In the meantime, @poetz.bsky.social will talk at CRAB satellite (sites.google.com/view/crab202...) about recent work by Project CETI (www.projectceti.org) on understanding social dynamics during a sperm whale calf birth.

Huge thanks to my amazing co-authors:
@h-merritt.bsky.social, @andreasantoro.bsky.social, @grabuffo.bsky.social, Demian Battaglia, Francesco Vaccarino, Manish Saggar, @brovelli.bsky.social, @lordgrilo.bsky.social

If you’re curious about how the shape of brain networks encodes identity and information, take a look at the full paper here: biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 10/n

This balance between redundancy and synergy, woven into each person’s unique topological scaffold, may offer a new lens on individual variability, and a powerful pathway for identifying cognitive or clinical biomarkers. 9/n

Third: most intriguingly, we found that the scaffold's structure dictates its information flow. The borders of loops handle redundant information, while the connections spanning these loops exhibit high synergy. It's a beautiful metaphor: integration happens within the voids. 8/n

Second, while FC fingerprints often draw from features confined to particular brain networks, scaffolds gain their power from inter-network connections. In other words, identity seems to live in how different large-scale brain systems interact 7/n

First, scaffold-based fingerprints achieved near-perfect identification accuracy (~100%), outperforming FC-based methods (~90%). Even more 🤯, they remained robust across different preprocessing strategies, brain atlases, and dramatically shortened scan times. 6/n

We tested this approach on resting-state fMRI data from 100 unrelated individuals in the Human Connectome Project. The results were striking. 5/n

To better capture this richer structure, we use homological scaffolds. Picture incrementally building a brain network by adding connections in order of strength. As we do this, loops begin to form. The scaffold is made of all edges that participate in these mesoscale loops 4/n

Traditional approaches to brain fingerprinting typically rely on Functional Connectivity (FC), which measures pairwise correlations between brain regions. But brains don’t just operate in pairs—networks of regions interact in complex, higher-order ways that FC often misses. 3/n

We show that the topological structure of brain connectivity—, homological scaffolds—offers a powerful and highly robust way to identify individuals based on their functional brain organization. 2/n