Micah G. Allen

Some very good news today! We expect to recruit a four-year postdoc to develop transcranial focused ultrasound (tFUS) in Aarhus. Details soon, but if you have solid tFUS experience and an interest in brain–body neuromodulation, I’d love to hear from you. Please spread the word!

Thrilled to share this piece from my time in Jon Britt's lab at McGill. We showed that mice would hold-down a lever to receive continuous photostimulation of dopamine inputs to the medial accumbens shell for varying durations. www.cell.com/cell-reports...

🚨New pre-print!🚨 Wonderful work led by my colleague Liz Davies, on a quite unique longitudinal RS-fMRI cohort of cannabis users and non-using controls (+ adult/teen groups). www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Short thread. ⬇️

New paper in Imaging Neuroscience by Joline M. Fan, Keith R. Murphy, et al: Toward a transcriptomic framework for ultrasound neuromodulation: A perspective on gene expression and regional brain sensitivity doi.org/10.1162/IMAG...

DynaBody is funded by DFF!! Using experience sampling, we will track body wandering (mind wandering about the body) in daily life, test how breathing alters its affective tone and content, and use natural language tools to map brain signatures! Eighth try, first success! dff.dk/om-fonden/ny...

Incredible paper - critically important for those of us studying #interoception. Congratulations and major thanks to Joey Charbonneau, @eblissmoreau.bsky.social, and co-authors !

1/ Our brains probably don’t store a new copy of “red” when we encounter something red. Yet we can reinstate distinct memories of red objects. How do we reuse what we already know when encoding memories? Excited to share new work led by @haoliu4391.bsky.social, with @marcelomattar.bsky.social 🧠🧵

what makes claudish different from human text? we're getting real psycholinguistic research! idea is that models are optimizing for information density rather than human understanding. consequences flow from that. i think i buy it. arxiv.org/abs/2610.29162

Getting ready for @iasp.bsky.social in Bangkok 🤩 w/ paper out in @painthejournal.bsky.social @isabellmeier.bsky.social @martintrostheim.bsky.social & team's meta-analysis revealed a TINY effect of endogenous opioid blockade on pain Challenging opioids' superiority 🧵 www.ovid.com/10.1097/j.pa...

Review @natimmunol.nature.com Cytokine circuits in CNS homeostasis and disease www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Do brain connections just carry information between regions, or do they transform it? Lab's latest is out in Nature Neuroscience, led by Lakshman Chakravarthula: "Network geometry shapes the transformation of task representations across the human cortex" www.colelab.org/pubs/Chakrav... 1/n

The brain uses dimensionality reduction as a built-in feature of its wiring. Network geometry shapes the transformation of task representations across the human cortex www.nature.com/articles/s41... #neuroscience

Our review of Bayesian efficient coding as a theory of perception is out now in TICS – with @ivntmc.bsky.social and Máté Lengyel. www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

New results from a study led by the brilliant @benjyb.bsky.social examining differences between numerical (e.g. zero) and perceptual absences using MEG - now revised in eLife elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre...

I just came across this paper by Cesario et al. that has one of the greatest titles ever: " journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Just published open access in 𝘗𝘴𝘺𝘤𝘩𝘰𝘭𝘰𝘨𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘭 𝘔𝘦𝘵𝘩𝘰𝘥𝘴: “𝗪𝗼𝗿𝗸𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝗖𝗶𝗿𝗰𝘂𝗹𝗮𝗿 𝗗𝗮𝘁𝗮: 𝗔 𝗧𝘂𝘁𝗼𝗿𝗶𝗮𝗹 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗖𝗼𝗴𝗻𝗶𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗕𝗲𝗵𝗮𝘃𝗶𝗼𝗿𝗮𝗹 𝗥𝗲𝘀𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗰𝗵” 🔗 doi.org/10.1037/met0... 🙎 Co-authors: @bayslab.org, @ivntmc.bsky.social, @cjungerius.bsky.social, Xiaolu Wang, Julie de Falco, Zahara Gironés, Adam Triabhall

Excited and proud to share this work, now published in PNAS. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... In this work, we identify neuromodulation as a high-dimensional reconfiguration signal that not only changes individual functional properties but also the statistical architecture linking them.

Read about @rgast.bsky.social's efforts to study how the physiological heterogeneity of neurons contributes to the computational capacity of neural populations!

Using Heart-Brain Coupling as a prefrontal grid search procedure for TMS yielded HBC in 90% of subjects, most often a non-BeamF3 site. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... Congrats Jessica Jacobs, great work!

Call for submissions: Special Issue in Cortex "Conscious awareness across the senses" co-edited by @renzolanfranco.bsky.social @arvidguterstam.bsky.social @leahbanellis.bsky.social @nfaivre.bsky.social & @canalesjohnson.bsky.social #neuroskyence #psychscisky www.sciencedirect.com/special-issu...

Alice Popovici @carneyinstitute.bsky.social has a great write-up helping explain how this might explain how internal states like hunger can make us want to drink www.brown.edu/news/2026-10...

🚨 New publication! 🚨 WaveSpace, a python tool for analysis and simulation of cortical #traveling_waves is now published in the Journal of Open Source Software! This work was headed by former Dugué Lab postdoc, Kirsten Petras. joss.theoj.org/papers/10.21...

🚨 New preprint! We conduct the largest multivariate brain-wide association study (BWAS) of bipolar disorder (BD) to date. We developed an imaging risk score (IRS), compared it to a polygenic risk score (PRS), and combined them in multimodal risk score (MRS) models. www.medrxiv.org/content/10.6...

New open dataset out in Scientific Data 🚨 We are releasing BBBD: the Brain, Body, and Behavior Dataset. Paper: www.nature.com/articles/s41... Work with @parralab.org

Huge multimodal data release: Brain signals, Cardio, Gaze, Head, Gut, Respiration, 178 participants watching videos = 110 hours. Lots of interest, so @jens-madsen.bsky.social did a massive update of the meta data. I have to say, I have not seen a data this well organized. bbbd.pythonanywhere.com

Kevin (who is on Bsky!) has done a really amazing work here. The package brings a lot of flexibility and precision to models of metacognition, and will become the new standard!

happy to announce the official release of my first R package on CRAN! 🎉 building on the Hmetad toolbox by @smfleming.bsky.social, the hmetad package allows users to fit the meta-d' model of confidence ratings using a familiar brms/lme4-style formula syntax

Merriam Webster out here fighting for its life

We went here for something similar: direct.mit.edu/opmi OA, free, edited by people I respect (and like)

A new fMRI study just out on precision functional mapping of imagined and experienced pain, led by Michael Sun (Sun et al., 2026, Nature Communications). How strongly does imagining pain activate nociceptive representations in the brain? doi.org/10.1038/s41... Thread below 👇

Hidden signals in sleep can predict future health www.nature.com/articles/d41...

We’re delighted to report the publication of our new @nature.com paper, ‘A microexon regulatory code reveals autism-linked genetic variation’, a major collaboration with @quaidmorris.bsky.social & additional colleagues, led by co-first authors @geparada.bsky.social & @ha.nnes.io.

Our paper is out in Nature, congrats to Qiyu, An et al! By stimulating ~20 motor cortex neurons carefully selected based on their activity, we could induce learned population activity and, sometimes, the movement itself, depending on the brain's state. www.nature.com/articles/s41...