ABSTRACT Humans can skillfully control their grasp during actions as complex and dynamic as swinging a tennis racket, and as simple and static as holding a briefcase. Both tasks require the use of sensory feedback to achieve and maintain an appropriate grasp force. There is evidence that motor and somatosensory cortices communicate task-relevant information in order to enable skillful movement.
Abstract: The long-term objective of this application is to understand cortical processing of sensory to motor transformations within the human cerebral cortex. A vast number of computations must be performed to achieve sensory-guided motor control. Standing out among these computations, visual information of the goals of action must be transformed from the coordinates of the retina to the coordinates of effectors used for movement, for instance limb coordinates for reaching under visual guidance and to world coordinates for interactions in the environment.
PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT Episodic memories integrate the content of human experience in space and time and constitute the core of one's identity. Memory formation involves processing, and constructing interpretations of the incoming information in our daily lives and is one of the first functions compromised in neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's Disease.
Reading involves complex transformations of word forms, with visual input mapped to lexical, semantic and phonological systems in less than a second. While much has been learned about the neuroanatomy of reading from functional imaging and lesion studies, the dynamic and interactive properties of this system remain largely unknown.
PROJECT SUMMARY Many pain syndromes are notoriously refractory to almost all treatment and pose significant costs to patients and society. Deep brain stimulation (DBS) for refractory pain disorders showed early promise but demonstration of long-term efficacy is lacking. Current DBS devices provide “open-loop” continuous stimulation and thus are prone to loss of effect owing to nervous system adaptation and a failure to accommodate natural fluctuations in chronic pain states.
Project Abstract Essential Tremor (ET) is a progressive disease that leads to significant disability and markedly diminished quality of life. Deep brain stimulation (DBS) in the ventralis intermedius (VIM) thalamus has been an effective treatment for ET control, but is associated with problematic side effects (e.g. dysarthia, imbalance) and may lose efficacy over time in people with severe ET. The ability to improve tremor control and reduce side effects with multifocal, current steering DBS techniques will be an important advance to the field.
Gait impairment and Freezing of gait (FOG), lead to falls, injury (even death), loss of independent living, and are common in neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s Disease (PD), affecting over 7 million people worldwide. The incidence of neurodegenerative diseases increases with age and as the population lives longer, the societal consequences of FOG, will be very significant.
Project Summary/Abstract Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) refractory to treatment is marked by failure of fear extinction and its biological substrate, amygdala reactivity to trauma reminders13,14. Decades of research have clarified the neuronal mechanisms coordinating fear extinction and consolidation15. Fear cells and extinction cells in the basolateral amygdala (BLA) alter their firing rate based on the nature of the stimulus and the influence from the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and the ventral hippocampus (vHPC)16,17.
For many years brain-computer interfaces (BCI's) have been explored as a means of restoring communication to patients with Locked-In Syndrome (LIS), a devastating and often irreversible neurological condition in which cognition is intact but nearly all motor output from the brain is interrupted, effectively cutting off communication with the outside world. To date non-invasive BCI's (e.g.
Abstract Recent technological advances have led to the realization recording devices that can sample neuronal activity from up to a few hundred channels in a limited area. These innovations reveal the importance of understanding circuit computations – and highlight the current inability to record individual neuron spiking activity across multiple scales, particularly without creating a prohibitive cost barrier.
