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Tom Donoghue

@tomdonoghue.bsky.social
1K followers 594 following 96 posts

🇨🇦 in 🇬🇧. Cognitive & Computational Neuro Scientist - studying electrophysiological signals in human brains, mostly by writing Python code. Lecturer of Cognitive Neuroscience @ University of Manchester. tomdonoghue.github.io

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Reposted by Tom Donoghue
David Ho @davidho.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
I don’t think everyone realizes how bad things are for US science: For the fiscal year that just ended, the Trump regime withheld $1.4 billion from the National Science Foundation’s research budget, which is about 1/5 of its primary research budget.
nytimes.com
National Science Foundation Diverted $1.4 Billion in Science Funds Mandated by Congress (Gift Article)
The move, affecting about one-fifth of the National Science Foundation’s primary research budget, is the latest sign of how the White House is asserting more control over grants.
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Sydney E. Smith @syd-smith.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Happy to share the final project from my PhD: "Simulated field potentials capture multiple simultaneous processes underlying human temporal attention," now a preprint on bioRxiv. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
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Tom Donoghue @tomdonoghue.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
I'm enjoying this Manchester theaters age recommendation for Jersey Boys, who seem to have decided to update from a more typical "contains coarse language" to the arguably overly broad 'the sounds of a New Jersey character may simply be too intense for any delicate young ears!'
Image of text which reads: Age guidance: 12+, parental guidance advised. Jersey Boys contains genuine New Jersey language which may not be suitable for younger audiences. Under 16s must be accompanied by an adult (18+). Please see terms and conditions.
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Darya Frank @darya-frank.bsky.social · 14/07/2026
🧠 New opportunity for a combined PhD+Graduate Teaching Assistant position, see especially @tomdonoghue.bsky.social's and mine project on spectral parameterization models across cognitive contexts: www.jobs.manchester.ac.uk/Job/JobDetai...
jobs.manchester.ac.uk
Graduate Teaching Assistant:Oxford Road
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Tom Donoghue @tomdonoghue.bsky.social · 17/07/2026
Update: I just got into NYC for a visit back here, and jokes on me I guess, as I would now gladly take the Manchester level of smokey-air over the current version of the North East's version...
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Tom Donoghue @tomdonoghue.bsky.social · 13/07/2026
The last three places I've lived (San Diego, New York City, and now Manchester) have all had days that go "Surprise! What looked like a bit of cloud is actually wildfire smoke!", and hot take perhaps (literally, if not figuratively), but I am not a fan. Or I need a fan. With a filter. Not that kind.
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Roxana Zeraati @roxana-zeraati.bsky.social · 07/07/2026
Our paper "Neural timescales from a computational perspective" is finally out in @natneuro.nature.com: www.nature.com/articles/s41... We discuss how computational models and methods can distill empirical observations on neural timescales into quantitative, testable theories of brain computation.
nature.com
Neural timescales from a computational perspective - Nature Neuroscience
This review integrates computational approaches to provide a unified view on how data analysis methods, biophysical mechanistic models and machine learning approaches can help to uncover the origins a...
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Michael Okun @michael-okun.bsky.social · 10/06/2026
I’ve officially resigned as Associate Editor for Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience. It used to be a reputable journal, but became a case study in how forced automation destroys academic integrity. 👇
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Angela Radulescu @angelaradulescu.bsky.social · 01/06/2026
In 2011, my interests in cognitive neuroscience converged on one stubborn intuition: it made no sense that how the brain learns and how it pays attention should be two fundamentally different processes.
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Tom Donoghue @tomdonoghue.bsky.social · 21/05/2026
Fun discovery from the old EEG literature - the first proposal to call slow waves "delta" was a suggestion to use this name as a useful brief description "until their true nature be discovered" (in 1936). Oops - guess we're still working that one, new name coming any day now 😅
Screenshot from a paper, with highlighted text that reads: "It is suggested that for the sake of brevity these slow waves from the neighbourhood of tumours be called "delta waves" until their true nature be discovered."
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Tom Donoghue @tomdonoghue.bsky.social · 11/05/2026
Delighted to share our new publication in @apertureohbm.bsky.social - the "Human Single-Neuron Pipeline" for managing human single-neuron research projects! It's an open-source resource of new & existing tools & resources curated for HSN projects: hsnpipeline.github.io
hsnpipeline.github.io
HSNPipeline
A pipeline for processing and analyzing human single-neuron data.
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Tom Donoghue @tomdonoghue.bsky.social · 27/04/2026
In early observations of REM sleep in EEG they thought the change in pattern was a technical issue and "fixed it" by taping the amplifier, waking the person up! Such an interesting anecdote of how wild it must of been to get started with EEG, with so little prior knowledge / expectations!
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Randolph Helfrich @randolph-helfrich.bsky.social · 20/04/2026
Does aperiodic activity index neural excitability? Single-unit and LFP recordings during optogenetic interneuron suppression show that aperiodic activity scales with firing, but it depends on context and oscillatory power. New preprint with @juliaveit.bsky.social. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
biorxiv.org
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Tom Donoghue @tomdonoghue.bsky.social · 07/04/2026
TIL that Gibbs & Grass, who first applied Fourier transforms to EEG recordings, then spent several years examining over 1700 EEG recordings (!!) and concluded that frequency analyses are no good for clinical recordings 😅 Their paper on this is worth a read: www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1...
A screenshot of a section of the paper, reading "although frequency analysis has advantages for revealing certain general features of the EEG, it is not satisfactory for clinical reasons"
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John Tuthill @tuthill.bsky.social · 24/03/2026
🧵 New preprint led by @bingbrunton.bsky.social, @elliottabe.bsky.social, @lawrencehu.bsky.social We gave a worm brain control of a fly body and it walked What did we learn? Nothing, other than deep reinforcement learning is effective We call it the digital sphinx www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
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Brian Merchant @bcmerchant.bsky.social · 17/03/2026
Three years into the AI era, educators say they face a major crisis. Bosses and clients replacing tutoring jobs with AI. Replacing *athletic coaching* with AI. Many students now cannot grasp why they would *not* use AI for schoolwork. And worse. The 5th installment of AI Killed My Job—educators:
bloodinthemachine.com
"If AI is writing the work and AI is reading the work, do we even need to be there at all?" Education workers reveal a growing crisis on campus and off
AI Killed My Job: Educators.
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Iris van Rooij 💭 @irisvanrooij.bsky.social · 15/02/2026
📚 Reading Women in Cognitive Science 📚 “Recommendations for readings are welcome, especially in the history of cognitive science (prior to 1950s, and the older the better).” irisvanrooijcogsci.com/2026/02/15/%...
irisvanrooijcogsci.com
📚 Reading Women in Cognitive Science 📚
Occasionally, I make threads on social media about papers and books that I read. It helps me focus and process deeper when I share highlights and thoughts with others. In this blogpost, I compile a…
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Nicholas Grossman @nicholasgrossman.bsky.social · 09/02/2026
“Collection of Handwritten Letters from Children in Detention Center” sounds like an exhibit in the Holocaust Museum.
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Colin Carlson @colincarlson.bsky.social · 27/01/2026
If I know you use this I will literally never cite your work again, because there is literally no way to trust it or you
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Randolph Helfrich @randolph-helfrich.bsky.social · 21/01/2026
Ripple oscillations are central for memory and sleep. But ripple detection in humans remains challenging. Here we introduce a simulation approach in @natcomms.nature.com as common ripple detectors mainly pick up 1/f noise and not genuine oscillations 👇 www.nature.com/articles/s41... #neuroskyence
nature.com
Aperiodic 1/f noise drives ripple activity in humans - Nature Communications
How aperiodic 1/f noise drives ripple activity in human brain and impacts on ripple detections is not fully understood. Here authors show that ripple detections should be driven by the 1/f noise, whic...
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Vicente Medel @medelero.bsky.social · 14/01/2026
Had a blast hosting @tomdonoghue.bsky.social at our lab in Santiago. We went full aperiodic mode, with @gnboncompte.bsky.social . Very cool collab ideas!! Thanks Tom!!
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Randolph Helfrich @randolph-helfrich.bsky.social · 15/12/2025
Aperiodic activity reflects pathological waveforms in epilepsy (and not necessarily hyper-excitability or altered E/I-balance). The 1/f slope goes up *or* down as function of waveforms during seizures. New work by Laura Heidiri and Frank van Schalkwijk from the lab: www.jneurosci.org/content/45/5...
jneurosci.org
Aperiodic Activity Reflects Pathologic Waveform Shapes in Focal Epilepsy
Epilepsy constitutes a clinically manifest excitability disorder that is characterized by aberrant electrophysiological activity in the electroencephalogram (EEG). The correct identification of the se...
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Alexandra Keinath @atkeinath.bsky.social · 08/12/2025
Another new paper from the lab: Predictive theories like the SR imply that navigators who navigate differently should have cognitive maps which differ in predictable ways. Here we show that this holds in mouse hippocampal CA1. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
sciencedirect.com
Environmental representations in mouse hippocampal CA1 reflect the predictive structure of navigation
Predictive theories of cognitive mapping propose that these representations encode the predictive relationships among contents as experienced by the n…
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Richard Gao @rdgao.bsky.social · 03/12/2025
Finally got the job ad—looking for 2 PhD students to start spring next year: www.gao-unit.com/join-us/ If comp neuro, ML, and AI4Neuro is your thing, or you just nerd out over brain recordings, apply! I'm at neurips. DM me here / on the conference app or email if you want to meet 🏖️🌮
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Tom Donoghue @tomdonoghue.bsky.social · 20/11/2025
📜🎉 Our project on aperiodic neural activity during sleep, led by the wonderful @mosameen.bsky.social, is now published! This project shows how time-resolved measures of aperiodic neural activity track changes of sleep stages + lots of other analyses in iEEG & EEG! www.nature.com/articles/s44...
nature.com
Temporally resolved analyses of aperiodic features track neural dynamics during sleep - Communications Psychology
Sleep involves dynamic changes in brain activity that unfold over time, reflected in the brain’s aperiodic EEG patterns. Incorporating the spectral ‘knee’—a bend in the EEG power spectrum—reveals stag...
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Tom Donoghue @tomdonoghue.bsky.social · 10/11/2025
I'm blown away to see our 2020 spectral parameterization (fooof) paper is the 2nd most cited neuroscience paper of 2020 🤯 What an adventure it's been - now ~10 years on & ~8500 km from where I first started on the project, and still enthralled by the work! www.thetransmitter.org/publishing/w...
thetransmitter.org
What are the most-cited neuroscience papers from the past 30 years?
Highly cited papers reflect the surge in artificial-intelligence research in the field and other technical advances, plus prizewinning work on analgesics, the fusiform face area and ion channels.
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Darya Frank @darya-frank.bsky.social · 16/10/2025
📣 🧠 We have a new PhD studentship at @fbmh-uom.bsky.social with Caroline Lea-Carnall & @tomdonoghue.bsky.social: Dopamine, brain networks & plasticity research. Computational modelling + multimodal neuroimaging: tinyurl.com/yr58xj8v Application deadline Nov 15th!
tinyurl.com
(Bicentenary) Modelling the effects of dopaminergic neuromodulation on brain state and function at The University of Manchester on FindAPhD.com
PhD Project - (Bicentenary) Modelling the effects of dopaminergic neuromodulation on brain state and function at The University of Manchester, listed on FindAPhD.com
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Tom Donoghue @tomdonoghue.bsky.social · 13/10/2025
📜🎉 I'm happy to share that my review of clinical research investigating aperiodic neural activity is now published! It examines 177 reports of aperiodic activity in clinical disorders summarizing findings, discussion topics, & making some recommendations! onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
A Systematic Review of Aperiodic Neural Activity in Clinical Investigations
This systematic literature review examines aperiodic neural activity in clinical disorders, summarizing current findings and discussion topics. One-hundred seventy-seven reports from across 38 distin...
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Tom Donoghue @tomdonoghue.bsky.social · 07/10/2025
📜 New preprint led by the wonderful Weijia Zhang on place cells: specifically if & how different methodological approaches used across human & rodent datasets may relate to differences in identified populations and implications for cross-species spatial cognition! Check it out here:
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Richard Gao @rdgao.bsky.social · 23/09/2025
I've been waiting some years to make this joke and now it’s real: I conned somebody into giving me a faculty job! I’m starting as a W1 Tenure-Track Professor at Goethe University Frankfurt in a week (lol), in the Faculty of CS and Math and I'm recruiting PhD students 🤗
media.tenor.com
a man wearing a white shirt and tie smiles in front of a window
ALT: a man wearing a white shirt and tie smiles in front of a window
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Colin Carlson @colincarlson.bsky.social · 17/09/2025
🚨 NEW: Climate change is already causing 30,000 deaths per year - a global annual economic loss of $100-350B USD - but the true damage is probably 10x higher. Out TODAY in Nature Climate Change: the first systematic look at the science of "health impact attribution" 🔓 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
"Health losses attributed to anthropogenic climate change," a brief communication in the journal Nature Climate Change. There's a map showing regions of the world, and pie charts of relevant studies as they apply to different health impacts like "heat-related deaths" and "maternal and child health"
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The Guardian @theguardian.com · 08/09/2025
Mahmoud Khalil on exile, liberation and Ice detention: ‘It was a clear act of cruelty’
theguardian.com
Mahmoud Khalil on exile, liberation and Ice detention: ‘It was a clear act of cruelty’
His grandparents survived the Nakba and he fled Assad’s Syria. Khalil is no stranger to political persecution, but not even Trump’s crackdown can silence him
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Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · 06/09/2025
Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia: doi.org/10.5281/zeno... We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity. 1/n
Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or
even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in
the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or
apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we
are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not
considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This
is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse
and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece,
we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology
industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to
relevant work to further inform our colleagues.Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI
(black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are
in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are
both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and
Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf.
Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al.
2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms
are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles
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Tom Donoghue @tomdonoghue.bsky.social · 01/09/2025
📜 I've updated my perspective piece covering a brief history of the study of aperiodic neural activity - adding a bit more work and adding an update of what I think this history suggests for future research. Preprint available on psyrxiv here: osf.io/preprints/ps...
osf.io
OSF
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The Transmitter @thetransmitter.bsky.social · 01/09/2025
Neurociencias Para Todos brings neuroscience education to remote communities in Mexico. @analog-ashley.bsky.social‬ talked with founder Monica López-Hidalgo about the program’s efforts and the importance of making neuroscience accessible to all. www.thetransmitter.org/community/br...
thetransmitter.org
Bringing neuroscience to rural Mexico
Monica López-Hidalgo’s outreach program, Neurociencias Para Todos, gives schoolteachers tools to bring neuroscience to their communities.
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Dan Nexon @dhnexon.net · 30/08/2025
🧵 Authoritarianism, Democratization, and Coalition Politics. The consensus around here is, more or less, that the United States is currently a consolidating authoritarian regime controlled by a mix of reactionary populists and fascists.
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Tom Donoghue @tomdonoghue.bsky.social · 25/08/2025
Apparently in (Northern?) England it's common to name fast food places by putting "{American place name} Fried Chicken". Just today I've walked past places called {Atlanta, Arizona, California, Georgia, Orlando, Michigan, Virginia} Fried Chicken - and my personal favourite: "Toronto Fried Chicken"
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Colin Carlson @colincarlson.bsky.social · 23/08/2025
I’m sorry but the “should scientists be activists” train left the station for the last time when we started spending billions to build concentration camps. I feel like you guys are engaging with the science stuff as though the camps thing is like, happening on a different TV show
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Tom Donoghue @tomdonoghue.bsky.social · 21/08/2025
I've updated my literature review of studies of aperiodic neural activity in clinical disorders, adding ~30 papers, taking it to 177 reports across 38 disorders! It's got a review of results so far, discussion of themes & issues, & recommendations for future work! www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...
medrxiv.org
A systematic review of aperiodic neural activity in clinical investigations
Aperiodic neural activity - activity with no characteristic frequency - has increasingly become a common feature of study, including in clinical work. Reports investigating aperiodic activity from pat...
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Berna Devezer @devezer.bsky.social · 20/08/2025
At this point, I am ready to become a dedicated patron to brands and businesses that have a principled stand against pushing AI as part of their offerings and vocally commit to smooth, lean/unbloated, pleasant basic customer experience.
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Emily P Stephen @emilypstephen.bsky.social · 19/08/2025
We have an opening for a post doc to help us quantify neurovascular coupling with simultaneous EEG/fNIRS data -- spread the word! With David Boas and Mike Esterman
mathjobs.org
MathJobs from the the American Mathematical Society
Mathjobs is an automated job application system sponsored by the AMS.
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Neurodata Without Borders @nwb.org · 18/08/2025
NWB just turned 10 years old! Researchers worldwide have downloaded 1.9 PB of NWB data from @dandiarchive.org. This animation shows the reach of NWB, facilitating collaboration across the globe. What impact has open neurophysiology data had on your science? Share your stories! 🧠 @openscience
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Tom Donoghue @tomdonoghue.bsky.social · 14/08/2025
Seems as good a time as any to re-share the "OpenLists" collection - an openly accessible set of lists of available resources in / for Cognitive Neuroscience! Includes open M/EEG & iEEG datasets & open software / analysis tools, and resources for DSP, Python, git, etc: openlists.github.io
openlists.github.io
OpenLists
Curated lists of Open Resources.
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Tim Guth @timaguth.bsky.social · 11/08/2025
Excited to share our new paper on theta-phase locking of single neurons during human spatial memory: www.nature.com/articles/s41... With @lukaskunz.bsky.social, Joshua Jacobs, and our colleagues from the University of Freiburg
Neuronal theta-phase locking increased during periods of elevated theta power, when aperiodic activity exhibited steeper slopes, and when clear theta oscillations were detected. Theta-phase locking was similarly strong during the successful and unsuccessful encoding and retrieval of memories. Some neurons changed their preferred theta phases between encoding and retrieval.
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Tom Donoghue @tomdonoghue.bsky.social · 08/08/2025
Manchester observations so far part 2: - “Hiya” - Zero based indexing for building floors - Meal deal supremacy - Triple checking every crossing for whichever side cars are on - For real though, why is half of every store pre-packed sandwiches - Surprise: tram on the road! No, the other side
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Tom Donoghue @tomdonoghue.bsky.social · 04/08/2025
I have now started at the University of Manchester as a lecturer (equivalent to assistant professor)! I’m looking forward to getting to know everyone here and getting started on the next phase of my research!
An image of the arch with the ‘University of Manchester’ sign
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Iris van Rooij 💭 @irisvanrooij.bsky.social · 28/07/2025
Sad to hear that Margaret Boden, pioneer in cognitive science and artificial intelligence, has passed away. Just a few days ago, someone reactivated the post below. I warmly recommend watching the video. Thank you Margaret for founding and shaping our field. www.sussex.ac.uk/broadcast/re...
sussex.ac.uk
Obituary: Professor Maggie Boden
The University of Sussex mourns the loss of Professor Margaret (Maggie) Boden, a pioneering figure in cognitive science and artificial intelligence.
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The Guardian @theguardian.com · 28/07/2025
Israel committing genocide in Gaza, say Israel-based human rights groups
theguardian.com
Israel committing genocide in Gaza, say Israel-based human rights groups
Reports detailing killing of children and elderly, forced displacement and starvation likely to add to pressure for action * Middle East crisis – live updates Two leading human rights organisations based in Israel, B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights, say Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza and the country’s western allies have a legal and moral duty to stop it. In reports published on Monday, the two groups said Israel had targeted civilians in Gaza only because of their identity as Palestinians over nearly two years of war, causing severe and in some cases irreparable damage to Palestinian society. Continue reading...
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Tom Donoghue @tomdonoghue.bsky.social · 26/07/2025
Miscellaneous notes from 2 days in Manchester so far: - friendly strangers - unrefrigerated eggs - kettles are so fast - fairy liquid - finding the pedestrian crossing light - "please place your item in the bagging area" - buying deodorant without having to break it out of pharmacy jail first
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