iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Armin Raznahan @bogglerapture.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

New work out by the stellar @sharareimer.bsky.social (congrats Shara!!) on predicting neuropsychiatric outcomes in genetic high risk groups from family data (here applied to XXY and XYY syndrome - but with generalizable insights). Check out Shara’s thread below …

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ΜΑΝΟΣ ΤΡΑΧΙΑΣ™ @trahias.bsky.social · 30/06/2026

Eline Brontsema (Dutch, b.1988) "Blue / Finckensteinallee Swimming Pool," 2024 Woodcut print 67.8 x 51 cm #art #painting #artist #BlueSkyArt

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NeuroecologyLab @neuroecologylab.bsky.social · 31/05/2026

Looking forward!

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Organization for the Study of Sex Differences (OSSD) @ossdcomm.bsky.social · 30/05/2026

Undergraduate Attendee Awards were awarded to undergraduate students who are from underrepresented minority groups who are interested in research in the area of sex differences and would like to attend the meeting. Awardees from the 2026 OSSD Annual Meeting are Cierra Guinn from Michigan (1/2)

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Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · 29/05/2026

Of all the harm this administration has done to US science, today's proposed changes to the way federal grants are awarded and administered is the most damaging yet. The text of the federal register document is impenetrably tedious by design, so here's an excellent summary of what it says.

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Armin Raznahan @bogglerapture.bsky.social · 28/05/2026

Thanks Ravi! Excited to see what you think …

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Armin Raznahan @bogglerapture.bsky.social · 28/05/2026

Would love to get your take on it Mallar. Was a deeeeeeeeeep dive 🤿 !

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Armin Raznahan @bogglerapture.bsky.social · 28/05/2026

A great big shout too out to our fabulous NIH IRP / NIMH collaborators Dustin Moraczewski, Adam G. Thomas, @sjgotts.bsky.social and Alex Martin. And a final deep thanks to all participants in, and creators of, the amazing Human Connectome Project dataset.

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Armin Raznahan @bogglerapture.bsky.social · 28/05/2026

Hats off the the sensational Siyuan Liu PhD who led this project, and all others from our lab who supported over the years since its inception : Bridget Mahony & @ethanwhitman777.bsky.social ...

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Armin Raznahan @bogglerapture.bsky.social · 28/05/2026

See paper for key contextual frames and caveats around sex/gender , static/dynamic & description/mechanism/meaning

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Armin Raznahan @bogglerapture.bsky.social · 28/05/2026

These findings inform longstanding debates re the nature and behavioral relevance of sex differences in human brain function — helping to shape our current understanding & future queries of sex as a neurobiological variable.

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Armin Raznahan @bogglerapture.bsky.social · 28/05/2026

So, sex differences in brain activation, anatomy, and behavior are detectible and reproducible — but they are largely orthogonal.

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Armin Raznahan @bogglerapture.bsky.social · 28/05/2026

Finally, we asked if individual differences in brain activation relate to individual diffs in behavior — and whether those brain–behavior relationships differ by sex. We found sig' activation–behavior associations, but these brain–behavior associations were broadly similar in males & females.

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Armin Raznahan @bogglerapture.bsky.social · 28/05/2026

This weak coupling was even seen between activation patterns from different tasks. So sex differences in brain activation are not one thing: they are strongly context-dependent and do not reduce to a single “male–female brain axis.”

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Armin Raznahan @bogglerapture.bsky.social · 28/05/2026

They mostly did not. Brain activation, brain volume, and behavior could each predict a person’s sex fairly well. But a person’s machine-learning-derived “sex typicality score” in one domain was only weakly correlated with their score in another.

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Armin Raznahan @bogglerapture.bsky.social · 28/05/2026

Next, we incorporated ~85 behavioral measures. Over 40% showed statistically significant sex differences, with absolute effect sizes ranging from small to large.

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Armin Raznahan @bogglerapture.bsky.social · 28/05/2026

We also found widespread sex differences in regional cortical volume. But these were largely unrelated to sex differences in cortical activation: the two maps were not spatially correlated, and where activation and volume differences co-occurred, their directions were largely independent.

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Armin Raznahan @bogglerapture.bsky.social · 28/05/2026

Using ~700 hours of fMRI data from ~1000 people across 7 tasks, we found that ~80% of cortical regions show task-specific sex differences in brain activation. These effects were small-to-moderate, reproducible in split halves, and enriched within canonical functional networks.

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Armin Raznahan @bogglerapture.bsky.social · 28/05/2026

Do humans show sex differences in brain activation? If so, are these task-specific or general — and do they relate to sex differences in brain anatomy and behavior? We dove deep into these questions in a new paper just out in Nature Communications | tinyurl.com/3rdrb524

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ΜΑΝΟΣ ΤΡΑΧΙΑΣ™ @trahias.bsky.social · 13/05/2026

Hasui Kawase (Japanese, 1883 - 1957) "Summer Afternoon at Shimohonda-Cho Kanazawa," 1921 Full color woodblock #art #painting #artist #BlueSkyArt

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Agnès Landemard @agnesland.bsky.social · 15/04/2026

How does blood flow relate to brain activity? We discovered that it reflects two neural populations affected oppositely by arousal. Together, they explain neurovascular coupling in all brain regions and brain states! Out today in Nature: rdcu.be/fdC2A @uclbrainscience.bsky.social

The supply of blood to brain tissue is thought to depend on the overall neural activity in that tissue, and this dependence is thought to differ across brain regions and across brain states. However, studies supporting these views have measured neural activity as a bulk quantity and related it to blood supply following disparate events in different regions. Here we measure fluctuations in neuronal activity and blood volume across the mouse brain, and find that their relationship is consistent across brain states and brain regions but differs in two opposing brainwide neural populations. Functional ultrasound imaging (fUSI) revealed that whisking, a marker of arousal, is associated with brainwide fluctuations in blood volume. Simultaneous fUSI and Neuropixels recordings showed that neurons that increase activity with whisking have distinct haemodynamic response functions compared with those that decrease activity. Their summed contributions predicted blood volume across states.Brainwide Neuropixels recordings revealed that these opposing populations coexist in the entire brain. Their differing contributions to blood volume largely explain the apparent differences in blood volume fluctuations across regions. The mouse brain thus contains two neural populations with opposite relations to brain state and distinct relationships to blood supply, which together account for brainwide fluctuations in blood volume.

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Arielle Keller @ariellekeller.bsky.social · 15/04/2026

Way to go @noemirubau.bsky.social and team! This study is going to yield such important and much-needed data! #neuroskyence #PsychSciSky #neuroimaging

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Chris Baker @cibaker.bsky.social · 06/04/2026

Happening Tuesday and Wednesday. Links for the online videocast can be found here: bit.ly/4bYlbxw

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In Otter News @in-otter-news.bsky.social · 15/03/2026

BREAKING NEWS: Otter receives some really good scritches.

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Max Elliott @maxwellelliott.bsky.social · 13/03/2026

Are you interested in detecting brain changes in individuals with higher precision over shorter intervals? Check out our new paper in Nature Communications. With Randy Buckner, @jingnandu.bsky.social, and others. Link - doi.org/10.1038/s414...

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Armin Raznahan @bogglerapture.bsky.social · 09/03/2026

🚨🚨New work just out by the truly stellar Will Snyder - revealing rare and common genetic influences on complexity of human cortical folding !! 🚨🚨 👀 Will’s thread ⬇️ for deets, and to follow on @willsnyder.bsky.social Huge congrats to Will & thnx to fabulous collaborators who made this possible.

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kelly @kickinson.bsky.social · 24/02/2026

my local park is full of hundreds of snow sculptures and someone has been adding museum labels

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womensartbluesky.bsky.social @womensartbluesky.bsky.social · 21/02/2026

Louise Moillon (c. 1610–1696) French painter in the Baroque era. One of the best still life painters of her time, she was trained by her father as she was unable to attend academies as a woman- who were thought to lack the ability required for artists #WomensArt

Painting featuring a basket of plumbs on a table surface in a dark interior

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ᴅʀ. ᴍᴏᴡɪɴᴄᴋᴇʟ'ꜱ @drmowinckels.io · 09/02/2026

The ggseg ecosystem finally has a proper home! 🧠 For those who don't know, ggseg is an R package ecosystem for visualizing brain atlas data. Think ggplot2, but for brains. #rstats #neuroimaging #openscience

Dark blue hexagon, with a light blue frame. Features a brain facing the left, with the front half as a wire-frame mesh of light blue, and the back half with several polygon segments of different colours. Below is written "ggseg" in light blue.

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Armin Raznahan @bogglerapture.bsky.social · 04/02/2026

Not sure if this is plot-driven enough for what you are after, but I’m currently reading The Book of Ebenezer Le Page and absolutely loving it! Something tells me you’d really like it (especially the world observations and humor) if not read already.

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ΜΑΝΟΣ ΤΡΑΧΙΑΣ™ @trahias.bsky.social · 03/02/2026

Frances Featherstone (British Artist, born 1976) "A Portal to another World", 2025. Oil on Canvas, 75 × 60 cm. Private Collection. #art #painting #artist #BlueSkyArt

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Thomas Nichols @nichols.bsky.social · 03/02/2026

Statistical Machine Learning post doc positions, w/ Oxford BDI-Novartis Collaboration for AI in Medicine, working on building causal predictive models for MS using a massive clinical trials MRI dataset. Join us on this unique collaboration! my.corehr.com/pls/uoxrecru... my.corehr.com/pls/uoxrecru...

my.corehr.com

Job Details

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Armin Raznahan @bogglerapture.bsky.social · 31/01/2026

… but the perfect year to start IV phenobarbital.

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womensartbluesky.bsky.social @womensartbluesky.bsky.social · 31/01/2026

Georgia O’Keeffe, Lake George Reflection, 1922 #Womensart

Painting with stylised lake side landscape in reds, blues and purples, with relection of hills in still water

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Armin Raznahan @bogglerapture.bsky.social · 31/01/2026

Thats the road you walked to get to your awesomeness now ! So plenty good has come already. :-)

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Armin Raznahan @bogglerapture.bsky.social · 23/01/2026

🤣👌🏽 It did make me wonder though whether you could get this consistency by active inference responding to some e.g. specific low-level V1/2 micro-circuit changes from the drug

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Kevin Mitchell @wiringthebrain.bsky.social · 15/01/2026

Paper accepted! 😊 "Reframing the Free Will Debate: The Universe is Not Deterministic" will appear in Synthese. Final version available here: arxiv.org/abs/2503.19672 - with Henry Potter and George Ellis

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Armin Raznahan @bogglerapture.bsky.social · 15/01/2026

Thanks. Would love to discuss it with you! Maybe we could have a chat once you’re back from the meeting ? Not quite as nice as in person after session, but still …

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Armin Raznahan @bogglerapture.bsky.social · 15/01/2026

Thanks so much @tollkuhn.bsky.social ! So wish i could have been there with you all as initially planned (pre travel-ban). Happy they get to hear all of your fab talks in person at least. 🤩

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Armin Raznahan @bogglerapture.bsky.social · 11/01/2026

So, gonadal type (testes vs. ovaries) and sex chromosome complement (XY vs. XX) represent two strong candidate drivers of phenotypic sex differences in mammals. But how well can these factors explain sex differences in the brain and how much does each contribute to a given difference? …

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Armin Raznahan @bogglerapture.bsky.social · 11/01/2026

How do gonads and sex chromosomes contribute to regional sex differences in the brain? 🤔 Our new preprint summarizes >5 years of work on this question, combining structural neuroimaging and snRNAseq within a sample of >850 mice. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Thread below …

biorxiv.org

Gonadal and sex chromosomal contributions to sex differences in mammalian brain organization

Sex differences in brain development may contribute to well-known sex differences in behavior and neuropsychiatric risk - making it important to comprehensively map and mechanistically annotate normat...

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Armin Raznahan @bogglerapture.bsky.social · 11/01/2026

Thanks so much! Hope you like it when you dig in. 🙏🏽

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Armin Raznahan @bogglerapture.bsky.social · 11/01/2026

Thanks, Kevin! We had a blast doing it.

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Armin Raznahan @bogglerapture.bsky.social · 11/01/2026

So sorry Becca. It sucks. Im right there not-ACNPing with you (except due to DHHS ban last week on ACNP travel for NIH IRP folks)

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Armin Raznahan @bogglerapture.bsky.social · 11/01/2026

Fin (phew!). Would love to know what you all think …

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Armin Raznahan @bogglerapture.bsky.social · 11/01/2026

5. Finally, this project touches on the controversial topic of sex differences in the brain. Although we do this in mice, our shared biology makes the findings relevant to humans – where we can’t forget the entwining of sex and gender, and the wonderful diversity that comes from that ...

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