Toby Ellmers
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tobyellmers.bsky.social
Toby Ellmers
@tobyellmers.bsky.social
430 followers 340 following 38 posts
Sir Henry Wellcome Fellow at Imperial College London. Interested in balance, falls, anxiety, vestibular, healthy ageing. Board Member of ISPGR.
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Reposted by Toby Ellmers
tahnee-engelen.bsky.social
So happy this paper is now out in @plosbiology.org! We investigated whether fluctuations in MEPs can be explained by phasic influences from internal bodily rhythms, and whether this might happen independently per organ system.
#interoception #neuroskyence
plosbiology.org PLOS Biology @plosbiology.org · 2d
How do internal bodily rhythms influence #brain activity & motor function? @tahnee-engelen.bsky.social &co show that #cardiac, #respiratory & #gastric rhythms independently modulate motor excitability, revealing distinct #interoceptive profiles across individuals @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/4nMtpLT
Top: Experimental set up. Single pulses of TMS were applied to the hand area of the right primary motor cortex with an inter-pulse interval randomized between 6 and 10 s. Simultaneously, the neuronavigated coil position (yellow), electrocardiogram (red), respiratory signal (blue), electrogastrogram (green), and electromyography from the left hand (gray) were recorded. The figure shows traces of a 20-s time segment from one participant of the cardiac (raw), respiratory (filtered), gastric (filtered), and EMG (raw) signals. The experimental measure was the Motor Evoked Potential amplitude measured on a hand muscle (first dorsal interosseous), analyzed against the phase of the cardiac, respiratory, and gastric rhythms. Note that the three rhythms have very different periods (~1 s for the heart, ~ 5 s for respiration, and ~20 s for the gastric rhythm). Bottom: Artwork illustrating how rhythms of the internal organs interact with the moment-to-moment fluctuations observed in corticospinal motor excitability. Image depicts an outline of a brain with representations of the three rhythmic organs influencing the motor system: the heart, lungs, and stomach. Image credit: Tahnée Engelen.
November 13, 2025 at 11:01 AM
Reposted by Toby Ellmers
micahgallen.com
🧠 New paper on breathing and the brain, out now
@plos.org Computational Biology! 🫁
"The respiratory cycle modulates distinct dynamics of affective and perceptual decision-making"
doi.org/10.1371/jour...
We show how respiratory 'tidal computations' alter our decisons!
The respiratory cycle modulates distinct dynamics of affective and perceptual decision-making
Author summary Breathing is more than just a vital process for survival — it influences how we perceive and interact with the world around us. Recent research suggests that the rhythm of breathing, fr...
doi.org
August 1, 2025 at 10:35 AM
Reposted by Toby Ellmers
vivensa.bsky.social
Book now for next week's free online masterclass with @magswatson1.bsky.social on how to mentor effectively in academia. We have covered the cost of the session for Academy members, and you can book here: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/masterclas...
#FundingForAgeingWell #MentoringMasterclass
Masterclass: How to mentor effectively in Academia
This Masterclass is suitable for those who currently mentor individuals and/or who are likely to mentor individuals
www.eventbrite.co.uk
November 6, 2025 at 11:42 AM
Reposted by Toby Ellmers
danlikesbrains.bsky.social
New preprint with amazing work from @nchalas.bsky.social:

How does respiration influence (un-)predictable near-threshold perception? MEG, arousal modulation, excitability states, respiration phase-resolved connectivity changes - it's all there :)

#neuroskyence

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Respiration as a dynamic modulator of sensory sampling
Respiration dynamically modulates sensory perception by orchestrating transient states of the brain and the body. Using simultaneous recordings of high-density magneto-encephalography (MEG), respirati...
www.biorxiv.org
June 30, 2025 at 12:20 PM
Reposted by Toby Ellmers
alesantuz.bsky.social
🔬 𝗣𝗼𝘀𝘁𝗱𝗼𝗰 𝗼𝗽𝗲𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴!

I’m recruiting a postdoctoral researcher (@mdc-berlin.bsky.social, Berlin 🇩🇪, @niccolozampieri.bsky.social lab) for my @dfg.de -funded project on somatosensory feedback and locomotor control. Please repost and DM me if interested!

#locomotion #proprioception #neuromechanics
November 2, 2025 at 5:44 AM
Reposted by Toby Ellmers
jendavies.bsky.social
**Come work with us!!**

Three-year post-doc position funded by Parkinson's UK available Cardiff University - using TMS to study inhibition of planned stepping movements and better understand freezing of gait. Full details here - krb-sjobs.brassring.com/TGnewUI/Sear...

Please share!!
Research Associate: Neural Control of Movement in - Cardiff University - Job Details
Job Details: Research Associate: Neural control of movement in Parkinson's Disease School of Healthcare Sciences, Card
krb-sjobs.brassring.com
October 31, 2025 at 8:55 AM
Reposted by Toby Ellmers
nataliepeluso.com
New primer in Cell from Patrick Haggard & @mattlongo.bsky.social

Somatosensation and the sense of self: Current Biology www.cell.com/current-biol...

#interoception #exteroception #affect #neuroskyence
Somatosensation and the sense of self
In this primer, Patrick Haggard and Matthew Longo consider how sensory signals from receptors throughout the body are integrated to produce the sense of a coherent, continuous, sentient body that form...
www.cell.com
October 30, 2025 at 7:57 PM
Reposted by Toby Ellmers
jonathanamichaels.bsky.social
Thrilled that our paper is out today in Nature!
www.nature.com/articles/s4...
Sensory expectations shape neural population dynamics in motor circuits
Nature - Experiments with human volunteers and macaques show that expectations produced by probabilistic cueing of future sensory inputs shape motor circuit dynamics in order to increase the...
www.nature.com
October 29, 2025 at 4:11 PM
Reposted by Toby Ellmers
ispgr.bsky.social
We were honoured to award Prof Bradford McFadyen @bjmcfadyen.bsky.social ISPGR's Honorary Membership at our 2025 World Congress. Prof McFadyen reflects on this award - and what it takes to make a meaningful career in posture and gait research - in our latest #ISPGRBlog.
tinyurl.com/5n7ces5h
A Lifetime Member's reflections on making a meaningful career in posture and gait research - ISPGR
tinyurl.com
October 28, 2025 at 8:27 AM
tobyellmers.bsky.social
Amazingly rich and in-depth reflections on a career well spent from the legend that is @bjmcfadyen.bsky.social. Must read for early career researchers in any area (but particularly posture and gait)!
ispgr.bsky.social ISPGR @ispgr.bsky.social · 18d
We were honoured to award Prof Bradford McFadyen @bjmcfadyen.bsky.social ISPGR's Honorary Membership at our 2025 World Congress. Prof McFadyen reflects on this award - and what it takes to make a meaningful career in posture and gait research - in our latest #ISPGRBlog.
tinyurl.com/5n7ces5h
A Lifetime Member's reflections on making a meaningful career in posture and gait research - ISPGR
tinyurl.com
October 28, 2025 at 8:29 AM
Reposted by Toby Ellmers
vivensa.bsky.social
🏆 How often do you get the opportunity to apply for flexible funding? How would you use £120k over three years? The deadline to nominate for the Vivensa Academy Excellence Awards is next week (31 October, 5pm). Visit: vivensafoundation.org.uk/wp-content/u...

#FundingForAgeingWell #ExcellenceAwards
October 23, 2025 at 8:49 AM
Reposted by Toby Ellmers
skhalsa.bsky.social
This is a very nice cross-species articulation of findings and challenges in body-brain and brain-body processing. Recommended reading for anyone interested in dipping their toes into this broad and rapidly developing area!
October 20, 2025 at 10:19 PM
Reposted by Toby Ellmers
masudhusain.bsky.social
The current environment is making it near impossible to run clinical trials in the UK.
One key issue discussed in @brain1878.bsky.social
is the duplication - or worse - of regulatory oversight at NHS hospitals & universities.

My views on how to change the system
academic.oup.com/brain/articl...
October 6, 2025 at 6:07 AM
Reposted by Toby Ellmers
royalsociety.org
We're very happy to announce that the winner of this year’s Royal Society Trivedi Science Book Prize is ‘Our Brains, Our Selves: What a Neurologist’s Patients Taught Him About the Brain’ by debut author, clinical neurologist and neuroscientist Masud Husain. #SciBooks royalsociety.org/news/2025/10...
October 1, 2025 at 7:25 PM
Reposted by Toby Ellmers
kathaschmack.bsky.social
Really enjoyed my weekend read on 𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐟𝐢𝐥𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐠: local recurrence amplifies natural input patterns and suppresses stray activity. This review beautifully argues that sensory cortex itself is a site of memory and prediction. Food for thought on hallucinations!

#neuroskyence #neuroscience
markhisted.org Mark Histed @markhisted.org · Sep 25
The brain is incredibly densely connected. Human cerebral cortex may have as many as *one trillion* connections.

Most of those cortical connections are recurrent, inside each area. What do they do?

New paper from me in Annual Reviews: 🧪 🧠📈 1/

www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...
Active Filtering: A Predictive Function of Recurrent Circuits of Sensory Cortex | Annual Reviews
Our brains encode many features of the sensory world into memories: We can sing along with songs we have heard before, interpret spoken and written language composed of words we have learned, and reco...
www.annualreviews.org
September 27, 2025 at 3:12 PM
Reposted by Toby Ellmers
imperialmed.bsky.social
Falls in later life can be devastating—but mindset matters.

Dr @tobyellmers.bsky.social from @imperialbrains.bsky.social explores how older adults’ beliefs about ageing significantly influence recovery after a fall.

#InternationalOlderPersonsDay

blogs.imperial.ac.uk/imperial-med...
What helps older adults bounce back after a fall? Their mindset might be key - Imperial Medicine Blog
Dr Toby Ellmers from the Department of Brain Sciences explores how older adults’ beliefs about ageing significantly influence recovery after a fall.
blogs.imperial.ac.uk
October 1, 2025 at 10:01 AM
Reposted by Toby Ellmers
skhalsa.bsky.social
Even after recovery, relapse is heartbreakingly common in anorexia nervosa. Could the answer lie in the gut’s hidden signals? 🧵
September 22, 2025 at 8:14 PM
Reposted by Toby Ellmers
actlab.bsky.social
Thrilled that our new review "Motor Working Memory" is now in press at TiCS!

@cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social
@cellpress.bsky.social

By me +
Hanna Hillman

We argue that a dedicated research program on 'working memory for movements' is long overdue

Link: authors.elsevier.com/a/1lmMX4sIRv...
September 15, 2025 at 12:56 PM
Reposted by Toby Ellmers
vivensa.bsky.social
🏆Nominations are now open for the third round of the Vivensa Academy Excellence Awards. Three awards of £120k will be made to Academy members. Deadline is 31 October 2025, 5pm. More here: vivensafoundation.org.uk/news/now-ope...
#FundingForAgeingWell #VivensaAcademy #ExcellenceAwards
September 11, 2025 at 8:24 AM
Reposted by Toby Ellmers
actlab.bsky.social
New preprint from the lab! 🧠
Led by Juliana Trach, w/ Sophia Ou

Using fMRI, we discovered evidence for time-sensitive reward prediction errors (RPEs) in the human cerebellum.

Builds on, and extends, recent work in both rodents and NHPs
figure showing cerebellar RPE responses
September 8, 2025 at 2:31 PM
Reposted by Toby Ellmers
vivensa.bsky.social
Our Director of Research, Sanjay Thakrar, has pulled together 10 practical tips for writing stronger grant applications: vivensafoundation.org.uk/news/10-tips...
#FundingForAgeingWell #GrantTips #ResearchFunding
10 tips for writing a stronger research funding application - Vivensa Foundation
Our top ten tips of what we want to see (and not!) in your research funding application. We hope this advice will be useful.
vivensafoundation.org.uk
August 28, 2025 at 10:02 AM
Reposted by Toby Ellmers
micahgallen.com
Are interoception and mental health linked? Many assume so, with interoception even described as a psychiatric “p-factor.” But in our latest preprint, we were surprised to find little evidence for such a connection. www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1... 🧵 Thread with our reflections on the matter 👇
Interoceptive Ability is Unrelated to Mental Health Symptoms: Evidence From a Large Scale Multi-Domain Psychophysical Investigation
Interoception-the sensing and perception of the internal viscera-is widely cast as a transdiagnostic mechanism linking brain-body interaction to mental illness. Prevailing models propose that altered ...
www.medrxiv.org
August 27, 2025 at 4:17 PM
Reposted by Toby Ellmers
cybal.bsky.social
Is it me, or the train moving?
We use vision to maintain balance. Just close your eyes while standing on one leg and you typically feel less stable. But if we use vision, how come we do not fall when looking at a moving visual reference, e.g. a train?
📈🧠🧪
#sensorimotor #balance #BiomechSky
August 25, 2025 at 5:05 PM
Reposted by Toby Ellmers
skhalsa.bsky.social
Postdoc job alert! I’m looking for someone with a PhD in neuroscience/psychology, psychiatry, biomed engineering, computational modeling or a related field to join my NIH-funded team at UCLA studying the neural & computational mechanisms of #interoception in anorexia nervosa 1/2
August 7, 2025 at 4:25 PM
Reposted by Toby Ellmers
vivensa.bsky.social
Vivensa Academy is a growing membership (500+) of researchers, clinicians and community organisations, all dedicated to improving later life. Discover why you should apply to join, and the fantastic members-only exclusives you can access from day one: vivensafoundation.org.uk/news/three-g...
Three great reasons to join Vivensa Academy today - Vivensa Foundation
Read on to discover why you should apply to join Vivensa Academy, and the fantastic members-only exclusives you can access from day one.
vivensafoundation.org.uk
August 7, 2025 at 10:56 AM