Reply to: “No evidence of neural feature-specific pre-activation during the prediction of an upcoming stimulus”
Gianpaolo Demarchi, Thomas Hartmann, Anne Hauswald, Juliane Schubert, Lisa Reisinger, Pavlos Topalidis, Kaja Benz, Fabian Schmidt, Quirin Gehmacher, Nathan Weisz · 2026
Read Reply to: “No evidence of neural feature-specific pre-activation during the prediction of an upcoming stimulus” by Gianpaolo Demarchi, Thomas Hartmann, Anne Hauswald, Juliane Schubert, Lisa Reisinger, Pavlos Topalidis, Kaja Benz, Fabian Schmidt, Quirin Gehmacher, Nathan Weisz (2026) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/pmc-13212686.txt.
Description
Gianpaolo Demarchi and co-authors reply in 2026 to critics of their past claim that the brain readies itself for a sound it expects. The critics reworked the team's open data and said the key pattern could arise with no true prediction at all.
Their trick was to shuffle tones from random sets so the sets looked ordered, then decode them the same way. Scores rose just as in the real data, which they blamed on mix-ups between tones close in pitch. Demarchi's team says the fake data differ from real brain data once sounds start. They also warn that the shuffle may reuse test items in training, which inflates scores. They grant the critique makes fair points about method, but reject its broad claim.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Gianpaolo Demarchi, Thomas Hartmann, Anne Hauswald, Juliane Schubert, Lisa Reisinger, Pavlos Topalidis, Kaja Benz, Fabian Schmidt, Quirin Gehmacher, Nathan Weisz |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 21 KB |
| VERSION | 1.0 |
| LICENSE | CC BY 4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |