iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Natalie Schaworonkow @nschawor.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

it was planned, but we failed to recruit enough cross-species beta speakers... but the cross-species format was definitely useful, I would say

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Reposted by Natalie Schaworonkow

Dennis Nestvogel @neuralnestbird.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

On my way to Frankfurt for this year’s #BernsteinConference! 🚆✨ Especially excited to dive into this workshop on neural signatures — looking forward to insightful, fun discussions and connecting with awesome folks in neuroscience! 💡🧠🤓 #Neuroscience #BrainScience

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Natalie Schaworonkow @nschawor.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

yes, we hope to discuss differential/similar task modulation. but I think there is no one presenting the same task + the same analysis across species, like in your 2021 Translational Psychiatry article, so one has to be careful with the specifics.

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Natalie Schaworonkow @nschawor.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

(slowly reintegrating back into normal life after a looong summer break. 🙂)

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Natalie Schaworonkow @nschawor.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

currently preparing for a Bernstein pre-conference workshop that I co-organized with @neuralnestbird.bsky.social. we will be looking at different electrophysiological signatures (= 〰️〰️〰️) across species. come by and say hi if you are there. 🙂 bernstein-network.de/bernstein-co...

Bernstein Workshop 2026
Bridging the species divide:   comparative approaches to study neural signatures

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Reposted by Natalie Schaworonkow

Melek Öyküm Yalçın @melekyalcin.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

together with @AnyaDietrich and a great team, we're organizing the Frankfurt hub of this year's 🌱CuttingGardens🌱, a distributed conference on cutting-edge methods for M/EEG data analysis, hosted by CoBIC! Sept 21–25, 2026🧵

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Natalie Schaworonkow @nschawor.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

back in the MEG after a break, doing the very last measurements. 🌟 surrounded by retrofuturistic objects, e.g., the MEG phantom: in the usual physics fashion, the human head is approximated by a water-filled sphere. electric fields can be generated inside the sphere to test source localization.

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Natalie Schaworonkow @nschawor.bsky.social · 30/06/2026

I think all the fMRI ones I know are in that list (with fmri tag), but happy to add more!

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Natalie Schaworonkow @nschawor.bsky.social · 19/06/2026

old school cool figure: Georgopoulous et al. (1988), example of population coding of movement direction. (or a retro space simulator? 🙃)

Figure 1: An example of population coding of movement direction. The blue lines represent the vectorial contributions of individual cells in the population (N = 475). The movement direction is in yellow and the direction of the population vector in red.

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Reposted by Natalie Schaworonkow

feed-discovery.bsky.social @feed-discovery.bsky.social · 12/06/2026

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ ⬆ brain rhythms ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ Subscribe: bsky.app/profile/did:plc:yy2mduwa64…

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Natalie Schaworonkow @nschawor.bsky.social · 08/05/2026

thanks for the clarification regarding the single trials! I think the sentence 'we applied a first-order Butterworth filter to the _average ERP_' was where my previous understanding came from. looking forward to learn more eventually. 🙂 (this overly specific bot reply to my previous post: creepy 😨)

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Natalie Schaworonkow @nschawor.bsky.social · 07/05/2026

🙂 I have some more complex feelings about the book price, but at least it's _relatively_ cheap. 😅

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Natalie Schaworonkow @nschawor.bsky.social · 07/05/2026

sometimes I am asked which is the best book/resource for starting out with EEG/MEG. I think my pick would be this one! 'MEG-EEG primer' academic.oup.com/book/46874 beautiful illustrations throughout & the side-by-side discussion of EEG & MEG makes a lot of sense.

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Natalie Schaworonkow @nschawor.bsky.social · 07/05/2026

thank you for the replies! I think I need make some simulations to wrap my head around this, there is definitely some complexity. 🙂 I am not sure if alpha measures (here = bandpass ERP) capture ongoing oscillations, maybe it's more ERP dynamics on a 100 ms timescale, so more ERP analysis is great!

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Natalie Schaworonkow @nschawor.bsky.social · 07/05/2026

very cool & the 'tentative yes' for planning also sounds great! 🙂

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Natalie Schaworonkow @nschawor.bsky.social · 07/05/2026

throwback to naive me accepting a PhD position after a 20 minute chat. 😅 (it worked out, but I only realize now how lucky I was back then.)

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Natalie Schaworonkow @nschawor.bsky.social · 07/05/2026

I would say any respectable lab website should have an alumni section 🙂 (e.g. here is our beautiful one: poeppel-lab.github.io/alumni/) otherwise it's a co-author search, but I guess this way would be less familiar to students, I hope that's explained somewhere in the 'how to phd' resources.

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Natalie Schaworonkow @nschawor.bsky.social · 06/05/2026

interesting! how do you think this inter-electrode correlations relate to more typical EEG measures? or to multivariate decoding with raw traces? I think this is the first time I see this in the EEG context, so I would be curious to understand more about these. 🙂

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Natalie Schaworonkow @nschawor.bsky.social · 06/05/2026

@ lists: a while ago, a red flag advisor list circulated among chinese computer science PhD students in the form of a doc+site: github.com/the-hidden-f... which was interesting to look at from a science sociology perspective, but I am not quite sure it caused more chaos than good. 🤷

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Natalie Schaworonkow @nschawor.bsky.social · 06/05/2026

I think one can only urge people to interview current and former trainees before committing to a new position. I don't think one even considers what challenges can arise as a person starting out in science & why this is useful. if a PI declines to establish contacts here, it's def a bad sign.

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Natalie Schaworonkow @nschawor.bsky.social · 04/05/2026

weekend project: built an LED action potential 💡

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Natalie Schaworonkow @nschawor.bsky.social · 28/04/2026

yeah, regression based was definitely used before, but somehow ICA won as the standard way to do this. 🙂

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Natalie Schaworonkow @nschawor.bsky.social · 28/04/2026

with electrodes placed around ears like this, you can definitely see basic effects, like alpha rhythms & auditory oddball evoked responses. (figure from: www.frontiersin.org/journals/hum... ) but for the headphones, electrodes seem to be on top of the ears? not super sure about that configuration 🤔

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Natalie Schaworonkow @nschawor.bsky.social · 28/04/2026

I think there is no theoretical problem with a regression based approach. it's more a matter of how many ECG electrodes one needs to do with accuracy, as the heart is a rotating dipole. also there would be a time-dependent lead field, as the torso compresses and expands with breathing. so tricky...

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Natalie Schaworonkow @nschawor.bsky.social · 24/04/2026

Friday @ MEG lab diary entry: new high score in this head position deviation game, <0.8mm ➡️ a good day! 🟢🌟🟢

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Natalie Schaworonkow @nschawor.bsky.social · 24/04/2026

very useful to see work in this direction, trying to figure out the cellular contributions to 1/f-activity. at the moment, it's sometimes frustrating to read studies in the vein of: 'we found differences in this 1 number and it means this 1 thing', there's not enough evidence for that. 🙃

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Natalie Schaworonkow @nschawor.bsky.social · 23/04/2026

I am not an expert here, but @willenjoy.bsky.social & @paulsteinfath.bsky.social have read all the HEP papers, maybe they have good thoughts? 🙂

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Natalie Schaworonkow @nschawor.bsky.social · 23/04/2026

I mean, of course there are heartbeat evoked potentials, but I think they are some magnitudes smaller in amplitude. 🙂

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Natalie Schaworonkow @nschawor.bsky.social · 23/04/2026

from my understanding: pretty much only artifact. in non-invasive EEG it's very localized, only on 1 channel = unlikely to be of neural origin (more spatial spread otherwise). here, the signal also only appears on 1 electrode. electrodes are far apart, difficult say something about vessel-closeness.

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Natalie Schaworonkow @nschawor.bsky.social · 23/04/2026

intracranial EEG artifact: if an electrode is located over a blood vessel, you can occasionally see some nice rhythms. sadly, these are not neural rhythms, but reflect the pulsation of the blood vessel, which moves the electrode around slightly. can also be seen in non-invasive EEG occasionally.

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Natalie Schaworonkow @nschawor.bsky.social · 22/04/2026

definitely agree with you on the ASAP! we need community standards fast, given the usage by PhD students who are under pressure to obtains results quickly, but have limited domain knowledge to even evaluate the AI outputs => occasionally feels like watching a car crash in slow motion... 😶‍🌫️

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Natalie Schaworonkow @nschawor.bsky.social · 21/04/2026

we have a themed bathroom on the ground floor of the institute 🙂 (designed by our fantastic graphic designer Claudia Kernberger)

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Natalie Schaworonkow @nschawor.bsky.social · 21/04/2026

Really happy for my awesome colleague Jiajie Zou! He is now leaving us for a postdoc at the MPI for Biological Cybernetics. Tübingen folks, please give him a warm welcome, aka invites for talks and such. 🙂

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Natalie Schaworonkow @nschawor.bsky.social · 18/04/2026

we record at 12 kHz to look at some fast responses. it just that the files become large and annoying to handle & for things that people usually are interested in, a much lower rate is sufficient, as you said. 🙂

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Natalie Schaworonkow @nschawor.bsky.social · 17/04/2026

Mon-Thu: reformat figure legends for the 17th time and other equally exciting tasks, mild questioning of life choices. Friday!: look at the brain in real time! 🤩🙂

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Natalie Schaworonkow @nschawor.bsky.social · 16/04/2026

the median number of authors on a research paper who are familiar with the underlying code: 1 it generally feels like that number will decrease even further, honestly a quite scary development. 😕⬇️

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Natalie Schaworonkow @nschawor.bsky.social · 15/04/2026

very surprised to learn this, don't the editors know you exist given that you are a former editor? (I get like at least 5 requests per month and assumed it would be similar for other people)

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Natalie Schaworonkow @nschawor.bsky.social · 15/04/2026

"delta" activity across species 🙃

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Natalie Schaworonkow @nschawor.bsky.social · 13/04/2026

wrestling with the bureaucracy is an art in itself, but sometimes there are creative ways, or they can be created. continue the advocacy, if it comes from male established professors (the more grey hairs the better), the chances of success are increased. 🙂

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Natalie Schaworonkow @nschawor.bsky.social · 13/04/2026

time extensions (contracts & grants): great, but if they are not applied automatically, it leaves you at the mercy of bureaucrats & PIs. small grants for travel & etc: great, but why do organizers & agencies need like 10 documents & 2 rec letters for such limited $ amounts?

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Natalie Schaworonkow @nschawor.bsky.social · 13/04/2026

core requirements as always: time & money. e.g.: UCSD childcare $2,6k per month = over 50% of postdoc salary (& long waitlist also). I talked to a research director who felt it was out of scope for him to be concerned with that. but maybe these 'fringe topics' should be more front & center.

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Natalie Schaworonkow @nschawor.bsky.social · 13/04/2026

I agree, the responsibility for structural problems is shifted to the individual. I am sure the article is well-intentioned, but the advice here is very supergeneric (plan & communicate), which probably reflects the fact that there is not much room for what you can do as an individual.

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Natalie Schaworonkow @nschawor.bsky.social · 12/04/2026

beautiful race! & such a well-deserved win 🙂

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Natalie Schaworonkow @nschawor.bsky.social · 10/04/2026

👍 but I am not complaining, other than that the data in Frankfurt is really nice! (compared to the artefacts in NYU data, which are 1 hot mess)

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Natalie Schaworonkow @nschawor.bsky.social · 10/04/2026

but please still do setup the camera!!

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Natalie Schaworonkow @nschawor.bsky.social · 10/04/2026

sometimes I feel 50% of my posts are just advertising for SSD/GED type methods, it's really super powerful. 🙂

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