Topic: electrical stimulation

Attractors play a key role in a wide range of processes including learning, memory, decision making and navigation. Due to recent innovations in recording methods, there is increasing evidence for the existence of attractor dynamics in the brain. Yet, our understanding of how these attractors emerge or disappear in a biological system is lacking. In vitro cultured cortical neurons have been used extensively as a realistic experimental tool to understand the underlying mechanisms in neuronal assemblies. One of the main characteristics of the activity of such networks are the spontaneous synchro

The development of circuit-based therapeutics to treat neurological and neuropsychiatric diseases require detailed localization and understanding of electrophysiological signals in the human brain. Electrodes can record and stimulate circuits in many ways, and we often rely on non-invasive imaging methods to predict the location to implant electrodes. However, electrophysiological and imaging signals measure the underlying tissue in a fundamentally different manner. To integrate multimodal data and benefit from these complementary measurements, I will describe an approach that considers how di

Electrical stimulation of a neural population may enable direct experiments relating local population activity with subsequent neural or behavioral processes. However, current stimulation approaches do not attempt precise control of population activity, in part due to the difficulty of characterizing diverse neural responses to varied stimulation patterns. We address this gap by building deep network models that extract neuronal spiking responses through stimulation and predict population responses to arbitrary spatiotemporal stimulation trains. To assess the tractability of training accurate

The vagus nerve is a major pathway by which the brain and the body communicate. Electrical stimulation of the vagus nerve (VNS) is widely used as a therapeutic intervention for epilepsy and there is compelling evidence that it can enhance recovery following stroke. Our work demonstrates that VNS exerts a robust excitatory effect on the brain. First, we establish that VNS triggers an increase in arousal state as measured by behavioral state change. This behavioral state change is linked to an increase in excitatory activity within the cortex. We also show that cholinergic and noradrenergic neur