Funded Awards

Project Abstract This project is a pilot clinical trial of a new brain stimulation treatment for obsessive-compulsive disorder. OCD is a mental illness that affects 4-7 million people in the US. Of those, 50-70% still have substantial symptoms after being treated with medication or talk therapy.

SUMMARY We present Connectome 2.0, the next-generation human MRI scanner for imaging structural anatomy and connectivity spanning the microscopic, mesoscopic and macroscopic scales.

Learning from feedback in the real w'orld is limited by constant fluctuations in reward outcomes associated with choosing certain options or actions.

Mental health diseases such as depression are a major burden on society and new treatment options are strongly needed. One strategic goal of NIMH is to develop novel therapies based on discoveries in neuroscience.

The first major goal of this work is to learn how certain brain regions (olfactory system, hippocampus, and cerebellum) learn very complex stimuli that employ a combinatorial code to identify stimuli as points in a high-dimensional space.

Different parts of the brain share and transmit Information through long-range connections that connect nerve cells in each part of the brain with nerve cells in other brain areas.

Human brainstem serves many plays critical roles in health and disease. Unfortunately, it has been vastly under-studied because of its physical inaccessibility in animal models, and its low contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR) for functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in human studies.

Deep Neural Network Approaches for Closed- Loop Deep Brain Stimulation Using Cortical and Subcortical Sensing Principal Investigators: R. Mark Richardson, MD, PhD, Department ofNeurologicaJ Surgery and Robert S.

The striking spatial correlates of hippocampal place cells and grid cells have provided unique insights into how the brain constructs internal, cognitive representations of the environment and uses these representations to guide behavior.

There have been remarkable advances in imaging technology, used routinely and pervasively in many human studies, that non-invasively measures human brain structure and function.

The network of peripheral nerves offers extraordinary potential for modulating and/or monitoring the functioning of internal organs or the brain. The nervous system functions by generating patterns of neural activity.

Collaborating Pis and Consultant United States Pl: Anitha Pasupathy, Dept. of Biological Structure, University of Washington, Seattle, USA Co-Pl: Wyeth Bair, Dept. of Biological Structure, University of Washington, Seattle, USA Japan Pl: lsamu Motoyoshi, Dept.

Dendritic spines mediate essentially all excitatory connections and are thus critical elements in the brain but their function is still poorly understood. In particular, a key question is whether or not they are electrical compartments.

When we speak, listeners hear us and understand us we speak correctly. But we also hear ourselves, and this auditory feedback affects our ongoing speech: delaying it causes dysfluency; perturbing its pitch or formants induces compensation.

Understanding how different parts of the brain communicate is perhaps the most fundamental question of neuroscience because it is at the heart of understanding all brain functions and disorders.

Tracking fast unpredictable movements is a valuable skill, applicable in many situations. In the animal kingdom, the context includes the action of a predator chasing its prey that is running and dodging at high speeds, like a cheetah chasing a gazelle.

Humans and other animals can choose their actions using multiple learning algorithms and decision­ making strategies.

Real-time neural decoding centers on predicting behavior variables based on neural activity data, where the prediction is performed at a pace that reliably keeps up with the speed of the activity that is being monitored.

Dopamine (DA) neurons are fundamental to many aspects of behavior, and dysfunction of the DA system contributes to a wide range of disorders, including drug addiction. How does DA contribute to such a diversity of functions and dysfunctions?

A fundamental goal for understanding the brain and mammalian and human intelligence, and to understand how processing goes awry in genetic and developmental diseases, is to understand the principles of operation of cerebral cortex.