Neurospeed - Baillet Lab: Neural Dynamics of Brain Systems

07/21/2025

Big news, and more to come, from our lab.

Une nouvelle page s’écrit pour la recherche au CHUM! Nous avons le grand plaisir d’annoncer la nomination de M. Sylvain Baillet, Ph.D., à titre de directeur de la recherche et de l’innovation du CHUM et directeur du Centre de recherche du CHUM (CRCHUM). Physicien de formation et expert recon...

07/17/2025

🚨New paper in PAIN led by Raghavan Gopalakrishnan, with Tor Wager, Mathieu Roy et al.

We studied how the brain anticipates unpleasant events, highlighting that predictive brain mechanisms extend beyond rewards to aversive stimuli.

An important step forward in understanding the neural dynamics of anticipation and pain.

odeling and magnetoencephalography to detect time-resolved activations underlying pain expectations and aversive PE signals in the human brain. The task entailed learning probabilistically changing cue-pain associations to avoid receiving a pain stimulus. We used an axiomatic approach to identify ge...

07/17/2025

07/11/2025

Best bunch!

07/07/2025

Sensorimotor control meets visual consciousness.

Our study shows that microsaccades—tiny, involuntary eye movements—help stabilize visual perception. Perception is not a passive mirror of the external world. Instead, it is actively shaped by interactions between sensory input and subtle motor processes that attempt to maintain our conscious experience.
Paper here: https://doi.org/10.1167/jov.25.8.8

https://www.neurospeed-bailletlab.org/news/zl2erl39xhy90qt2fpvgarqrvbmdzt

Our latest study, led by grad student Max Levinson and published in the Journal of Vision , explores why our conscious perception often does not match the physical world accessible to our senses. Using high-resolution eye-tracking, we found that microsaccades—tiny involuntary eye movements—reset...

05/13/2025

05/08/2025

"This collegial spirit must be revived in future collaborations in consciousness, and in other fields. We need more of them as a way to advance science."

Bringing together proponents of rival theories to test their ideas against each other can advance science — but only if all sides can accept that they might be wrong.

05/02/2025

Open access version of The New York Times coverage of Cogitate' Nature paper published yesterday (incl. [a very quick summary of] the journey that got us there).

What makes humans conscious? Scientists disagree, strongly, as one group of peacemakers discovered the hard way.

04/30/2025

The first major study from the Cogitate Consortium is out today in Nature — a landmark collaboration testing theories of consciousness through rigorous, preregistered science. Data & tools are shared openly.
Proud to contribute from McGill University & The Neuro.

Multimodal results (iEEG, fMRI and MEG) of predictions from integrated information theory and global neuronal workspace theory align with some predictions of both theories on visual consciousness, but also critically challenge key tenets of both theories.

04/07/2025

Welcoming Laurien Reinders!
Laurien is a PhD candidate and technical physician at the Center for Pain Medicine at the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Her research focuses on how chronic pain and spinal cord stimulation affect brain activity, using magnetoencephalography.
Alongside her research, she contributes to the clinical field as a neurostimulator programmer and enjoys teaching and supervising Technical Medcine master’s students.
During her time with us, she’ll be diving deeper into MEG data analysis, applying a brain fingerprinting approach to chronic pain patient data.

Outside of work, Laurien loves playing field hockey, cycling, cooking, and playing the piano.

03/20/2025

It’s been a while since we last shared news about new members joining our lab. We’ve had quite a few new additions: https://www.neurospeed-bailletlab.org/who

Welcoming our latest team member, Rena Chang: Rena is a second-year physiology student at McGill interested in the intersection of brain networks and computational modelling. She is currently researching prediction error signals in the brain in relation to food intake. Her previous experiences in research have centered around exercise physiology, with an emphasis on the effects of sleep habits and diet on cardiovascular outcomes.

01/24/2025

A collaborative review on how electrophysiological brain recording and imaging at multiple scales, from cells to large-scale brain networks, contribute to defining neurostimulation targets.

Neuromodulation therapy comprises a range of non-destructive and adjustable methods for modulating neural activity using electrical stimulations, chemical agents, or mechanical interventions. Here, we discuss how electrophysiological brain recording and imaging at multiple scales, from cells to larg...