nature & mechanisms of
neural dynamics of brain systems
Understanding human brain activity across time scales: from milliseconds to the life span.
The broad objective of Sylvain Baillet’s lab is to comprehend the nature and macroscopic mechanisms of large-scale, network brain activity — how they enable complex behavior, how they are altered in disease.
We don’t specialize in specific brain functions or syndromes. We want to find their common denominator.
Our group nurtures multi-disciplinary expertise in computational and empirical approaches to systems neuroscience — with a blend of imaging, multi-scale electrophysiology, cognitive and clinical neuropsychology, biophysics, computational models and data science.
Please consult the sections below to learn more about our team, vision, projects, publications and our latest news.
News
Congratulations to Dr Max Levinson on his successful PhD defense! We wish him the best as he embarks on his next research chapter at New York University.
We are both happy and proud to have played a little part (MEG-BIDS) in this collective effort to promote collaboration and structured data sharing in neuroimaging research. New retrospective paper just published by MIT Press' Imaging Neuroscience.
Today, Jason brilliantly defended his PhD thesis in Neuroscience and became one new neuroSPEED PhD graduate!
We publish in Annals of Neurology a new study that advances the fundamental understanding of Parkinson's disease beyond its motor symptoms. Our findings underscore the importance of considering the neurochemical organization of the cortex in the disease and its implications for treatment and management. As we continue to explore these complex relationships, we move closer to more targeted and effective therapies for PD patients.
We publish in Cerebral Cortex a new study in collaboration with Jérôme Sackur at Ecole Normale Supérieure (Paris) that explored how different types of attention interact in the brain.
We recorded brainwaves with EEG to study how involuntary attention (like a sudden sound grabbing your attention) can interrupt voluntary attention (like focusing on a task). Our findings shed light on the complex ways our brain juggles different attention processes, offering new insights into how our mind manages focus and distractions.
We publish in the journal PAIN reports a new study that advances the understanding of the complex and multifaceted brain signals that convey the perception of pain.
When slow is not necessarily a low. We show in a new study just published in Progress in Neurobiology how a slowing of brain activity may be protective of brain functions in the natural history of Parkinson’s Disease.
Sylvain has been elected Chair of the Organization, which purpose is to advance the understanding of the anatomical and functional organization of the human brain, and to promote the medical and societal applications of brain imaging methods.
OHBM is the largest scholarly Society of the field, with several international Chapters, Special Interest Groups and an annual meeting gathering 3,000 attendees.
As Associate Dean (Research) of the Faculty of Medicine & Health Sciences, Sylvain gave a short interview about current AI & health research efforts at McGill University to the Temerty Centre for AI Research & Education in Medicine.
We are happy and proud to announce that Alex Wiesman, PhD, has been awarded a prestigious Banting postdoctoral fellowship sponsored by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.
Sylvain was interviewed by the magazine Science about a new study published in PLoS Biology reporting the decoding of music from the electrophysiological activity of the brain of participants.
We are grateful to receive additional funding from the National Institutes of Health in support of our Brainstorm software developments. This new supplement is to enable specific software developments that critical to Alzheimer’s neuroimaging research. reach out to us now as we are opening two post-doctoral positions for this project.
We participate in a major international adversarial collaboration to identify the neural bases of consciousness. The New York Times reports today on our first published study and the state of affairs.
Our new study published today in open access by npj Parkinson’s Disease clarifies the neurophysiological manifestations of speech impairments in Parkinson’s disease using advanced functional brain imaging.
We took part in another fruitful collaborative study led by vision neuroscience specialist Prof Janine Mendola, which was just published in the European Journal of Neuroscience in open access.
In a new study published today in the journal Neuromodulation, we report the brain responses to spinal cord stimulation, a treatment for individuals afflicted by severe chronic pain. We found that these brain responses are remarkably variable across patients, which may account for the fact that the benefits of spinal cord stimulation on chronic pain vary greatly between individuals.
In another winning collaboration with Prof Bratislav Misic, we show how markers of brain activity and structure relate to the topography of neurotransmitter systems across the cortex. This new study is published by Nature Neuroscience.
Our new collaborative study, published in Epileptic Disorders clarifies how seizures propagate across the brain in certain types of general epilepsy.
We were fortunate to work with Prof Bratislav Misic and collaborators to deliver neuromaps, a toolbox for accessing, transforming and analyzing structural and functional brain annotations in a common framework.
The details are reported in a new article published in Nature Methods.
We publish today in eLife, a new method that decomposes brain activity into oscillatory and background signal elements that vary at the natural time scale of the brain and behavior. Check it out with the companion open-source code or with Brainstorm!
We are looking for a talented post-doctoral researcher to lead exciting new methods and software developments for naturalistic neuroscience.
We publish today in Cerebral Cortex a study that advances our understanding of the effects of biological aging on the neurophysiology of deeper brain structures that are crucial to cognitive functions.
A new study conducted by Golia Shafiei, in the team of Bratislav Misic at The Neuro/McGill, in collaboration with our lab was just published in PLoS Biology. The study advances our comprehension of how functional MRI signals relate to electrophysiological fluctuations detected with MEG in brain networks.
We constantly process sounds that come in streams, embedded in a certain context — think music and speech for instance. How salient sounds standing out from a flow of auditory information are detected and processed by brain circuits was the purpose of our new study, just published in the Journal of Neuroscience.
Jason da Silva Castanheira receives a prestigious Brain Star award from the Canadian Association for Neuroscience and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research!
Publications
Browse all our publications.