I know I keep asking this but how can #Neuroscientists say that #fMRI lets you look at "neural activity patterns"?

The same BOLD signal, in a specific voxel, could be generated from an infinite combination of excitatory and inhibitory neurons being more or less active (and that's not even talking about glial cells). How could similar BOLD signals mean that the underlying neural activity patterns were similar?

I must be missing something, please explain 🙏

#Neuroscience

An interesting social media datapoint: @rmgrieves and I recently posted about our new research:

• Mastodon / Fedi:
  Boosts: 18; Quotes: 0; Favs: 19, Comments: 2 (interesting discussions!)

• Bluesky:
  Boosts: 60; Quotes: 7; Favs: 115, Comments: 6 (interesting questions, 1 troll)

• LinkedIn
  Boosts: 9; Quotes: 0; Favs (reactions): 46; Comments: 3 (no discussion initiation)

• [Twitter/X] (only the journal posted there, I will not link to it)
  Boosts: 5; Quotes: 0?; Favs: 9; Comments: 1 but I can't read it.

• [Facebook] (yeah I know, that's also the journal)
  Can't see any stats for it

Conclusion: #Bluesky currently the place to be for article-sharing and discussion..
We need more #Neuroscientists and #Researchers on Mastodon!

Lastly: Altmetric has always been useful to check mentions of a paper. They've recently added Bluesky, but not Mastodon / the Fedi.. We should keep asking them to add us! More on this below..

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#AcademicChatter

🤖 The future of #AI – Evolutionary approaches for #intelligentSystems 🌱

What will the next generation of #artificialintelligence look like?

According to #WolfSinger, one of Germany's leading #neuroscientists, advances in AI will soon have to be guided by #evolution itself.

📺 https://youtu.be/C2FVIbAyaH4

📎 https://philosophies.de/index.php/2022/03/22/kann-das-gehirn-das-gehirn-verstehen/

#EvolutionarySystems #Autopoiesis #ArtificialIntelligence #Neuroscience #Zoomposium #FutureOfAI #EvolutionAndTechnology #IntelligentSystems

A colleague is asking how many #Neuroscientists are here on Mastodon / Fedi. If you are one, could you make yourself known in this poll? Also, more specific comments about your field welcome! 🧠

please boost around if you don't mind
#Neuroscience #Academia #AcademicChatter

#anxiety #depression #stress #mitochondria #neuroscience #neuroscientists #MentalHealth

"Mitochondria May Hold Keys to Anxiety and Mental Health

Carmen Sandi recalls the skepticism she faced at first. A behavioral neuroscientist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, she had followed a hunch that something going on inside critical neural circuits could explain anxious behavior, something beyond brain cells and the synaptic connections between them. The experiments she began in 2013 showed that neurons involved in anxiety-related behaviors showed abnormalities: Their mitochondria, the organelles often described as cellular power plants, didn’t work well — they produced curiously low levels of energy.

Those results suggested that mitochondria might be involved in stress-related symptoms in the animals. But that idea ran contrary to the 'synapto-centric' vision of the brain held by many neuroscientists at the time. Her colleagues found it hard to believe Sandi’s evidence that in anxious individuals — at least in rats — mitochondria inside key neurons might be important.

'Whenever I presented the data, they told me, it’s very interesting, but you got it wrong,' Sandi said.

Yet a growing number of scientists have joined her during the past decade or so in wondering whether mitochondria might be fundamental not just to our general physical well-being but specifically to our mental health. In particular, they have explored whether mitochondria affect how we respond to stress and conditions like anxiety and depression.

Although much of the evidence so far is preliminary, it points to a substantial connection. Mitochondria seem to be central to the very existence of a stress response, serving both as mediators of it and targets for the damage it can do. To some of the researchers involved in this work, the stress response even looks like a kind of coordinated action by mitochondria throughout the body that interacts with the neurological processing. "

https://www.quantamagazine.org/mitochondria-may-hold-keys-to-anxiety-andmental-health-20200810/

🎧 Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas: https://pod.link/1406534739

— world-renowned #physicist and thinker Sean Carroll sits down each week with some of the most fascinating minds on the planet — from #neuroscientists and #philosophers to game designers, authors, and filmmakers. Together, they explore the deep questions that shape how we think, feel, and understand the universe.

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💡

#time_travel #science_podcast #culture #philosophy #pop_science

#Neuroscientists Explored How the #Brain Reacts — or Doesn’t React — to #Music

https://www.insidehook.com/wellness/neuroscientists-explored-brain-reacts-doesnt-react-music

Any #Neuroscientists going to #SfN this year (in San Diego, USA)?

https://www.sfn.org/meetings/neuroscience-2025/general-information/dates-and-deadlines

#Neuroscience #NeuroConf #SfN2025
(I am not)

Edit: reopened the poll because it was set for just 1 day, oops