Psychiatry seminars

The last twenty years have witnessed extraordinarily rapid progress in basic neuroscience, including breakthrough technologies such as optogenetics, and the collection of unprecedented amounts of neuroimaging, genetic and other data relevant to neuroscience and mental health. However, the translation of this progress into improved understanding of brain function and dysfunction has been comparatively slow. As a result, the development of therapeutics for mental health has stagnated too. One central challenge has been to extract meaning from these large, complex, multivariate datasets, which requires a shift towards systems-level mathematical and computational approaches. A second challenge has been reconciling different scales of investigation, from genes and molecules to cells, circuits, tissue, whole-brain, and ultimately behaviour. In this talk I will describe several strands of work using mathematical, statistical, and bioinformatic methods to bridge these gaps. Topics will include: using artificial neural networks to link the organization of large-scale brain connectivity to cognitive function; using multivariate statistical methods to link disease-related changes in brain networks to the underlying biological processes; and using network-based approaches to move from genetic insights towards drug discovey. Finally, I will discuss how simple organisms such as C. elegans can serve to inspire, test, and validate new methods and insights in networks neuroscience.

Karl Deisseroth explains how light-sensitive microbial proteins became tools for investigating brain circuits in living, freely moving animals. By controlling selected classes of neurons, and sometimes individual cells, optogenetics allows researchers to ask how cellular activity contributes to behaviour and mental experience. The lecture connects the discovery and development of these tools with questions about emotions, the neural pathways that generate our inner experience, and processes disrupted in psychiatric illness. It considers both basic research and clinical possibilities, including the importance of neuronal and social connections for emotional well-being.

Given the complex and dynamic nature of our social relationships, the human brain needs to quickly learn and adapt to new social situations. The breakdown of any of these computations could lead to social deficits, as observed in many psychiatric disorders. In this talk, I will present our recent neurocomputational and intracranial work that attempts to model both 1) how humans dynamically adapt beliefs about other people and 2) how individuals can exert influence over social others through model-based forward thinking. Lastly, I will present our findings of how impaired social computations might manifest in different disorders such as addiction, delusion, and autism. Taken together, these findings reveal the dynamic and proactive nature of human interactions as well as the clinical significance of these high-order social processes.

In this talk series, addiction neuroscientists from across the world share their personal stories/experiences on the beauty of addiction neuroscience and how/why they have decided to invest their scientific life in this field. We hope that this talk series would encourage and support a new generation of young and passionate addiction neuroscientists in different countries to revolutionize the field of addiction medicine.

How inclusive and diverse is non-invasive brain stimulation in the treatment of psychiatric disorders?Indira Tendolkar, Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behavior, Department of Psychiatry. Mental illness is associated with a huge socioeconomic burden worldwide, with annual costs only in the Netherlands of €22 billion. Over two decades of cognitive and affective neuroscience research with modern tools of neuroimaging and neurophysiology in humans have given us a wealth of information about neural circuits underlying the main symptom domains of psychiatric disorders and their remediation. Neuromodulation entails the alteration of these neural circuits through invasive (e.g., DBS) or non-invasive (e.g., TMS) techniques with the aim of improving symptoms and/or functions and enhancing neuroplasticity. In my talk, I will focus on neuromodulation studies using repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) as a relatively safe, noninvasive method, which can be performed simultaneously with neurocognitive interventions. Using the examples of two chronifying mental illnesses, namely obsessive compulsive disorders and major depressive disorder (MDD), I will review the concept of "state dependent" effects of rTMS and highlight how simultaneous or sequential cognitive interventions could help optimize rTMS therapy by providing further control of ongoing neural activity in targeted neural networks. Hardly any attention has been paid to diversity aspects in the studies. By including studies from low- and middle income countries, I will discuss the potential of non-invasive brain stimulation from a transcultural perspective.

In this talk series, addiction neuroscientists from across the world share their personal stories/experiences on the beauty of addiction neuroscience and how/why they have decided to invest their scientific life in this field. We hope that this talk series would encourage and support a new generation of young and passionate addiction neuroscientists in different countries to revolutionize the field of addiction medicine.

Mental Health problems among youth constitutes an area of significant social, educational, clinical, policy and public health concern. Understanding processes and mechanisms that underlie the development of mental health problems during childhood and adolescence requires theoretical and methodological integration across multiple scientific domains, including developmental science, neuroscience, genetics, education and prevention science. The primary focus of this presentation is to examine the relative role of genetic and family environmental influences on children’s emotional and behavioural development. Specifically, a complementary array of genetically sensitive and longitudinal research designs will be employed to examine the role of early environmental adversity (e.g. inter-parental conflict, negative parenting practices) relative to inherited factors in accounting for individual differences in children’s symptoms of psychopathology (e.g. depression, aggression, ADHD ). Examples of recent applications of this research to the development of evidence-based intervention programmes aimed at reducing psychopathology in the context of high-risk family settings will also be presented.

In this talk series, addiction neuroscientists from across the world share their personal stories/experiences on the beauty of addiction neuroscience and how/why they have decided to invest their scientific life in this field. We hope that this talk series would encourage and support a new generation of young and passionate addiction neuroscientists in different countries to revolutionize the field of addiction medicine.

Risk occupies a central role in both the theory and practice of decision-making. Although it is deeply implicated in many conditions involving dysfunctional behavior and thought, modern theoretical approaches to understanding and mitigating risk in either one-shot or sequential settings, which are derived largely from finance and economics, have yet to permeate fully the fields of neural reinforcement learning and computational psychiatry. I will discuss the use of dynamic and static versions of one prominent approach, namely conditional value-at-risk, to examine both the nature of risk avoidant choices, encompassing such things as justified gambler's fallacies, and the optimal planning that can lead to consideration of such choices, with implications for offline, ruminative, thinking.

The cognitive neuroscience of conscious perception has seen considerable growth over the past few decades. Confirming an influential hypothesis driven by earlier studies of neuropsychological patients, we have found that the lateral and polar prefrontal cortices play important causal roles in the generation of subjective experiences. However, this basic empirical finding has been hotly contested by researchers with different theoretical commitments, and the differences are at times difficult to resolve. To address the controversies, I suggest one alternative venue may be to look for clinical applications derived from current theories. I outline an example in which we used closed-loop fMRI combined with machine learning to nonconsciously manipulate the physiological responses to threatening stimuli, such as spiders or snakes. A clinical trial involving patients with phobia is currently taking place. I also outline how this theoretical framework may be extended to other diseases. Ultimately, a truly meaningful understanding of the fundamental nature of our mental existence should lead to useful insights for our colleagues on the clinical frontlines. If we use this as a yardstick, whoever loses the esoteric theoretical debates, both science and the patients will always win.