Philipp Thölke

Meditation induces shifts in neural oscillations, brain complexity and critical dynamics: Novel insights from MEG

Annalisa Pascarella

Philipp Thölke

David Meunier

Jordan O’Byrne

Tarek Lajnef

Antonino Raffone

Roberto Guidotti

Vittorio Pizzella

Laura Marzetti

Karim Jerbi

2025-03-19

bioRxiv (prépublication)

doi.org

Caffeine induces age-dependent increases in brain complexity and criticality during sleep

Philipp Thölke

Maxine Arcand-Lavigne

Tarek Lajnef

Sonia Frenette

Julie Carrier

Karim Jerbi

Caffeine is the most widely consumed psychoactive stimulant worldwide. Yet important gaps persist in understanding its effects on the brain,… (voir plus) especially during sleep. We analyzed sleep EEG in 40 subjects, contrasting 200mg of caffeine against a placebo condition, utilizing inferential statistics and machine learning. We found that caffeine ingestion led to an increase in brain complexity, a widespread flattening of the power spectrum’s 1/f-like slope, and a reduction in long-range temporal correlations. Being most prominent during non-REM sleep, these results suggest that caffeine shifts the brain towards a critical regime and more diverse neural dynamics. Interestingly, this was more pronounced in younger adults (20-27 years) compared to middle-aged participants (41-58 years) whose sleep brain dynamics were less affected by caffeine. Interpreting these data in the light of modeling and empirical work on EEG-derived measures of excitation-inhibition balance provides novel insights into the effects caffeine has on the sleeping brain.

2024-06-01

bioRxiv (prépublication)

doi.org

Divergent Creativity in Humans and Large Language Models

Antoine Bellemare-Pepin

Franccois Lespinasse

Philipp Thölke

Yann Harel

Kory Wallace Mathewson

Jay A. Olson

Yoshua Bengio

Karim Jerbi CoCo Lab

Psychology Department

U. Montr'eal

Montreal

Qc

Canada

Music department

C. University

Sociology

Anthropology department

Mila

Departmentof Psychology

University of Toronto Mississauga … (voir 5 de plus)

Mississauga

On

Department of Computer Science

Operations Research

Unique Center

The recent surge in the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) has led to claims that they are approaching a level of creativity akin … (voir plus)to human capabilities. This idea has sparked a blend of excitement and apprehension. However, a critical piece that has been missing in this discourse is a systematic evaluation of LLM creativity, particularly in comparison to human divergent thinking. To bridge this gap, we leverage recent advances in creativity science to build a framework for in-depth analysis of divergent creativity in both state-of-the-art LLMs and a substantial dataset of 100,000 humans. We found evidence suggesting that LLMs can indeed surpass human capabilities in specific creative tasks such as divergent association and creative writing. Our quantitative benchmarking framework opens up new paths for the development of more creative LLMs, but it also encourages more granular inquiries into the distinctive elements that constitute human inventive thought processes, compared to those that can be artificially generated.

2024-05-13

ArXiv (prépublication)

doi.org

arxiv.org

Bio-Mechanical Poet: An Immersive Audiovisual Playground for Brain Signals and Generative AI.

Philipp Thölke

Antoine Bellemare‐Pepin

Yann Harel

François Lespinasse

Karim Jerbi

2024-01-01

ICCC (publié)