Paul Fiedler
pfiedler.bsky.social
Paul Fiedler
@pfiedler.bsky.social
🧠 medical neurosciences @Charité

interested in memory, sleep, neuron-glia interaction, health, and scicomm 🌈
Reposted by Paul Fiedler
Now online @nature.com!

Want to change the consequences of receptor activation?

Small molecules binding the GPCR-transducer interface change G protein subtype preference in predictable ways, enabling rational drug design 💥

So many new possibilities! 🧪🧠🟦

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🧵👇
Designing allosteric modulators to change GPCR G protein subtype selectivity - Nature
Studies of the G-protein-coupled receptor NTSR1 show that the G protein selectivity of this receptor can be modified by small molecules, enabling the design of drugs that work by switching receptor su...
www.nature.com
October 27, 2025 at 8:50 PM
Reposted by Paul Fiedler
My co-authors have yet to move to Bluesky, so I'm pleased to announce our latest work has just been published in @nature.com Neuroscience. Amazing work led by Junheng Li, revealing that falling asleep follows a predictable bifurcation pattern #neuroskyence #sleep
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Falling asleep follows a predictable bifurcation dynamic - Nature Neuroscience
Li et al. propose a conceptual framework to study the phenomenon of falling asleep based on electroencephalogram data. They show that a tipping point marks the brain’s nonlinear wake-to-sleep transiti...
www.nature.com
October 28, 2025 at 5:35 PM
Reposted by Paul Fiedler
A new user influx - welcome! A great nudge to pass this around. (Psst: Scientist authors tend to have fascinating Bsky feeds).

go.bsky.app/2LmKSDN
October 16, 2025 at 4:22 PM
Reposted by Paul Fiedler
Hello everyone today we are getting some basic menstruation education! No, actually, MOST mammals do NOT menstruate! With maybe one or two exceptions, only primates shed their uterine lining in a regular cycle.

Other mammals have something called estrus.
All mammals menstruate. So why would ours make another mammal think something is wrong?
October 15, 2025 at 1:40 PM
Reposted by Paul Fiedler
“More than half of the work done by women in the period between the 16th and 18th centuries took place outside of the home, and around half of all housework and three-quarters of care work was conducted professionally for other households” [England]

phys.org/news/2025-10...
A woman's place was not in the home: Challenging the assumptions about women's work in early modern history
New research has revealed that women played a fundamental role in the development of England's national economy before 1700.
phys.org
October 12, 2025 at 9:05 AM
Reposted by Paul Fiedler
Jess Wade is amazing, and it's my absolute honour to be one of the more than 2000 women in STEM whose wikipedia page she started: mymodernmet.com/jessica-wade... 🧪🔭👩‍🔬
Meet the Physicist Who Wrote Over 2,000 Wikipedia Biographies for Women in STEM
After noticing a lack of entries on Wikipedia for incredible women throughout history, this incredible woman decided to take matters into her own hands.
mymodernmet.com
October 12, 2025 at 7:26 AM
Reposted by Paul Fiedler
Super proud of this collaboration with rockstar Ryan Raut - born out of playing in the sandbox in our last year of grad school! Multi-scale brain activity can be predicted from a simple measure of arousal like pupil diameter. Out with linear causality, in with dynamic systems to explain neurobiology
Arousal as a universal embedding for spatiotemporal brain dynamics - Nature
Reframing of arousal as a latent dynamical system can reconstruct multidimensional measurements of large-scale spatiotemporal brain dynamics on the timescale of seconds in mice.
www.nature.com
September 24, 2025 at 9:52 PM
Reposted by Paul Fiedler
🌟 Excited to share that I'm recruiting PhD students in Psychology for my new lab at Rice University this cycle (Signal boost appreciated!)

To learn more, check out the Learning & Behavior Change Lab website:
www.sinclairlab-rice.com

Applications are due Dec 1st: psychology.rice.edu/graduate/pro...
Sinclair Lab
The Learning & Behavior Change Lab at Rice University, directed by Dr. Sinclair
www.sinclairlab-rice.com
September 8, 2025 at 3:45 PM
Reposted by Paul Fiedler
ANSWER: 0 (yes, ZERO!)

This is a result of an analysis done by a student in my grad seminar, using a large dataset (N=307,313).

What this result might mean: Nobody's personality is truly "average," and people's personality profiles (at least Big 5) might be more "jagged" than we think.

(🧵 1/5)
Imagine you have Big 5 personality scores from over 300,000 people. You designate the scores in the "mean +/- 0.25 SDs" range for each trait (~20%) as the average range.

QUESTION: How many people in this >300K sample do you think fall in the average range for ALL 5 TRAITS?

What's your answer?
September 7, 2025 at 3:03 PM
Reposted by Paul Fiedler
Here is a thread showcasing my GitHub repositories: 1) Friends Don't Let Friends Make Bad Graphs. An opinionated essay on good and bad graphs.

My popular one by a long shot with 6.4k stars and 248 forks. github.com/cxli233/Frie...
November 12, 2024 at 2:40 AM
Reposted by Paul Fiedler
The two key studies of the International Brain Laboratory @intlbrainlab.bsky.social are out today!

A brain-wide map of neural activity during complex behaviour
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Brain-wide representations of prior information in mouse decision-making
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
A brain-wide map of neural activity during complex behaviour - Nature
The International Brain Laboratory presents a brain-wide electrophysiological map obtained from pooling data from 12 laboratories that performed the same standardized perceptual decision-making task i...
www.nature.com
September 3, 2025 at 3:46 PM
Reposted by Paul Fiedler
This looks pretty cool: ultrasound can now see through the skull! 🧠🔊

The skull has long been a barrier to ultrasound. This reprint shows how to make it quickly transparent → enabling full-depth, high-res fUSI in mice (& humans! 🤯🤯)
Huge congrats to the authors!!!

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
September 3, 2025 at 1:35 PM
Reposted by Paul Fiedler
New preprint...and this one is truly EPIC 🚨.

Using a large group of patients with depression and healthy controls (N>800), we show differences in the functional segregation of insular subnetworks. And we can use it to classify!
Led by @glassybrain.bsky.social #neuroskyence 🩺
osf.io/preprints/ps...
August 30, 2025 at 8:30 AM
Reposted by Paul Fiedler
Crying and sadness induced by stimulation to L anterior insula (a human case study). How remarkable.

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33511338/
August 23, 2025 at 3:25 PM
Reposted by Paul Fiedler
Not yet #fluorescencefriday but too excited to wait to share this gorgeous #astrocyte image by student in the lab Camila Cabarcas Arrieta

Astrocyte expressing eGFP in green.
GFAP staining in magenta (labelling blood vessel in this case)
August 19, 2025 at 8:30 PM
Reposted by Paul Fiedler
Yesterday I discovered that ChatGPT's PhD-level expertise didn't extend to bird anatomy. This morning I thought, perhaps I was being too hard on the half-trillion-dollar company. Birds are a little weird, anatomically speaking. Let's try something more familiar. A mammal. Behold.
August 14, 2025 at 2:16 PM
Reposted by Paul Fiedler
📣Call for applications

We are recruiting the 2nd cohort of PhD students for the international research training group on women's mental health. If you care about translational pharmacoimaging work integrating hormonal states, please apply #neurojobs
jobs.medizin.uni-tuebingen.de/Job/6598/PhD...
PhD Researcher (f/m/d) Women’s Mental Health
jobs.medizin.uni-tuebingen.de
August 13, 2025 at 11:05 AM
Reposted by Paul Fiedler
Check out our latest paper..

- A simple view of the ageing effect across the full spectrum and the whole head
- Spectra of effect sizes
- Covariates can change effect size
- Replication!

We hope this facilitates synthesis of results across a rich and varied literature of age effects

#neuroskyence
August 13, 2025 at 11:35 AM
Reposted by Paul Fiedler
🚨 New Preprint 🚨

Targeting intracranial electrical stimulation (ES) to network regions defined within individuals causes network-level effects

By Cyr et al.

***
Q: Can we use individualized network maps from precision fMRI to modulate a targeted network via intracranial ES?

A: Yes!

🧵:
August 5, 2025 at 3:31 PM
Reposted by Paul Fiedler
At #ccn2025 and interested in bridging animal and human neuroscience?

Stop by B121 this afternoon to see our investigation of the neural representations in spikes and field potentials and our surprising result that sometimes field potentials are better!

2025.ccneuro.org/poster/?id=t...

🧠📈
Poster Presentation
2025.ccneuro.org
August 13, 2025 at 5:21 AM
Reposted by Paul Fiedler
I still get chills

Meet Mike
*30+ years severe depression
*first hospitalized @ 13y
*20 meds
*3 rounds of ECT
*2 near-fatal suicide attempts

Mike felt joy for the first time in decades after we turned on his new brain pacemaker or PACE

see videos, read paper, follow thread
doi.org/10.31234/osf...
August 10, 2025 at 6:23 PM
Reposted by Paul Fiedler
The long and newly updated story of lithium and its potential role for helping to prevent Alzheimer's disease
erictopol.substack.com/p/lithium-an...
August 9, 2025 at 8:54 PM
Reposted by Paul Fiedler
New @nature.com
The possibility that lithium deficiency is a driver of Alzheimer's disease. Experimental model shows Li depletion impedes amyloid clearance, and repletion in humans could be achieved with low doses
nature.com/articles/s41...
Lithium deficiency and the onset of Alzheimer’s disease - Nature
Lithium has an essential role in the brain and is deficient early in Alzheimer’s disease, which can be recapitulated in mice and treated with a novel lithium salt that restores the physiological level.
nature.com
August 6, 2025 at 3:16 PM
Reposted by Paul Fiedler
Good schematic on the lithium discovery www.nature.com/articles/d41...
August 6, 2025 at 9:20 PM