In this final episode of the first season of the FENS‑EJN Journal Club, Matteo Piumatti speaks with Lisa Trost and Andries ter Maat from the Max Planck Institute for Biological Intelligence about their recent EJN publication on vocal communication in female zebra finches. Unlike males, females don’t sing. Yet their brains contain a reduced version of the same song‑control circuitry. So, what is this system doing?

Lisa and Andries walk us through their innovative freely‑behaving electrophysiology setup, what RA neurons reveal about different call types, and how these findings challenge long‑standing assumptions about female vocal behaviour and the evolution of the song system in birds.

Join us for this season finale as we dive into neural timing, communication, and the surprising complexity of these “non‑singing” females.

In this episode of the FENS-EJN Journal Club, Matteo Piumatti talks with Professor Paul Sauseng about the study by Sauseng and colleagues that won the EJN Best Publication Award in 2025.

The research set out to replicate a landmark paper that transformed the field by showing that transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS) could enhance working memory performance through fronto-parietal phase alignment at theta frequency. Paul explains the original approach, the challenges of reproducing such influential findings, and what his team discovered when testing both easy and demanding memory tasks. Tune in to learn whether this brain stimulation technique really works, why replication matters, and what these results reveal about the complexity, and evolution, of cognitive neuroscience.

What happens in your brain when you watch a live dance performance? In this episode of the FENS–EJN Journal Club, Dr Hanna Poikonen (ETH Zurich, GAIA Lab, and Wise Motion Community) joins Matteo Piumatti to discuss her study “Cortical oscillations are modified by expertise in dance and music: evidence from live dance audience.”

They explore how dancers, musicians, and non-experts engage differently at the neural level when watching live art, what brain synchrony tells us about expertise, and why taking neuroscience out of the lab might bring us closer to real life.