In this episode, I speak with Dr. Sara Larivière, Assistant Professor at the Department of Nuclear Medicine and Radiobiology at Université de Sherbrooke. She is at the head of the SLIC (Sherbrooke Laboratory for Integrative Connectomics), holding a Canada Research Chair in Neuroimaging of Epilepsy. Dr. Larivière and I are friends and colleagues, having received our doctorate training at the same lab under the supervision of Dr. Boris Bernhardt, my first guest on the show.

Her lab integrates neuroimaging, computational statistics, machine learning, and pipeline engineering to advance knowledge of the human brain. By developing and deploying neuroinformatics and data science tools, her team investigates normal and atypical brain development, with the goal of enhancing personalized prognosis and therapies, ultimately aiming to shape public health policy.

In this instalment, Dr. Larivière and I break down a 2024 article we published in the Journal of the American Medical Association - Neurology, titled Brain Networks for Cortical Atrophy and Responsive Neurostimulation in Temporal Lobe Epilepsy. We discuss how accounting for widespread cortical dynamics in temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) may inform novel therapeutic approaches that move beyond traditional subcortical targets.

In this inaugural episode, I speak with one of the world’s foremost experts in neuroimaging and brain connectomics, Dr Boris Bernhard, Professor of Neurology and Neurosurgery at McGill University and Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Neuroinformatics. Dr Bernhardt is the Principal Investigator at the Multimodal Imaging and Connectome Analysis (MICA) Lab situated at the McConnell Brain Imaging Centre of the Montreal Neurological Institute (aka, The Neuro). He is also my friend and professional colleague, having served as my thesis supervisor during my PhD studies at McGill University.

His lab investigates how the organization of structural and functional brain networks supports integrated cognition in both healthy individuals and those with disorders, particularly epilepsy and autism. His team has played a key role in recent conceptual and methodological breakthroughs for mapping spatial patterns in the brain as continuous gradients—especially hierarchical ones that span from sensory-motor regions to higher-order transmodal systems responsible for associative processing. His research routinely combines multimodal neuroimaging, network neuroscience, 3D histology, and transcriptomics.

On this occasion, Dr Bernhardt and I discuss a recently published paper by his lab in Nature Communications, titled Multimodal gradients unify local and global cortical organization. We break down how brain function is situated at the nexus of local and global cortical dynamics.

What if the brain’s famous “error detection” signature—midfrontal theta—wasn’t just one signal, but an entire set of individual rhythms? In this episode of The Abstract, I pull renegade neuroscientist, Dr. Mike X Cohen, back into the world of academia to unpack his 2020 bombshell paper. Using ultra-dense simultaneous MEG+EEG and clever generalized eigendecomposition, his work revealed 3–11 distinct midfrontal theta components in every participant—each likely handling a different slice of response conflict. No single “CEO” dominates; it’s collaborative, multidimensional symphony! We also take a critical look at the dopamine-detox trend and other half-baked online nonsense. If you love neuroscience—real neuroscience—this episode is your wake-up call. Tune in now—the brain just got way more interesting…

I'm Shahin Zagros, cognitive neuroscientist and founder of ZAGROSCIENCE. I take brain research very seriously, which is why I find a lot of what passes for neuroscience online lacking in substance.

With my podcast, The Abstract, I bring you the latest and most compelling work in the field by interviewing the women and men who are driving it forward.

Don't settle for fluff or sensationalization - get the real deal by subscribing to ZAGROSCIENCE now: https://zagroscience.substack.com/subscribe