Faruk Gulban

My photo shows the front of a warm-yellow coloured Minoan clay flask, hand painted in black with a frontally depicted octopus. The flask measures 27 cm (about 10.5 inches) in height. It has a short spout at the top with a small loop handle at either side. The octopus is swimming diagonally with its eight writhing, sucker-lined arms covering the whole surface of the flask. It stares out at the viewer with wide, almost cartoon-like eyes. Additional motifs include sea urchins, tritons, small rocks and seaweed. Minoan decoration depicting sea motifs is known by scholars as the ‘Marine Style’. The flask was excavated in 1903 at a Bronze Age settlement site at Palaikastro. The Palaikastro excavations, carried out between 1902 and 1906, were run by R. Bosanquet and R.M. Dawkins from the British School of Athens. The flask is part of the collections at Heraklion Archaeological Museum, Heraklion, Crete.

Marvellous 3,500 year-old Minoan clay flask decorated with a wide-eyed octopus 🐙❤️

Excavated in 1903 from a Bronze Age settlement site at Palaikastro, Crete.

Heraklion Archaeological Museum 📷 by me

#Archaeology

Our 7-minute venous mapping study is featured in the UMN Medical School news!

I’m especially grateful for our international collaboration with Kendrick Kay from CMRR UMN. That partnership was vital in helping our ideas mature and refining the tools we built.

med.umn.edu/news/seven-m...

🎓🧠 It's finally out in @pnas.org 📄
doi.org/10.1073/pnas...
We reconstruct the cerebellar cortex and vasculature in-vivo by combining motion-corrected, pTX-enabled #7T MRI with a new segmentation approach.

Thanks Siawoosh 😄

Thank you :)

A new MRI protocol can scan the human brain and its venous network in under 7 minutes at 0.35 mm iso. resolution, marking it as a potential tool for diagnosing cerebrovascular diseases and monitoring neurodegeneration.
scim.ag/3LkRfRY

Christmas is over and you start wondering what 2026 may bring? 🎁 Perhaps this #PhD position in Tübingen on the Neural Mechanisms of #Body #Memories in #women & #men is for you 👇 Starting date 01.03.2026 or earlier #fMRI #mentalhealth #sexdifferences

📢 We’ve received several questions about the character count for OHBM 2026 submissions in our new platform, Oxford Abstracts. To help clear things up, we’ve put together a brief blog post explaining the updated limits and what they mean for you.

📝 Read more here: 👉 www.ohbm-com.com/blog/new-abs...

Scientific publishing norms were built for a world that no longer exists.

In this commentary, I argue that the future of scientific exchange may benefit from new channels of interaction and dissemination.

Label free, capillary-scale blood flow mapping in vivo reveals that low-intensity focused ultrasound evokes persistent dilation in cortical microvasculature - Communications Biology Capillary-scale blood flow mapping in vivo reveals that low intensity focused ultrasound evokes persistent dilation in cortical microvasculature

Label free, capillary-scale blood flow mapping in vivo reveals that low-intensity focused ultrasound evokes persistent dilation in cortical microvasculature
www.nature.com/articles/s42...

Faruk Gulban: Meso-Vessel Imaging with 7 T MRI YouTube video by Layer fMRI

Yesterday, @ofgulban.bsky.social gave a great talk about efficient imaging of small veins.
It was inspiring. Impressive how much information is there waiting to be harvested.
youtu.be/7wStzJNUXic?...

Neurosalience #S6E1 - Highlights of season 5 and looking ahead to season 6 YouTube video by Organization for Human Brain Mapping

A new season of OHBM Neurosalience has started. Here's our kickoff episode where I talk with Lead Producer, Michelle Li about highlights from the past season, reaching our 100th episode, the controversial DIANA paper from last year, and what to expect.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFcq...

We have an exciting 4-year PhD position available @maastrichtu.bsky.social focusing on intracranial EEG recordings to investigate how hippocampal ripples contribute to human memory processing.

For more info: tinyurl.com/r5c49zuy (closing date Nov 2nd)
Please help spread the word! #neurojobs

From the Aegean Bronze Age, Minoan clay vessels with black handpainted decoration.on a pale biscuity-coloured slip Top left - clay flask decorated in Minoan ‘Marine Style’’ with an octopus with tentacles writhing around the body of the vase. Additional motifs such as seaweed and rocks represent the seabed. From Palaikastro, 1500-1450 BC Top right - clay rhyton in the shape of a bull’s head. A rhyton is a type of pouring vessel used for filling cups or making liquid offerings. There is a pouring hole at the bull’s mouth. From Knossos Little Palace, 1450-1375 BC Bottom left - Nautilus vessel - clay rhyton depicting the seabed with nautili, corals and seaweed. From Phaistos Palace, 1500-1450 BC Bottom right - Basket shaped rhyton decorated with double-axe motif. There is a small pouring hole in one of the bottom corners. From Pseira, 1500-1450 BC

Marvellous Minoan clay vessels made by creative potters on the island of Crete during the Aegean Bronze Age around 3,500 years ago! 🤩

Heraklion Archaeological Museum 📷 by me

#Archaeology

'In 1953, while working a hotel switchboard, a college graduate named Shea Zellweger began a journey of wonder and obsession that would eventually lead to the invention of a radically new notation for logic' @cabinetmagazine.bsky.social

www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/18/we...

Mapping the dynamics of phyllotaxis in Palms.

Illustration from Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius’s Historia naturalis palmarum, issued in 10 parts, 1823-50

More on the blood motion artifact, and capturing it on 7 T MRI, see my 2022 paper: doi.org/10.1016/j.ne...

I call this artifact shortly "blood motion artifact", but in the past it was called "spatial misregistration of the vascular flow". See Larson et al. 1990, doi.org/10.2214/ajr....

One reason I developed LayNii IDA was to more easily explore my 0.35 mm multi echo human brain data. Here I’m observing blood motion artifacts across echos. The arterial signal *appear* to move across several millimeters. Best captured in short readout windows (e.g. ~3 ms readout windows in GRE).

The most primal generative experiences may be ones created by the visual cortex alone, or at least those involving the visual cortex in close collaboration with entheogenic triggers or light stimulation.

Subjective Visual Phenomena – Johann Purkinje, 1819

Computing geometric layers and columns on continuously improving human (f)MRI data Authors: Ömer Faruk Gülban, Renzo Huber | Date: April 2024 Chapter published here: Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) today is a common method to study the human brain. The popularity of …

We have published our book chapter “draft/preprint” on our blog and later added the DOI of the book chapter when it came out: layerfmri.com/2024/04/18/l...

I've always wanted to explore fMRI time series as a smooth, real-time movie. Now I can with LayNii IDA. Plus, with voxel-wise correlations on the fly.

Fast, intuitive, and surprisingly insightful.

40 ms TR fMRI data from @practicalfmri.bsky.social !

@layerfmri.bsky.social @afni-pt.bsky.social

One more: Marshall Xu is presenting our latest updates in mapping brainstem vasculature at poster #1759, where he did some nifty image transformations + VesselBoost segmentation to get our best results yet. Take a look!
@sbollmann.bsky.social @ofgulban.bsky.social
ww6.aievolution.com/hbm2501/Abst...

Very cool! Looking forward to the blog post and the data.

LayNii IDA Devlog #001 – A Meso-MRI GUI Is Born (Sort Of) YouTube video by ofgulban

Cool, would you mind sharing this data? I would like to explore the voxel-wise correlations in it, if possible (using LayNii IDA: youtu.be/ZFsBljNOcyw?...)

Let's Analyze E006 - Register 11.7 T human fMRI data YouTube video by ofgulban

Demonstrating anatomy-functional data registration of 11.7 T (!) partial-coverage human fMRI data at 0.7 × 0.7 × 0.8 mm resolution to help my colleague Alejandro Monreal-Madrigal.

Who did a great work with this spiral readout acquisition. The data quality looks quite good 👏

youtu.be/Cgf8i-Lqrac

LayNii IDA Devlog #001 – A Meso-MRI GUI Is Born (Sort Of) YouTube video by ofgulban

Devlog #1 for LayNii IDA, a GUI for meso-(f)MRI data

Featuring whole human brain MRI datasets at:
• 0.8 mm functional data
• 0.35 mm in vivo multi-echo anatomical data
• 0.075 mm ex vivo anatomical data

Chronicling the development journey of neuroimaging software.

youtu.be/ZFsBljNOcyw?...

Title text: "If you think curiosity without rigor is bad, you should see rigor without curiosity."

Alt text: https://explainxkcd.com/3101#Transcript

Grateful to these friends and collaborators who show up in the personal stories behind this post. Science communication isn’t just about clarity, it’s about connection: @sitek.bsky.social @k4tj4.bsky.social @r3rt0.bsky.social @mholla.bsky.social @layerfmri.bsky.social

Throughout history, people have shared ideas through the dominant communication tools of their time, cave paintings, handwritten letters, printed pamphlets, digital journals, blogs... What once seemed informal became formal. What once didn’t “count” eventually did. Today’s citation-worthy PDF may be tomorrow’s quaint artifact.

In this blog post I am exploring the strange tension between rigor, reach, and recognition in modern science.

What we gain (and lose) by just publishing the PDFs:
thingsonthings.org/just-publish...

Thank you!