Christopher Whyte

📢New: A comment on “On the minimal theory of consciousness implicit in active inference” by @christopherjwhyte.bsky.social Andrew W. Corcoran, Jonathan Robinson, Ryan Smith, Rosalyn J. Moran, Thomas Parr, Karl Friston, @anilseth.bsky.social , @hohwy.bsky.social: authors.elsevier.com/a/1nqAp5bD-s...

we started out just wanting to point out that, despite its popularity, comparing hits vs misses in detection tasks is actually not a very good way to study subjective experience / consciousness. but we ended up expanding it to make it relevant for clinical stuff too led by @tomnakamura.bsky.social

📜 FINALLY OUT! 📜 In @imagingneurosci.bsky.social (@mitpress.bsky.social), myself, Lionel Barnett, @anilseth.bsky.social, Olivia carter, and @thomasandrillon.bsky.social, advance approaches of #multiscale #emergence and it's application to EEG across #conscious #states. Buckle up 👇 1/n

1/ Conscious AI and Biological Naturalism. A long time in the making, but the full collection is *out now* in Behavioural and Brain Sciences I deeply thank all my many commentators for their wise, broad, and deep opinions on this critical topic.I also thank them for their saintly patience. 🙏🏽

1/11 Happy to share our TICS paper on using the flexibility of one of the most basic cognitive functions, perception, to understand one of the most complex cognitive dysfunctions, psychiatric conditions (also my first formal work in computational psychiatry 🎉) 📄: www.cell.com/trends/cogni... 🧵 : 👇

Our new paper is out this week in Nature Neuroscience! www.nature.com/articles/s41... We built a BCI that works with the brain's natural geometry — and we found that people could learn to play a video game with their brains in <1 hr of training. This efficiency is groundbreaking & here's why:

Mindscape 352 | Bing Brunton @bingbrunton.bsky.social on Connecting the Connectome to the Body. #MindscapePodcast www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2026...

Online Now: Perceptual multistability: a multifaceted window into brain dysfunctions

🎉 📜 NEW #PREPRINT !! 📜 🎉 Spearheaded by Adam Barrett we tried to tackle some of the challenges of IIT. We confront aspects worth delving into, with an incredible team of collaborators, inc. Pedro Mediano, @frosas.bsky.social, Daniel Bor, Lionel Barnett, and @anilseth.bsky.social.

If you need a method to infer causality from neural data, even when the signal is short, check our recent paper: Paper: joss.theoj.org/papers/10.21... Code: github.com/CMC-lab/Tran...

How does the visual cortex coordinate neural activity over spatial and temporal scales? We found broad θ waves organize local γ bursts and spiking, forming a flexible spatiotemporal code to multiplex feedforward/feedback signals. Now out in full @natcomms.nature.com: doi.org/10.1038/s414... 🧵

I've been inspired to become a founder of a new startup that develops brain-to-brain interface technology. It's called Talk. We're going to reinvent communication for the digital age. The best part is that we're able to zero-shot transfer the full computational stack already used by your brain!

The extended version of my thesis procrastination project/subcortex visualization package is out now in both Python and R, now that I’ve graduated 🤠 This figure shows the 9 atlases included (and counting)! Preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Website: anniegbryant.github.io/subcortex_vi...

Finally, after much delay from the BBC, Marnie Chesterton's "What Is Quantum?" is being broadcast at 9.30 am on Radio 4 on Tues 30th Dec. Recorded on Helgoland in the summer, with input from the leading figures in quantum mechanics (and me). www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m...

Really hoping bifurcations are the new manifolds. What a time to be alive 🥲

1/ "Hemispherotomy leads to persistent sleep-like slow waves in the isolated cortex of awake humans" - out now in @plosbiology.org, led by Michele Colombo, Jacopo Favaro, & Marcello Massimini. 🧠

What changes and what stays the same as you scale from single neurons up to local populations of neurons up to whole brains? Michael and Mac @macshine.bsky.social on the systems approach to study brains across scales. braininspired.co/podcast/220/

Thank you so much for having me!! I always have a blast chatting with @bethfisher.bsky.social and this time was no different! 💕 Also I loved your reflections in the end and how both of you have change your mind perhaps a bit through sharing your experiences with each other. So cool and precious!

The first major output of the @templetonworld.bsky.social @arc-intrepid.bsky.social adversarial collaboration testing IIT & predictive processing theories of consciousness is out now arxiv.org/abs/2509.00555

Adaptive learning is coordinated across behaviour, time and neurobiology (from synapses and dendrites, to astrocytes and the systems level). If you’ve ever wondered how noradrenaline helps shape these multiscale learning processes, you might like this: www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

OHBM Oz rego + abstracts now open. Get amongst it!

I wrote a Comment on neurotheory, and now you can read it! Some thoughts on where neurotheory has and has not taken root within the neuroscience community, how it has shaped those subfields, and where we theorists might look next for fresh adventures. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

It’s touching and wonderful the amount of people saying reading Pratchett has made them a better person, myself included. Was it @adamchapman.bsky.social I remembering saying that his downstream positive effect on UK society is something we should increasingly be considering as his readers age?

🎊Ain’t no party like a thesis submission party🎊 Honored to have submitted my PhD as a recipient of the Paulette Isabel Jones Career Development Award from The University of Sydney! Thank you x1000000 to MVP supervisor @bendfulcher.bsky.social & co-supervisor @macshine.bsky.social 😊

I need some help from the #neuroskyence Bluesky-verse. Anyone know the source of this ~quote from Walter J. Freeman Jr.: "the secrets of the brain are hidden by two of God’s own firewalls: neurobiology and non-linear dynamics". I read it yrs ago but can't seem to find my way back to the source.

Position open for a neuroimaging focused postdoc to come work with us in Sydney Feel free to get in touch for a chat if you have any questions about it :) usyd.wd105.myworkdayjobs.com/en-GB/USYD_E...

Interested in cortical wave dynamics? Check out our new preprint led by J Cruddas with @jchrispang.bsky.social where review the physics and physiology of cortical waves and their implications for psychological function: osf.io/preprints/ps... @nsb-lab.bsky.social

New electron microscopy study in @nature.com Neuroscience finds that layer 5 ET neurons mostly connect to inhibitory cells locally, esp. those suppressing other excitatory cells, suggesting a "winner-take-all" system. 🧠📈 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

After five years of confused staring at Greek letters, it is my absolute pleasure to finally share our (with @smfleming.bsky.social) computational model of mental imagery and reality monitoring: Perceptual Reality Monitoring as Higher-Order inference on Sensory Precision ✨ osf.io/preprints/ps...

finally recovered from all the thought provoking discussions I had at @assc28.bsky.social! presented a meta analysis of the current state of consciousness science and why we should leave theory convergence behind (based on work with @mnoichl.bsky.social & @niccolonegro.bsky.social)

📜🪇[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

A new study led by @timothysit.bsky.social reveals that different layers of mouse V1 integrate visual and non-visual signals differently. Activity is dominated by vision (or spontaneous fluctuations) in L2/3 and by movement in L5. This leads to different geometries. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

New paper! We introduce an efficient set of statistical features for fMRI time series (calibrated on mouse manipulation experiments and tested on mouse and human data): catchaMouse16. Paper: doi.org/10.52294/001... Code (python/Matlab/C): github.com/DynamicsAndN...

Pairs well with www.nature.com/articles/s41... “Our results indicate that individual V1 neurons do not signal how the actual visual input deviates from the animal’s predictions, as postulated within the predictive coding framework” Thrilling to see a major theory get tested!

1/3) This may be a very important paper, it suggests that there are no prediction error encoding neurons in sensory areas of cortex: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... I personally am a big fan of the idea that cortical regions (allo and neo) are doing sequence prediction. But... 🧠📈 🧪

Congratulations to Abhilash Dwarakanath who won this year's William James Prize for his brilliant work on the b istability of prefrontal states gating access to consciousness. You can read his paper here: www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...

New paper @pnas.org with Lola Beerendonk, Jan Willem de Gee, Simon van Gaal and others, on pharmacological shifts of performance. We combine psychophysics and pupillometry with computational modeling to provide interesting insights linked to PV-SST-VIP circuits: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Mindscape 320 | Solo: Complexity and the Universe. Our cosmos was once simple, and someday will be simple again. We currently live in the complicated, exciting era of universal history! Enjoy it while it lasts. #MindscapePodcast www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2025...

New preprint! Why are long-range connectomic interactions in the cortex dominant in shaping dynamics in some experiments but apparently negligible in others? We (w/ R Maran, @elimuller.bsky.social) address this question by studying a new hybrid model of cortical dynamics. arxiv.org/abs/2506.19800

This paper, from @smellosopher.bsky.social et al, is a well-designed spherical cow with a lot of 🥛 to give. Has been quite influential in how I think of #NeuroAI and ANNs as models for the brain 🐮 onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

We just pushed “Memory by a 1000 rules” onto bioRxiv, where we use clever #ML to find #plasticity quadruplets (EE, EI, IE, II) that learn basic stability in spiking nets. Why is it cool? We find 1000s!! of solutions, and they don’t just stabilise. They #memorise! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

#OHBM2025 was a blast -- the perfect way to celebrate submitting my PhD thesis with y'all 🎉 It was an honor (and so fun!) to represent the Aussie imaging community alongside a fab panel in the LOC Symposium, sharing my final thesis work on homotopic connectivity: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

I'm excited to announce that my lab's open textbook on Scientific Computing for Cognitive Neuroscience (v1.0) has just gone live! Our goal is to help mend the gap between the computational skills needed by cognitive neuroscience, and typical curricula that don't yet include it. 1/3

I am so excited to share that our paper 'A neural basis for distinguishing imagination from reality' is now published in @cp-neuron.bsky.social! 🧠✨ See thread below! doi.org/10.1016/j.ne...

New pre-print with Rebecca Brady on mathematical models to simulate audio-visual reaction time tasks. This debutant paper has three main goals: 1. To simulate different mechanisms of multisensory integration and compare with the behavioural findings 1/8

CIFAR invites applications for senior PhD and postdocs to participate in the Neuroscience of Consciousness Winter School, held in Montebello, Canada Dec 10-12, 2025. The Winter School is hosted by members of CIFAR’s Brain, Mind, and Consciousness program. Please repost. cifar.ca/next-generat... 🧠🧪