive computational modeling and multimodal neuroimaging at Massachusetts General Hospital The Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, located within the Department of Radiology at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and Harvard Medical School (HMS) in Boston, Massachusetts, has an opening for a highly qualified postdoctoral individual to work with Dr. Heidi Jacobs. The Jacobs lab is focused on improving the early detection and early treatment of Alzheimer’s disea

Funded PhD (UK home-fee students only) in London

We’re inviting applications for a funded PhD in paediatric epilepsy clinical neurophysiology. The student will analyse sleep-wake scalp EEG, heart rate variability, and medical complexity profiles. It would be a great fit for somebody with experience in physiological time series analysis, but generally with a quantitative background relevant for a health data science PhD. 1 post - 1 participant Read full topic

Looking for an expert collaborator? Introducing the OHBM Matchmaker!

Need an expert collaborator for your neuroimaging project? OHBM Matchmaker makes it easy to: Showcase your expertise Discover collaborators by skill Draft outreach messages instantly Try it here: https://ohbmatchmaker.org 1 post - 1 participant Read full topic

We are excited to announce the release of a new major version of pyAFQ!

pyAFQ is an open-source software tool for tractometry of brain white matter in diffusion MRI measurements. It implements a complete and automated data processing pipeline for tractometry, from preprocessed dMRi data to white matter tract identification, as well as quantification of tissue properties along the length of the major long-range brain white matter connections. The new release includes major advances relative to versions in the 2.X series of the software, including: PyAFQ 3.0 now uses T1w images for registration, tissue segmentation, and brain segmentation. When segmentations are not

Neonatal cortical surface alignment

Dear all, I have a set of neonatal cortical surfaces generated using iBeat2 docker version. The files are in vtk. I would like to align them to a common space, however I am struggling with the process. Has anybody tried this? Any advice/guidance will be really appreciated. Thanks in advance. Best regards, Manuel 1 post - 1 participant Read full topic

Agentic AI and the next intelligence explosion

This post is the second of two recursive returns to engage the ideas of Blaise Agüera y Arcas, which were the subject MindBlog posts on 3/13/26 and 3/16/26.  Here is text of Evans, Bratton, and Agüera y Arcas, as summarized by ChatGPT: The article, “Agentic AI and the next intelligence explosion,” by James Evans, Benjamin Bratton, and Blaise Agüera y Arcas, argues against the familiar “singularity” image of one superintelligent machine bootstrapping itself into godlike autonomy. The authors say that model is probably wrong at its core. Intelligence, in their view, is not a single scalar quanti

MRIQC custom brain template

I want to use MRIQC to extract metrics for ultra-low-field, infant MRIs. Because of the differences in brain shape and in image contrast, I would like to use our own (age-specific) templates, and I have a couple of questions: What files are required to be included with the template? Feeding the mriqc repo into an AI tool (Claude), it reports that it only needs: res-02_desc-brain_mask — normalization reference mask res-01_label-CSF_probseg, res-01_label-GM_probseg, res-01_label-WM_probseg — probability masks res-02_desc-fMRIPrep_boldref res-01_desc-carpet_dseg Is this accurate? If only those fi

NITRC Booth #30 and Poster at OHBM 2026

Join NITRC at OHBM 2026 June 15-18. Learn more about how NITRC can help you in your research, find new resources and data, share your own work, let us know what we can do for you, or just stop by to catch up! You'll find us in Exhibitor booth #30 as well as presenting a Poster 3295 in Hall 1 on Wednesday, June 17 from 12:45-1:45 and Thursday, June 18 from 1:45-2:45 pm.

Alternative to GIN as a remote to push large datasets (multiple TBs)

Dear Datalad team, Since GIN is imposing quite strict limits to repo size (50 GB, typically too small for large neuroimaging datasets), I am looking for a convenient alternative to push my large datalad datasets with multiple subdatasets to. Can you recommend any alternatives? Thanks very much in advance! Best wishes, Lukas 8 posts - 3 participants Read full topic

XCP-D 26.0.2 fails during brainsprite plot_slices_T1/T2

Summary of what happened: I am running XCP-D 26.0.2 on fMRIPrep 25.2.5 derivatives from OASIS-3 using a Singularity/Apptainer image on an HPC cluster. The workflow appears to proceed past the initial parsing and into the post-processing workflow, but it fails during generation of the surface/brainsprite visual report. The failing nodes are: plot_slices_T1 plot_slices_T2 The error occurs inside matplotlib when XCP-D tries to create the figure for the anatomical slices: TypeError: _warn() got an unexpected keyword argument ‘skip_file_prefixes’ Command used (and if a helper script was used, a lin

AI Is Not an Alien Intruder — It Is the Latest in a Four-Billion-Year Evolutionary Cascade of Symbiotic Transitions

This post is the first of two recursive returns to engage the ideas of Blaise Agüera y Arcas, which were the subject MindBlog posts on 3/13/26 and 3/16/26.  Here is the storyline as organized by Claude sonnet 4.6 Blaise Agüera y Arcas, VP and Fellow at Google and founder of the Paradigms of Intelligence research group, has just published two related books with MIT Press: What Is Life? and What Is Intelligence? (2025). His argument, developed across these books and a series of recent lectures (including a September 2025 Long Now talk and a Harvard Berkman Klein event), is one of the most sweepi

The Future of Brain Medicine with Owen Muir

The Tech Mirage: Why the U.S.-China AI Race Is Failing Us All

I asked ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and DeepSeek to summarize Yi-Ling Liu's recent New York Times essay, in the form of a MindBlog post,  and pass on Gemini's version: We’ve all heard the breathless headlines about the high-stakes technological showdown between the U.S. and China. In Washington and Silicon Valley, the narrative is delivered like a Hollywood script: a binary, winner-take-all sprint toward Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), where the victor claims absolute global dominance. But if you look past the geopolitical theater, a starkly different reality emerges. Journalist Yi-Ling L

Human Enhancement vs. Support: How Can Neurotechnology Expand Human Function?

Training the Nervous System: Yana Nakhimova on the Body as the Interface

Activating the evolved healing mechanisms of the placebo response requires permission from a safe environment

I want to point to an article on the placebo effect published at theconversation.com, and recommend that you read it.  I asked the four LLM's I frequently consult to reduce the article to a MindBlog post length, and have selected a few of their paragraphs to pass on below: The placebo effect — improvements in symptoms following inert treatment — is driven by expectation, context, and social cues rather than pharmacology. But it is anything but imaginary. Placebo treatments trigger measurable changes in the brain, immune system, and hormone function. In pain studies, they cause endorphin rele

When Execution Gets Cheap, What Remains Scarce? - The last biological moat.

I have enjoyed reading a recent essay by Aneesh Sathe, which I recommend you read in full. I will pass on here the equally amazing job that Claude Sonnet 4.6 did in summarizing its main points, then responding to my editing and emphasis suggestions, and also adding some additional ideas on the relevant neurobiological substrate: "the last biological moat" - what is left for the human mind to do. Here is the result, which begins with the title of Sathe's essay:  The Lightening of Intent: When Execution Gets Cheap, What Remains Scarce? Aneesh Sathe's essay "The Lightening of Intent" is one of th

The Refusal to Dehumanize - Rewilding Creativity

..  I find it impossible to keep up with the prolific output stream of Indy Johar on Substack, but two recent posts (The Refusal to Dehumanize and Rewilding Creativity) have caught my eye, and are a fascinating read.  I recommend reading them in full. To assist readers wanting a quicker fix I reviewed renderings of the main ideas into a single post by four LLMs (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and DeepSeek) and have chosen ChatGPT's effort to pass on: We are entering a period in which two seemingly distinct developments—renewed permission to dehumanize and the automation of creativity—are in fact e

The Physiology of Agency in the Age of AI

There is a question lurking beneath the current wave of enthusiasm about artificial intelligence that I think deserves more serious attention than it has received. It is not the familiar worry about job displacement or misinformation or even the alignment problem. It is a more intimate question: What happens to our bodies when the feeling of being the author of our own actions begins to erode? I have been exploring this question in correspondence with a European reader who follows MindBlog, and his observations have sharpened my thinking considerably. He describes using AI across a wide range

Vertical Interoperability Innovation Lab

Applications are now open for the Vertical Interoperability Innovation Lab—a virtual workshop bringing together ~30 participants from across the biomedical data ecosystem to explore early-stage ideas for closing interoperability gaps across the research data lifecycle. Open to individuals working across the health research data ecosystem, the Lab will focus on interdisciplinary exchange and developing actionable project ideas. The program includes a 90-minute orientation on June 12, followed by five workshop sessions held between June 22–July 7. Learn moe and apply at: https://apply.kn

What a self is.

Reading Michael Pollan’s account of his meeting with Anil Seth in his recent book "A World Appears" has prompted me to write down for my own use what I take a “self” to be. This post archives that summary and shares it with interested MindBlog readers. So, here’s the summary:* The self can be understood, to use Seth's phrase,  as a "controlled hallucination." Our brains build this construct to regulate the body using interoceptive signals—internal data about our heart rate, breathing, and chemistry—to maintain stability (homeostasis) in the face of constant disruption. From these signals arise

From Animal to Humans - Multimodality as a safeguard of honesty in communication and language

I pass on the abstracts of an article by Hex et al to appear in Behavioral and Brain Sciences.  Motivated readers can obtain a PDF of the manuscript by emailing me. The abstracts are followed by a commentary on the article. Short Abstract Multimodality characterizes nearly every communicative system, and we argue that this feature of communication plays an essential role in safeguarding signal honesty. We first discuss the importance of honesty in communication, and introduce socially-mediated controls as an alternative to intrinsic costs. We next outline how multimodality mitigates signal dis

Modvigil 200 MG: Is It Worth the Attention?

With so many discussions around productivity and focus, Modvigil 200 MG has gained attention as a wakefulness-promoting option. Many users talk about its potential to support alertness and help manage demanding work or study schedules, making it a common topic in forums and online communities. Some people report improved concentration and the ability to stay engaged with tasks for longer periods, while others mention that results can vary depending on routine, sleep habits, and overall lifestyle. As with any productivity approach, combining it with healthy habits and a balanced schedule play

Executive Function: Universal Capacity or Schooled Skill?

A recent PNAS article by Kroupin and colleagues challenges one of the most widely assumed constructs in cognitive science: that “executive function” (EF) reflects a universal set of cognitive control capacities. Their data suggest something more unsettling—that what psychologists have been measuring for decades as EF may be, to a substantial degree, a culturally constructed skill set tied to life in what they call “schooled worlds.” The core of their argument is empirical. Standard EF tasks—card sorting, backward digit span, rule switching—require manipulating arbitrary, decontextualized info

The Default Mode Network as a Bidirectional Interface Between World and Mind

I want to pass on the abstract of a PNAS contribution from Zhang et al. titled "Sender–receiver subdivisions of the default mode network in perceptual and memory-guided cognition", followed by a ChatGPT rendering of the PDF of the article that I asked it to use in generating a more general summary.   Here is the abstract: Everyday cognition depends on the brain’s capacity to shift between sensing the external world and constructing it from memory. To achieve this, large-scale cortical systems must flexibly integrate incoming sensory signals with internally generated representations. Here,

AI, Agency, and the Quiet Hollowing of Mind

Reading through the article "A Rational Optimist View Of Preventing Agency Decay" is a rich experience. For readers with less patience, here is a ChatGPT summary (that also generated the title of this post).  Much current discussion of artificial intelligence swings between two poles: utopian efficiency and apocalyptic takeover. The more consequential reality lies between these extremes. The emerging risk is not that machines suddenly replace us, but that we gradually hand over pieces of our cognitive life—judgment, initiative, authorship—without noticing the cumulative effect. The argument i

Memes Before Machines: The Real Cognitive Risk of the AI Age

I strongly urge you to read a New York Times opinion piece by Willy Staley titled "Forget the A.I. Apocalypse. Memes Have Already Nuked Our Culture." (unlocked link). Here I pass on ChatGPTs response to my request that it compose a MindBlog post delivering the basic messages of the article.  It provided the title for this post and the following text:   Public anxiety about artificial intelligence has settled into a familiar groove: superintelligence, runaway systems, existential risk. These concerns are not trivial. But they may be misdirected. The more immediate transformation of mind is alr

AI use can compromise our serendipity, creativity, autonomy, and sense of agency.

I have been reading numerous articles on pitfalls of using AI, and want to point to two in particular that I highly recommend for a slow and careful read.   The Substack piece by Colin Lewis is titled "AI Is A Medium And It Will Change Us" - Lessons from AI Labs on the Slow Erosion of Human Autonomy.  From the article: We are in real danger of losing ourselves through AI usage. Researchers at Google DeepMind have confirmed, under certain conditions, an LLM “is able to induce belief and behaviour change.” And researchers at Anthropic have identified a rising pattern of “situational disem

Arctop and the Intelligence Layer for Brain Data: Dan Furman on Decoding the Mind

Remote Care for Spinal Cord Stimulation: Todd Langevin on BIOTRONIK Neuro’s Data-Driven Approach

Quality as a Competitive Advantage: Rebecca Crane on Building Neurotech That Works

One terminal chats with another to start vibe coding a new dericbownds.net

Writing MindBlog posts is on temporary hiatus because I have recently followed Claude's instructions to set up my Mac mini M3 to use Claude code, getting my own API, etc., and starting for myself the "vibe coding" I have been reading so much about. The terminal app on the Mac is used to both view the lines of code it is executing as they flow past, as well as to issue instructions with your own keyboard (or voice). This is essentially one sort of terminal that interfaces with a vast underlying machinery (The Apple terminal App) with another sort of terminal (My sense of having a self, which is

The polyvagal theory is dead - and HRV isn't a simple indicator of arousal

I was recently struck by Baxter's Substack post (its title copied to be the title of this MindBlog post), which noted work critical of Porges' Polyvagal  theory (or PVT) published iin the journal Clinical Neuropsychiatry, because it calls into question one idea commonly derived from this theory that I have accepted (and repeated in several MindBlog posts): that heart rate variability can be taken as a simple indicator of calm (higher HRV and parasympathetic nervous activity) versus arousal (lower HRV and sympathetic nervous system activity).  A number of bio-monitors such as the Apple Watch an

The nature of intelligence and selves.

I want to pass on the result of my extracting what I felt to be crucial chunks of text from Chapters 5 through 9 of Agüera y Arcas’s "What is Intelligence" which can be found at https://whatisintelligence.antikythera.org/. I found myself unable to hold and summarize the rich array of ideas in these clips of text in my attentional space, so I asked Anthropic Claude, ChatGPT 4.2, and Google gemini to condense and assemble the main points and take home messages from the clips into a narrative roughly two pages long.  The Claude result astounded me.  Here it is: What Intelligence Is: A Synthesis o

A seismic shift in our understanding of intelligence

I've just spent the last three days reading large chunks of the remarkable book "What is Intelligence" by Agüera y Arcas. It is best accessed at https://whatisintelligence.antikythera.org/, where you will find text with supporting graphics, charts, and animations.  Arcas argues that computation is the substrate for intelligence in all life forms and that prediction is the fundamental principle behind intelligence.  Goodall provides a good review of the book and Arcas's ideas. The introduction to the book encapsulates his basic ideas, and I pass on here ChatGPT's condensation of its main points

AI Makes Workloads Worse, Not Better

An article in today's Wall Street Journal by Ray Smith conforms so completely to my own work experience over the past week (I'm currently feeling fatigued from cognitive overload) that I pass on this Google Gemini summary of its main points: An article "AI Makes Workloads Worse, Not Better" by Ray A. Smith in the 3/12/26 Wall Street Journal highlights a counterintuitive trend: rather than freeing up time for high-level creative tasks, artificial intelligence is actually increasing the speed, density, and complexity of work. Data from ActivTrak, which analyzed 164,000 workers, shows that AI use

NITRC Booth and Poster at CNS 2026

Join NITRC at CNS 2026 March 7-10. Learn more about how NITRC can help you in your research, find new resources and data, share your own work, let us know what we can do for you, or just stop by to catch up! You'll find us in Exhibitor booth #05 as well as presenting a Poster D90 in the Fairview/Kitsilano Ballrooms on Monday, March 9 from 8-10 am.

Empathy as a Brain Rhythm: Orexin, Theta Oscillations, and Prosocial Behavior

(The following is the final installment of a series of three posts on using ChatGPT to assist in the generation of MindBlog posts.  I think this final product is a better job than than I would have done.) A recent paper in Science by Kim et al. reports a striking mechanistic link between physiology, brain rhythms, and social behavior. The work shows that empathic and prosocial responses in mice depend on theta oscillations in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) driven by orexin neurons in the hypothalamus. The finding offers a concrete neural circuit connecting arousal systems, cortical dynami

A MindBlog-ready ChatGPT synthesis

This post continues from the previous one to show  ChatGPT's response to my prompt "Let's go with the empathy / orexin paper for your producing a  MindBlog-ready synthesis" .  MindBlog-ready synthesis Paper: Empathy and prosocial behavior powered by orexin-driven theta oscillations (Science, Feb 2026) Core finding The study identifies a specific neural circuit linking arousal chemistry, brain rhythms, and social behavior: In mice, theta oscillations in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) increase during empathic states such as observing another animal in distress and during prosocial response

Will Deric’s Mind Blog be firing Deric soon? Is AI is doing his job better?

The short answer to both questions is yes and no.   I am finding that ChatGPT 5.2 ($20/month version) will scan the TOCs (tables of contents) of journals such as Science Magazine, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Current Biology, Neuron, Nature, Nature Neuroscience, Nature Reviews Neuroscience, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, etc.  and display the titles of articles in areas that it has learned that MindBlog focuses on.   (I'm reporting here on working with ChatGPT because I've found so far that paid versions of Gemini and Claude, while almost as good, don't provide output with t

Elise Jenkins: Lessons from a Journey in Neurotechnology

From Nanoparticles to Neurotech: Tetiana Aleksandrova on Subsense

NITRC-CE v0.57.28 released

We are pleased to announce the release of NITRC-CE v0.57.28. This release is a security update and includes both CE Classic and CE LITE offerings. We are considering making this the final release of NITRC-CE in its current form. If you use NITRC-CE or have used it in the past, please let us know your thoughts at https://form.typeform.com/to/RTW4Y1Fv or by contacting moderator@nitrc.org.

Still locked out of OASIS-3 even after access was approved.

Hello everyone, I’m running into trouble reaching the OASIS-3 datasets on the main project page (https://www.nitrc.org/projects/oasis3). Whenever I click the “Image Repository” link in the left-hand menu, I receive the following message: My account already shows “User” access, yet the repository still blocks me. Any pointers on what I’m missing would be greatly appreciated—thanks! Jay

Regarding the permission to access OASIS-3 and OASIS-4

It has been more than a week, but I haven't received any information regarding OASIS-3 and OASIS-4. If anyone knows how to deal with this? .

NITRC v2.1.73 released

We are pleased to announce the release of NITRC v2.1.73. This release features enhancements to the tool/resource administration pages. Administrators are encouraged to check their listings' information while trying out the new interface. Release notes can be found at https://www.nitrc.org/plugins/mwiki/index.php/nitrc:NITRC_Release_Notes#NITRC-R_Release_v2.1.73-0_-_09.2F04.2F2025

Visit NITRC at OHBM 2025 in Brisbane!

NITRC will have an exhibitor booth at OHBM's annual meeting in Brisbane, AU. Please swing by to visit. We'd love to know what works and doesn't work for you and catch up! Also, we'll be presenting our poster #1931 on Fri, June 27 | 13:45 -15:45 and Sat, June 28 | 13:45 -15:45