David Brang

Super excited that this work it out! If you care about inhibitory control or aging and cognition check out Jacob's explainer for details!

Visual speech enhances phoneme separability in human superior temporal gyrus https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.09.10.750762v1

Super excited by this manuscript led by the amazing @brissend.bsky.social By combining fMRI, TMS, and modeling, we finally have causal evidence that the cerebellum is contributing to brain-wide working memory representations and recall performance! 1/n

The data is in: the NIH goalposts have shifted. What were once almost certain fundable scores have become coin flips and what used to be likely grants have become aspirational, leading to fewer awards. Another manifestation of how HHS policies have led to fewer awards and less science.

Independent Component Analysis (ICA) is important for signal processing but isn't always intuitive. I made a demo to generate EEG, run ICA, and remove blink components, that also works with wav files, letting you move the speakers/mics around to control mixing. dbrang.github.io/EEG-ICA-Demo/

EEG requires many neurons aligned so that their electric fields can positively sum to spread up to the scalp. I made a browser-based simulator for my EEG class to visualize how "open fields" contribute to EEG recordings. dbrang.github.io/Open-Closed-... Github: github.com/dbrang/Open-...

Interpreting EEG requires understanding how the skull smears electrical fields as they propagate from the cortex. I made a browser-based simulator for my EEG class to visualize how dipole depth/orientation change the topomap. dbrang.github.io/EEG-Dipole-D... Github page: github.com/dbrang/EEG-D...

We (I and @willenjoy.bsky.social) created a toolbox for simulations of EEG/MEG because we needed to simulate data. Our initial aim was to simulate connectivity. For this short clip, I simulated two sources with phase connectivity using our toolbox. #brainmovie meegsim.readthedocs.io/en/stable/in...

I gave a talk in 2009 about feature-based attention and a famous vision scientist asked how top down signals from PFC could possibly target the right sensory neurons. The best I could do was "uh, dunno". sunyoungp.bsky.social has a much more thoughtful answer journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...

Our department is recruiting! New tenure-track, open rank faculty position in the Department of Psychology at the University of Michigan (emphasis on human cognition and artificial intelligence). apply.interfolio.com/169170

New paper with @herveyjumper.bsky.social and Vardhaan Ambati! It shows that causal (DCS+) language cortex in glioma patients has greater ECoG information encoding (higher entropy and linguistic decoding). DCS+ sites showed stronger oscillations and high gamma, enabling prediction of DCS sites.

Electrocorticographic Detection of Speech Networks in Glioma-infiltrated Cortex https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.07.04.663249v1

Experimentology is out today!!! A group of us wrote a free online textbook for experimental methods, available at experimentology.io - the idea was to integrate open science into all aspects of the experimental workflow from planning to design, analysis, and writing.

Here is a link to 60 Minutes NIH segment... www.cbsnews.com/news/scienti...

At #CNS2025? Come by our posters from the Cognition, Control, and Action Lab! SAT 3-5pm A126 Modeling the temporal dynamics of cognitive control A149 Cognition-Action links in Parkinson disease (TMS-fMRI) SUN 8-10am B30 Causal role of the cerebellum in spatial working memory (TMS-fMRI)

New study from my PostDoc Emily Cunningham! We used ECoG with stimulation of the STG to test for direct (potentially monosynaptic) A-to-V connections in humans. 112 out of 231 visual electrodes (across 19/23 patients) exhibited early responses to STG stimulation (as early as 18ms after stimulation).

Helpful table to determine how much your University or health system is set to lose if the NIH indirect cap is suddenly lowered to 15%. For SJSU it is $374k which is on the smaller end but devastating considering our other budget issues. datawrapper.dwcdn.net/l0ZqA/8/

ATTENTION If you are someone who had an F31-Diversity (or similar) application submitted this cycle, please DM me here, contact me on signal (jeremymberg.78), or email me at jeremymberg@gmail.com. I will keep all information confidential. 2/n

And the funding announcement for diversity supplements now has been updated to expire today. Supplements are so important to the careers of junior scientists. This is crushing for post docs and early career faculty grants.nih.gov/grants/guide...

We're looking to hire a new lecturer in Psychology at the University of Michigan! The initial appointment is for 3 years and this person would teach our large Intro to Cognitive Psychology course along with smaller courses on topics within their expertise. apply.interfolio.com/160580

Excited this one is finally out! The forced response method: A new chronometric approach to measure conflict processing with @hanzhang.bsky.social link.springer.com/10.3758/s134... Can we better study how the conflict between goal-directed and habitual/automatic actions is resolved? Read on!

Posted some of the lab's Open-Source Image Registration scripts onto github, useful for identifying where ECoG electrodes are located based on intraoperative photography alone, by registering/warping pictures of the brain with and without the ECoG grid. github.com/dbrang/Intra...

I have not seen a starter pack for the study of brain rhythms. So, here's a start. go.bsky.app/A6zgHeE

my first preprint with @dbrang.bsky.social is now live. we tested whether mouth movement improves auditory speech onset encoding and ongoing speech envelope tracking with distinct or overlapping mechanisms (1/7)

Now out in Current Biology! Here's the free access link: https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1jcF93QW8S6Fk9 @neurocow @tnagarKaRaja @DemidenkoMI

First R01 for the lab! Grateful to have such amazing lab members and collaborators. We’re recruiting postdocs for this work and for an NSF grant (salary 65-70k; the postdoc could potentially live out of state and work remotely). More info at...