Simon Faghel-Soubeyrand
banner
simonfsoubeyrand.bsky.social
Simon Faghel-Soubeyrand
@simonfsoubeyrand.bsky.social
Oxford Postodoctoral Researcher, Staresina Lab || Banting Postdoctoral Fellow || vision, memory, sleep, machine learning
Pinned
Preprint alert! 🚨
1/ How does deep sleep reshape our memories? Our new study shows that slow-wave sleep (SWS) reorganises episodic memory networks, shifting recall from the parietal cortex to the anterior temporal lobe (ATL). With Polina Perzich and @bstaresina.bsky.social . A thread below👇
Slow wave sleep supports the reorganisation of episodic memory networks https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.03.24.644966v1
Reposted by Simon Faghel-Soubeyrand
Our "mind captioning" paper is now published in Science Advances @science.org .
The method generates descriptive text of what we perceive and recall from brain activity — a linguistic interpretation of nonverbal mental content rather than language decoding.

doi.org/10.1126/scia...
Mind captioning: Evolving descriptive text of mental content from human brain activity
Nonverbal thoughts can be translated into verbal descriptions by aligning semantic representations between text and the brain.
doi.org
November 6, 2025 at 2:45 AM
Reposted by Simon Faghel-Soubeyrand
My Lab @unlv.edu is recruiting motivated students interested in human memory and brain research! Learn #EEG, #fMRI, and data analysis while exploring how we remember 🧠
📧 DM me or check out #PhD program www.unlv.edu/degree/phd-n... & www.unlv.edu/psychology/g...
Plus, Vegas is a fun place to live!🤟
Doctor of Philosophy - Neuroscience
This interdisciplinary Ph.D. program provides coursework and research training in neuroscience, with research mentoring spanning a range of different dimensions (basic to applied/clinical neuroscience...
www.unlv.edu
November 5, 2025 at 7:58 PM
Reposted by Simon Faghel-Soubeyrand
I wrote a thing on episodic memory and systems consolidation. I hope you all enjoy it and/or find it interesting.

A neural state space for episodic memories

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

#neuroskyence #psychscisky #cognition 🧪
A neural state space for episodic memories
Episodic memories are highly dynamic and change in nonlinear ways over time. This dynamism is not captured by existing systems consolidation theories …
www.sciencedirect.com
November 3, 2025 at 12:56 PM
Reposted by Simon Faghel-Soubeyrand
Introducing CorText: a framework that fuses brain data directly into a large language model, allowing for interactive neural readout using natural language.

tl;dr: you can now chat with a brain scan 🧠💬

1/n
November 3, 2025 at 3:17 PM
Reposted by Simon Faghel-Soubeyrand
A nice shift in perceived colour between central and peripheral vision. The fixated disc looks purple while the others look blue.

The effect presumably comes from the absence of S-cones in the fovea.

From Hinnerk Schulz-Hildebrandt:
arxiv.org/pdf/2509.115...
September 24, 2025 at 12:04 PM
Reposted by Simon Faghel-Soubeyrand
🚨Preprint: Semantic Tuning of Single Neurons in the Human Medial Temporal Lobe

1/8: How do human neurons encode meaning?
In this work, led by Katharina Karkowski, we recorded hundreds of human MTL neurons to study semantic coding in the human brain:

doi.org/10.1101/2025...
Semantic Tuning of Single Neurons in the Human Medial Temporal Lobe
The Medial Temporal Lobe (MTL) is key to human cognition, supporting memory, emotional processing, navigation, and semantic coding. Rare direct human MTL recordings revealed concept cells, which were ...
doi.org
October 27, 2025 at 3:32 PM
Reposted by Simon Faghel-Soubeyrand
How well do classifiers trained on visual activity actually transfer to non-visual reactivation?

#Decoding studies often rely on training in one (visual) condition and applying it to another (e.g. rest-reactivation). However: How well does this work? Show us what makes it work and win up to 1000$!
IMAGINE-decoding-challenge
Predict which words participants were hearing, based upon brain activity recordings of visually seeing these items?
www.kaggle.com
October 24, 2025 at 6:55 AM
Reposted by Simon Faghel-Soubeyrand
@dotproduct.bsky.social's first first author paper is finally out in @sfnjournals.bsky.social! Her findings show that content-specific predictions fluctuate with alpha frequencies, suggesting a more specific role for alpha oscillations than we may have thought. With @jhaarsma.bsky.social. 🧠🟦 🧠🤖
Contents of visual predictions oscillate at alpha frequencies
Predictions of future events have a major impact on how we process sensory signals. However, it remains unclear how the brain keeps predictions online in anticipation of future inputs. Here, we combin...
www.jneurosci.org
October 21, 2025 at 11:05 AM
Reposted by Simon Faghel-Soubeyrand
What do we talk about when we talk about "readout"?

I argued that our overly specialized, modular approach to studying the brain has given us a simplistic view of readout.

🧠📈
October 13, 2025 at 3:15 PM
Reposted by Simon Faghel-Soubeyrand
Why do we remember emotional events so vividly? Our new paper @nathumbehav.nature.com suggests that emotional arousal enhances memory by strengthening integration across large-scale brain networks! Led by the amazing @jadynpark.bsky.social & @ycleong.bsky.social! doi.org/10.1038/s415...
Out now in @nathumbehav.nature.com! We applied graph theoretic analyses to fMRI data of participants watching movies/listening to stories. Integration across large-scale functional networks mediates arousal-dependent enhancement of narrative memories. Open access link: rdcu.be/eKKAw
October 13, 2025 at 6:33 PM
Reposted by Simon Faghel-Soubeyrand
A memory can be represented at different levels of granularity, from highly specific to generalized.

Different representational formats of a memory can be used at different times or in different contexts, and draw on different neural representations.

doi.org/10.31234/osf...
OSF
doi.org
September 25, 2025 at 6:58 PM
Reposted by Simon Faghel-Soubeyrand
Our article is out in Annual Review of Vision Science: “Visual Image Reconstruction from Brain Activity via Latent Representation”
We trace the path from early brain decoding to modern NeuroAI, highlight progress & pitfalls, and discuss future directions www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...
Visual Image Reconstruction from Brain Activity via Latent Representation | Annual Reviews
Visual image reconstruction, the decoding of perceptual content from brain activity into images, has advanced significantly with the integration of deep neural networks (DNNs) and generative models. T...
www.annualreviews.org
September 18, 2025 at 3:40 AM
Reposted by Simon Faghel-Soubeyrand
New preprint! My stellar undergrad, June Kim, & @charan-neuro.bsky.social find that intersubject pattern similarity at encoding (especially in posteromedial cortex) relates to shared/differing content between Ss at recall (measured using topic modeling) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Natural language processing captures memory content associated with shared neural patterns at encoding
People can experience the same event yet form distinct memories shaped by individual interpretations. Prior research shows that multivariate activity patterns in the Default Mode Network (DMN) are cor...
www.biorxiv.org
September 16, 2025 at 6:08 PM
Reposted by Simon Faghel-Soubeyrand
How does the brain🧠 make causal inferences and use memories to understand narratives🎬?

We built an RNN🤖 with key-value episodic memory that learns causal relationships between events and retrieves memories like humans do!

Preprint www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

w/ @qlu.bsky.social, Tan Nguyen &👇
A neural network with episodic memory learns causal relationships between narrative events
Humans reflect on past memories to make sense of an ongoing event. Past work has shown that people retrieve causally related past events during comprehension, but the exact process by which this causa...
www.biorxiv.org
September 5, 2025 at 12:26 PM
Reposted by Simon Faghel-Soubeyrand
A transformation from vision to imagery in the human brain. Intriguing new preprint by Roy & Naselaris et al for anyone interested in mental imagery!
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
A transformation from vision to imagery in the human brain
Extensive work has shown that the visual cortex is reactivated during mental imagery, and that models trained on visual data can predict imagery activity and decode imagined stimuli. These findings ma...
www.biorxiv.org
September 4, 2025 at 9:28 AM
Reposted by Simon Faghel-Soubeyrand
Quantifying memory recall is hard! Luckily, natural language processing (incl. #LLMs) offers new, automated, and scalable ways to do that!

Great new review by Fenerci & @signysheldon.bsky.social in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social!
www.cell.com/trends/cogni...
Studying memory narratives with natural language processing
Cognitive neuroscience research has begun to use natural language processing (NLP) to examine memory narratives with the hopes of gaining a nuanced understanding of the mechanisms underlying differenc...
www.cell.com
August 28, 2025 at 1:35 PM
Reposted by Simon Faghel-Soubeyrand
New paper with @rjantonello.bsky.social @csinva.bsky.social, Suna Guo, Gavin Mischler, Jianfeng Gao, & Nima Mesgarani: We use LLMs to generate VERY interpretable embeddings where each dimension corresponds to a scientific theory, & then use these embeddings to predict fMRI and ECoG. It WORKS!
Evaluating scientific theories as predictive models in language neuroscience https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.08.12.669958v1
August 18, 2025 at 6:34 PM
Reposted by Simon Faghel-Soubeyrand
🚨 Finally out in Nature Machine Intelligence!!
"Visual representations in the human brain are aligned with large language models"
🔗 www.nature.com/articles/s42...
High-level visual representations in the human brain are aligned with large language models - Nature Machine Intelligence
Doerig, Kietzmann and colleagues show that the brain’s response to visual scenes can be modelled using language-based AI representations. By linking brain activity to caption-based embeddings from lar...
www.nature.com
August 7, 2025 at 1:06 PM
Reposted by Simon Faghel-Soubeyrand
🚨 New preprint alert!

Excited to share our latest work on alpha/beta activity, eye movements, and memory.

Across 4 experiments combining scalp EEG/iEEG with eye tracking, we show that alpha/beta activity directly reflects eye movements, and only indirectly relates to memory.

👇 Highlights (1/7):
Low-frequency brain oscillations reflect the dynamics of the oculomotor system: a new perspective on subsequent memory effects https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.07.29.667451v1
July 30, 2025 at 7:33 PM
Reposted by Simon Faghel-Soubeyrand
New CNeuroMod-THINGS open-access fMRI dataset: 4 participants · ~4 000 images (720 categories) each shown 3× (12k trials per subject)· individual functional localizers & NSD-inspired QC . Preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2507.09024 Congrats Marie St-Laurent and @martinhebart.bsky.social !!
July 30, 2025 at 1:57 AM
Reposted by Simon Faghel-Soubeyrand
My first, first author paper, comparing the properties of memory-augmented large language models and human episodic memory, out in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social!

authors.elsevier.com/a/1lV174sIRv...

Here’s a quick 🧵(1/n)
authors.elsevier.com
July 26, 2025 at 3:05 PM
Reposted by Simon Faghel-Soubeyrand
Finally published:
“Top-down and bottom-up neuroscience: overcoming the clash of research cultures”
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Looking for ways to better understand different neuroscientific perspectives and enable productive collaborations
Top-down and bottom-up neuroscience: overcoming the clash of research cultures - Nature Reviews Neuroscience
As scientists, we want solid answers, but we also want to answer questions that matter. Yet, the brain’s complexity forces trade-offs between these desiderata, bringing about two distinct research app...
www.nature.com
July 22, 2025 at 11:02 AM
Reposted by Simon Faghel-Soubeyrand
Excited to share our newly published paper! 👇 Massive thanks to @harrington-mo.bsky.social @sacairney.bsky.social @mggaskell.bsky.social
July 21, 2025 at 6:56 PM
Reposted by Simon Faghel-Soubeyrand
How reliable is OPM-MEG, and how does it compare to other neuroimaging modalities? 🤔

In a new preprint with ‪@s-michelmann.bsky.social‬, we evaluate the reliability of OPM-MEG within & between individuals, and compare it to fMRI & iEEG during repeated movie viewing. 🧠

📄 doi.org/10.1101/2025...
Reliability and signal comparison of OPM-MEG, fMRI & iEEG in a repeated movie viewing paradigm
Optically pumped magnetometers (OPMs) offer a promising advancement in noninvasive neuroimaging via magnetoencephalography (MEG), but establishing their reliability and comparability to existing metho...
doi.org
July 19, 2025 at 4:10 PM
Reposted by Simon Faghel-Soubeyrand
JOB ALERT: Computational Cognitive Neuroscience Postdoc position in Osaka, Japan! Possible start in October 2025 (contact me ASAP), or from April 2026. PLEASE REPOST! #postdocjobs #neuroskyence #neuroscience #psychscisky #compneurosky #neurojobs 1/
July 18, 2025 at 3:34 AM