Rubén Herzog

Mentors/TAs are giving their tutorials. Spiros Chavlis introduces Python with the LIF model, Will Dorrell on neural computation, Kira Düsterwald on Probability Theory, Isabel Cornacchia on Dynamical Systems, Colleen Gillon on Reinforcement learning, and Rubén Herzog on information theory applied to neural data.

A massive shoutout to our incredible mentors and TAs! 🙌

They delivered 6 wonderful tutorials. Their energy and dedication make this school special. 💻🧠 🇿🇦

@spiroschav.bsky.social | Will Dorrell | @kiradust.bsky.social | @isabelmaria-c.bsky.social | @colleenjg.bsky.social | @rherzoga.bsky.social

Check out this new model from @ivanmindlin.bsky.social, @rherzoga.bsky.social and friends showing that a local homeostatic inhibition allows for a broader repertoire of states, including spatial mosaics of wake and sleep-like activity.

Could this be the basis of the phenomenon of local sleep?

🧠🧪💤

The impact of homeostatic inhibitory plasticity in a generative biophysical model A main characteristic of biological systems is their capacity to dynamically adapt to environmental changes. In the brain, synaptic plasticity enables the strengthening or weakening of connections bet...

📄Very happy to share our new pre-print!! 🧠

We introduce a homeostatic inhibitory plasticity rule into the Dynamic Mean Field (DMF) model which stabilizes firing rates and expands the model’s dynamical repertoire—for example, enabling slow-wave activity.

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
⬇️⬇️⬇️
1/5

Planeamos revisar y discutir colectivamente los resultados de la encuesta en un Evento Satélite de la ASSC 2026. Únete a la organización del primer evento de la Sociedad Latinoamericana de la Conciencia!.

We plan to collectively review and discuss the results of the survey in a Satellite Event of the ASSC in Chile 2026 . Join us in the organization of the first event of the Latin American Consciousness Society!.

@medelero.bsky.social @cam-signorelli.bsky.social @em-fl.bsky.social

Survey towards a Latin-American Society for Scientific Studies of Consciousness This survey explores the community's interest in a dedicated Society for the Scientific Studies of Consciousness in Latin America (LA). The focus of this society may be, among others, to develop regio...

[🚨ALERTA LATAM🚨]
¿Quieres fortalecer la ciencia de la conciencia en América Latina? 🧠🌎

Completa esta breve encuesta (5–10 min) y únete a la creación de la primera Sociedad Latinoamericana para la Ciencia de la Conciencia.

Tu voz cuenta: forms.gle/iEd91YWVXcwH...

Survey towards a Latin-American Society for Scientific Studies of Consciousness This survey explores the community's interest in a dedicated Society for the Scientific Studies of Consciousness in Latin America (LA). The focus of this society may be, among others, to develop regio...

[🚨LATAM ALERT🚨]
Do you want to strengthen consciousness science in Latin America? 🧠🌎

Take this short survey (5-10 mins) and join us in the creation of the first Latin American Society for Consciousness Science.

Your voice matters: forms.gle/iEd91YWVXcwH...

#Consciousnes #Science #LATAM

Illustration from Ana Yael https://www.anayael.com/

💤🧠🧪 New article! 🧪🧠💤

After years of effort led by @qualiastructure.bsky.social (Nao Tsuchiya and William Wong), Jenny Windt, Katja Valli, Valdas Noreika and @rherzoga.bsky.social, the Dream database is now published in @natcomms.nature.com

**A dream EEG and mentation database**
rdcu.be/eAwni

A dream EEG and mentation database Nature Communications - The authors present a multicenter database to investigate the neural correlates of dreaming, including physiological, behavioral and experiential data. This database could...

Dream start for database that aims to improve our understanding of conscious experience in sleep

Free link to the paper in Nature Communication is rdcu.be/eAwni !

PS: @nature.com @natureportfolio.nature.com should really improve their editorial system to extract authors and affiliations from the submitted document. Adding 53 authors one-by-one, their emails and affiliations can be annoying. Do I really need to do this in the AI era?
Just saying...

Congrats and thanks to the whole team: 53 authors across 37 institutes across the world. Speciall thanks to William Wong, @naotsuchiya.bsky.social and @thomasandrillon.bsky.social !

We propose that a 'covert wake' mechanism may underly NREM dreams, where both wake and deep sleep brain dynamics coexist, enabling consciouss experience.

As a proof of concept, we demonstrated that dream experience can be detected from EEG signals both in REM and NREM sleep. Also, dream experience during NREM is associated with increased wake-like EEG activity embedded into slow wave activity.

The work provides an open and ever growing database with multicentric neural recordings of participants while sleeping and dreaming, in addition to sleep staging and phenomenological reports.

Database
👇
monash.edu/dream-database

A dream EEG and mentation database Nature Communications - The authors present a multicenter database to investigate the neural correlates of dreaming, including physiological, behavioral and experiential data. This database could...

📜[PUBLICATION ALERT]📜

I had the honour to be co-first author of this huge effort to advance dream science and our understanding of conscious experience during sleep.

In Nature Communications rdcu.be/eAwni. @naotsuchiya.bsky.social @thomasandrillon.bsky.social

#sleep
#dreams
#EEG

Take-home: The next generation of brain mode discovery methods should explicitly optimize for synergy preservation. Leveraging synergy yields a more parsimounious and informative low-dimensional representation that retains a key qualitative property of large-scale brain dynamics: #synergy

9/9

Bonus track: Global signal regression enhances the discovery of synergistic interactions by reducing common sources of redundancy. See also www.nature.com/articles/s42...!

8/9

Main result: Autoencoders achieved the lowest reconstruction error while uniquely preserving synergistic interactions across all modes. PCA ranked second preserving neither synergy nor redundancy. The rest retained some synergy, but with higher reconstruction errors.

7/9

A systematic comparison: We derived low‑dimensional brain modes using PCA, diffusion maps, Laplacian eigenmodes, Yeo 7 resting‑state network (RSN) averaging, and a nonlinear autoencoder. Each method was constrained to 7 modes, aligning with the 7 @bttyeo.bsky.social RSNs.

6/9

We leverage #informationtheory to detect synergistic high-order interactions in resting‑state #fMRI. Synergistic interactions were consistently present across parcellations with different number of regions, prompting the question: do different DR methods also preserve synergy?

5/9

Dimensionality reduction methods aim to compress brain data mainly by minimizing redundancy. But what if we can go further by preserving and leveraging high-order synergistic interactions between brain modes? More information could be encoded within the same reduced space.

4/9

Dimensionality reduction of brain dynamics should be evaluated not only by reconstruction error or explained variance, but also by whether it preserves key qualitative properties of large-scale dynamics such as synergy.

3/9

Proposal: A complementary criterion for dimensionality reduction (DR) of brain dynamics (" #brainmodes ") based on preserving synergy. #Synergy is a recently characterized, still understudied property of the brain.

Synergy is information in the whole system that is not in the parts alone.

2/9

The synergistic interactions of low-dimensional brain modes Neuroimaging techniques produce vast amounts of data, capturing brain activity in a high-dimensional space. However, brain dynamics are consistently shown to reside in a rather lower-dimensional space...

📜🧠[PREPRINT RELEASE]🧠📜

I'm very happy to share our new preprint: “The synergistic interactions of low-dimensional brain modes.”

Thanks to Vohryzek, Luppi, Geli, Geli, Kringelbach, Tagliazucchi, Deco & Sanz-Perl !

DOI: doi.org/10.1101/2025...

See below!
#neuroscience
#brain
#synergy

1/9

Dynamical independence reveals anaesthetic specific fragmentation of emergent structure in neural dynamics Conscious experience depends on the coordinated activity of neural processes that span multiple scales--from synapses to whole-brain dynamics. A recently introduced measure, dynamical independence, id...

📜🪇[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

📢 New preprint alert!

With an incredible crew: Carlos Coronel
@rherzoga.bsky.social & Matteo Neri
We propose a computational framework for diversity-sensitive brain health combining:
• Brain clocks
• High-order interactions
• 🧠 Whole-brain modeling

👇👇👇
www.authorea.com/users/825533...

🚨New preprint out! 🚨

We investigated the EEG signatures of Idiopathic Hypersomnia (IH) with long sleep time using fine-grained EEG analysis in PSG recordings.

Here’s what we found 👇
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

(Illustration from nicolasdecat.com)

(1/12)

🎉 FINALLY PUBLISHED! 🎉

We outline how to capture the #emergent dynamical structure in #biophysical neural models.

coauthored with a team dear to my heart; @thomasandrillon.bsky.social, @anilseth.bsky.social, Lionel Barnett, and Olivia Carter.

journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...

Want to spend 3 weeks in South Africa for an unforgettable summer school experience? Imbizo 2026 (imbizo.africa) student applications are OPEN! Lectures, new friends, and Noordhoek beach await. Apply by July 1!

More info and apply: imbizo.africa/apply/

#Imbizo2026 #CompNeuro

With immense pleasure, here is our #TICS opinion paper on "mind blanking"!
@cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social

**Where is my mind?**
A neurocognitive investigation of mind blanking
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

With Jenny Windt, @antoinelutz.bsky.social and @ademertzi.bsky.social