Brain-heart interactions at the edges of consciousness
Various clinical cases have provided evidence linking cardiovascular, neurological, and psychiatric disorders to changes in the brain-heart interaction. Our recent experimental evidence on patients with disorders of consciousness revealed that observing brain-heart interactions helps to detect residual consciousness, even in patients with absence of behavioral signs of consciousness. Those findings support hypotheses suggesting that visceral activity is involved in the neurobiology of consciousness and sum to the existing evidence in healthy participants in which the neural responses to heartbeats reveal perceptual and self-consciousness. Furthermore, the presence of non-linear, complex, and bidirectional communication between brain and heartbeat dynamics can provide further insights into the physiological state of the patient following severe brain injury. These developments on methodologies to analyze brain-heart interactions open new avenues for understanding neural functioning at a large-scale level, uncovering that peripheral bodily activity can influence brain homeostatic processes, cognition, and behavior.
From primate anatomy to human neuroimaging: insights into the circuits underlying psychiatric disease and neuromodulation; Large-scale imaging of neural circuits: towards a microscopic human connectome
On Thursday, October 26th, we will host Anastasia Yendiki and Suzanne Haber. Anastasia Yendiki, PhD, is an Associate Professor in Radiology at the Harvard Medical School and an Associate Investigator at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Athinoula A. Martinos Center. Suzanne Haber, PhD, is a Professor at the University of Rochester and runs a lab at McLean hospital at Harvard Medical School in Boston. She has received numerous awards for her work on neuroanatomy. Beside her scientific presentation, she will give us a glimpse at the “Person behind the science”. The talks will be followed by a shared discussion. You can register via talks.stimulatingbrains.org to receive the (free) Zoom link!
Vocal emotion perception at millisecond speed
The human voice is possibly the most important sound category in the social landscape. Compared to other non-verbal emotion signals, the voice is particularly effective in communicating emotions: it can carry information over large distances and independent of sight. However, the study of vocal emotion expression and perception is surprisingly far less developed than the study of emotion in faces. Thereby, its neural and functional correlates remain elusive. As the voice represents a dynamically changing auditory stimulus, temporally sensitive techniques such as the EEG are particularly informative. In this talk, the dynamic neurocognitive operations that take place when we listen to vocal emotions will be specified, with a focus on the effects of stimulus type, task demands, and speaker and listener characteristics (e.g., age). These studies suggest that emotional voice perception is not only a matter of how one speaks but also of who speaks and who listens. Implications of these findings for the understanding of psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia will be discussed.
How AI is advancing Clinical Neuropsychology and Cognitive Neuroscience
This talk aims to highlight the immense potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in advancing the field of psychology and cognitive neuroscience. Through the integration of machine learning algorithms, big data analytics, and neuroimaging techniques, AI has the potential to revolutionize the way we study human cognition and brain characteristics. In this talk, I will highlight our latest scientific advancements in utilizing AI to gain deeper insights into variations in cognitive performance across the lifespan and along the continuum from healthy to pathological functioning. The presentation will showcase cutting-edge examples of AI-driven applications, such as deep learning for automated scoring of neuropsychological tests, natural language processing to characeterize semantic coherence of patients with psychosis, and other application to diagnose and treat psychiatric and neurological disorders. Furthermore, the talk will address the challenges and ethical considerations associated with using AI in psychological research, such as data privacy, bias, and interpretability. Finally, the talk will discuss future directions and opportunities for further advancements in this dynamic field.
Linking GWAS to pharmacological treatments for psychiatric disorders
Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified multiple disease-associated genetic variations across different psychiatric disorders raising the question of how these genetic variants relate to the corresponding pharmacological treatments. In this talk, I will outline our work investigating whether functional information from a range of open bioinformatics datasets such as protein interaction network (PPI), brain eQTL, and gene expression pattern across the brain can uncover the relationship between GWAS-identified genetic variation and the genes targeted by current drugs for psychiatric disorders. Focusing on four psychiatric disorders---ADHD, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and major depressive disorder---we assess relationships between the gene targets of drug treatments and GWAS hits and show that while incorporating information derived from functional bioinformatics data, such as the PPI network and spatial gene expression, can reveal links for bipolar disorder, the overall correspondence between treatment targets and GWAS-implicated genes in psychiatric disorders rarely exceeds null expectations. This relatively low degree of correspondence across modalities suggests that the genetic mechanisms driving the risk for psychiatric disorders may be distinct from the pathophysiological mechanisms used for targeting symptom manifestations through pharmacological treatments and that novel approaches for understanding and treating psychiatric disorders may be required.
The Social Brain: From Models to Mental Health
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.
How inclusive and diverse is non-invasive brain stimulation in the treatment of psychiatric disorders?
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.
Multi-scale synaptic analysis for psychiatric/emotional disorders
Dysregulation of emotional processing and its integration with cognitive functions are central features of many mental/emotional disorders associated both with externalizing problems (aggressive, antisocial behaviors) and internalizing problems (anxiety, depression). As Dr. Joseph LeDoux, our invited speaker of this program, wrote in his famous book “Synaptic self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are”—the brain’s synapses—are the channels through which we think, act, imagine, feel, and remember. Synapses encode the essence of personality, enabling each of us to function as a distinctive, integrated individual from moment to moment. Thus, exploring the functioning of synapses leads to the understanding of the mechanism of (patho)physiological function of our brain. In this context, we have investigated the pathophysiology of psychiatric disorders, with particular emphasis on the synaptic function of model mice of various psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia, autism, depression, and PTSD. Our current interest is how synaptic inputs are integrated to generate the action potential. Because the spatiotemporal organization of neuronal firing is crucial for information processing, but how thousands of inputs to the dendritic spines drive the firing remains a central question in neuroscience. We identified a distinct pattern of synaptic integration in the disease-related models, in which extra-large (XL) spines generate NMDA spikes within these spines, which was sufficient to drive neuronal firing. We experimentally and theoretically observed that XL spines negatively correlated with working memory. Our work offers a whole new concept for dendritic computation and network dynamics, and the understanding of psychiatric research will be greatly reconsidered. The second half of my talk is the development of a novel synaptic tool. Because, no matter how beautifully we can illuminate the spine morphology and how accurately we can quantify the synaptic integration, the links between synapse and brain function remain correlational. In order to challenge the causal relationship between synapse and brain function, we established AS-PaRac1, which is unique not only because it can specifically label and manipulate the recently potentiated dendritic spine (Hayashi-Takagi et al, 2015, Nature). With use of AS-PaRac1, we developed an activity-dependent simultaneous labeling of the presynaptic bouton and the potentiated spines to establish “functional connectomics” in a synaptic resolution. When we apply this new imaging method for PTSD model mice, we identified a completely new functional neural circuit of brain region A→B→C with a very strong S/N in the PTSD model mice. This novel tool of “functional connectomics” and its photo-manipulation could open up new areas of emotional/psychiatric research, and by extension, shed light on the neural networks that determine who we are.
Developing a mouse incentive delay task
Monetary incentive delay task (MID) is a well-validated human functional MRI task widely used in probing affective-motivational processes in psychiatric disorders. We are developing a mouse version of the MID task in order to facilitate translations of findings from the wealth of human imaging studies. This talk presents our task design and behavioural data from the ongoing work.
Brain Awareness Week @ IITGN
A quarter century of the maddening hunt for madness genes: what is to be done
Towards better interoceptive biomarkers in computational psychiatry
Empirical evidence and theoretical models both increasingly emphasize the importance of interoceptive processing in mental health. Indeed, many mood and psychiatric disorders involve disturbed feelings and/or beliefs about the visceral body. However, current methods to measure interoceptive ability are limited in a number of ways, restricting the utility and interpretation of interoceptive biomarkers in psychiatry. I will present some newly developed measures and models which aim to improve our understanding of disordered brain-body interaction in psychiatric illnesses.
Sexual dimorphism of microglia
Sex differences in brain structure and function are of substantial scientific interest because of sex-related susceptibility to psychiatric and neurological disorders. Neuroinflammation is a common denominator of many of these diseases and thus microglia as the brain´s immunocompetent and instrumental cells has come into focus in sex specific studies. We and others show that male microglia are more frequent in specific brain areas and appear to have a higher potential to respond to stimuli, whereas female microglia seem to acquire a more “protective” phenotype.
The Dopamine Synapse and Learning
The actions of dopamine within the striatum are central to the selection of cortical and perhaps thalamic inputs that mediate learning throughout life, including during operant conditioning, reward and avoidance learning and the establishment of motor patterns. Dysfunction of these synaptic circuits during maturation or aging underlies many neurological, psychiatric and neurodevelopment disorders. We will discuss the biological sequences by which these synapses are altered as an animal interacts with the environment.