Prof. Vladimir Litvak

We are pleased to announce that the SPM for MEG/EEG course hosted by University College London will take place from Monday, May 18th to Thursday, May 21st, 2026!

Registration is now open via the UCL Online Store:

I think the opposite is true. The properties of the connectome are highly meaningful. Even the degree sum network is meaningful and might be truly relevant to some disorders. The exciting aspect is the possibility of expressing lesion networks and R-maps in terms of canonical resting networks.

So these guys seem to have done exactly what I was suggesting, and it seems that at least some of the networks can be distinguished in low-dimensional space. This is super-exciting. And this must be the space where all fMRI resting networks live because they are generated from the same connectome.

A recent @natneuro.nature.com paper analyzed lesion network mapping and raised concerns about the validity of the method.
See below 👇 for our response.

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

The deep brain stimulation response network in Parkinson’s disease operates in the high beta band Bahners et al. identify a brain network linked to optimal therapeutic outcomes in patients with Parkinson’s disease receiving deep brain stimulation. This

New @netstim.org publication alert: @bahnebahners.bsky.social in BRAIN out now:

academic.oup.com/brain/advanc...

A 🧵:

Looks great! You should have an art exhibition to go with it!

Scientist gives himself BRAIN damage testing Havana Syndrome weapon A scientist in Norway gave himself brain damage after testing an experimental weapon designed to disprove the existence of 'Havana Syndrome'.

On the importance of ethics and risk assessment www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/...

Sumultaneous subthalamic local field potentials and MEG-derived cortical activity in Parkinson's patients ON and OFF dopaminergic medication This dataset contains simultaneous magnetoencephalography and subthalamic local field potential recordings acquired during deep brain stimulation surgery for Parkinson’s disease. Acquisition and preprocessing procedures are detailed in Litvak et al., Brain 2011 (doi:10.1093/brain/awq332) and Litvak et al., Journal of Neuroscience 2012 (doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0767-12.2012). All files are provided in FieldTrip raw format as defined in the FieldTrip data specification. Data from a subset of the original cohort are available due to ethical restrictions on data sharing.Recordings were obtained in two clinical states for each participant: after overnight withdrawal of dopaminergic medication and while receiving their usual medication. Clinical characteristics and medication doses are listed in subject_details.csv. Pre-operative motor scores were collected using standard clinical assessments.Experimental conditionsParticipants completed the following tasks:R: rest.SL: simple left-hand movement comprising a simultaneous button press with digits 2 to 4.SR: simple right-hand movement with the same gesture.CL: complex left-hand sequence consisting of successive presses of digits 2, 4 and 3.CR: complex right-hand sequence with the same pattern.Event timings for button presses are stored in the event channel.Recorded signalsThe dataset includes:Bipolar subthalamic local field potentials.Electro-oculography.Electromyography from the bilateral first dorsal interosseous muscles.Virtual electrode time series reconstructed from MEG for the supplementary motor area and bilateral primary motor cortices. Virtual electrode coordinates are reported in MNI space and were affine transformed to individual anatomy: SMA [−2 −10 59], left M1 [−37 −25 62], right M1 [37 −25 62].

We have released a subset of our simultaneous MEG and subthalamic LFP recordings from people with Parkinson’s with clinical metadata. The data cover rest and movement tasks, medication on and off states, and include MEG‑derived virtual electrodes for SMA and bilateral M1.

doi.org/10.6084/m9.f...

🚨 New research alert: What happens at the cortex during pallidal #DBS in patients with cervical #dystonia? 🧠 ⚡
---> www.researchgate.net/publication/... <-----

Finally, we are grateful to our clinical colleagues Lucy Simmonds, Susie Lagrata, Manjit Matharu, Harith Akram and Ludvic Zrinzo and to the outstanding research facilities of the Department of Imaging Neuroscience @imagingneuroucl.bsky.social (formerly the Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging).

We are equally indebted to Arjun Ramaswamy @arjunramaswamy.bsky.social for his perseverance and rigorous analysis, and to Jon Roiser @jonroiser.bsky.social for invaluable input to Arjun's work alongside co‑supervision from Umesh Vivekananda.

This study would not have been possible without Douglas Steele @dougiej.bsky.social , who suggested the task and travelled from Dundee to London for every patient recording.

Taken together, these findings show that the essential components required to compute reward prediction error, as proposed by reinforcement learning theory and earlier animal work, are present in the human VTA.

We observed stronger responses to rewarding outcomes than to losses or neutral events. In a subset of patients, we also identified a signal reflecting the value of the chosen option around the time of the decision.

This project was conceived over a decade ago, with data collection spanning a period of six years.

Preprint alert!!! We recorded directly from the human ventral tegmental area (VTA), the principal source of cortical dopaminergic innervation, while patients performed an instrumental learning task. 🧵👇

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

When I was entering the field of DBS, Ludvic Zrinzo said a few things that were simple in retrospect but formulated so clearly that they fundamentally changed how I think of the therapy. I am super grateful about this super insightful interview at @stimulatingbrains.org – tune in 👇👇

I’m still trying to understand their explanation for why all the controls you used were invalid. But whatever the bottom line I have no doubt you were as rigorous as you could possibly be.

I’m looking forward to the debate around this important paper.
But even if some results from @andreashorn.org, @foxmdphd.bsky.social and other brilliant and hard-working colleagues turn out too good to be true, the field will correct itself and emerge stronger. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

What is the status of DBS for epilepsy?
Find out in our new review/metaanalysis spearheaded by @laurenahart.bsky.social & Garance Meyer in JNNP: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40666371/

A 🧵 — please RT for reach! 🙏

See you in Geneva! We have such an incredible line up of speakers this year!
#optoDBS2026 – registration now open at www.optodbs.ch

As last time, we are expanding scope way beyond just DBS and optogenetics – for instance including TMS and LIFU applications this year!

Deep brain stimulation and psychosis: A case series and two candidate causal brain circuits https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.11.18.25340443v1

Yes, I suspected it might have been me. Thanks for setting the record straight 😊

@orcid.org alerted me to the fact that my PhD thesis from 2006 is available online via OSF. I'm not sure how it got there, but it was quite nostalgic to flip through those long-forgotten pages again and remember the good times in Haifa and Würzburg. Enjoy! doi.org/10.31237/osf...

And one can definitely learn from it how to write the most useful review.

q.e.d Science Critical Thinking AI for constructive criticism and science evaluation

I’m really impressed with qedscience.com. Not perfect but the best qualitative jump I’ve seen in AI output since the original ChatGPT. Even the kind of dumb things it sometimes says, a human reviewer could say as well, but many of the points are spot on.

#BrainMeeting 🧠 Alert! 🎺

This Friday, October 24th, the Brain Meeting speaker will be Terence Sanger, MD, PhD.

This talk will be online only. 12 Queen Square Seminar room (4th Floor) will be available if you need a space to watch the stream. For more information:
www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/event

Bat Island: The New Era of Science YouTube video by Weizmann Institute of Science

Who says a scientist’s life is boring? Was nice to see some friends from times long gone in this movie.

youtu.be/46svA-C939s?...

What was the point he was making with this? I recently heard about Pollock in a different context from @marcusdusautoy.bsky.social .

Looks amazing! Congratulations!