Publications related to Towards a unified understanding of synaptic plasticity : parsimonious modeling and simulation of the glutamatergic synapse life-cycle

A bistable inhibitory optoGPCR for multiplexed optogenetic control of neural circuits

Information is transmitted between brain regions through the release of neurotransmitters from long-range projecting axons. Understanding how the activity of such long-range connections contributes to behavior requires efficient methods for reversibly mani ...

Nature Portfolio2024

Subcortical correlates of consciousness with human single neuron recordings

Michael Eric Anthony Pereira, Olaf Blanke, Nathan Quentin Faivre, Fosco Bernasconi

Subcortical brain structures such as the basal ganglia or the thalamus are involved in regulating motor and cognitive behavior. However, their contribution to perceptual consciousness is still unclear, due to the inherent difficulties of recording subcorti ...

2024

Small-scale robotic devices for medical interventions in the brain

Lorenzo Francesco John Noseda, Mahmut Selman Sakar

This article summarizes the recent advancements in the design, fabrication, and control of microrobotic devices for the diagnosis and treatment of brain disorders. With a focus on diverse actuation methods, we discuss how advancements in materials science ...

2024

Fast adaptation to rule switching using neuronal surprise

Wulfram Gerstner, Martin Louis Lucien Rémy Barry

In humans and animals, surprise is a physiological reaction to an unexpected event, but how surprise can be linked to plausible models of neuronal activity is an open problem. We propose a self-supervised spiking neural network model where a surprise signa ...

2024

White adipose tissue distribution and amount are associated with increased white matter connectivity

Jean-Philippe Thiran, Elda Fischi Gomez, Gabriel Girard, Philipp Johannes Koch, Liana Okudzhava

Obesity represents a significant public health concern and is linked to various comorbidities and cognitive impairments. Previous research indicates that elevated body mass index (BMI) is associated with structural changes in white matter (WM). However, a ...

Wiley2024

Driving and suppressing the human language network using large language models

Martin Schrimpf

Transformer models such as GPT generate human-like language and are predictive of human brain responses to language. Here, using functional-MRI-measured brain responses to 1,000 diverse sentences, we first show that a GPT-based encoding model can predict t ...

Nature Portfolio2024

Seeking the new, learning from the unexpected: Computational models of surprise and novelty in the brain

Alireza Modirshanechi

Human babies have a natural desire to interact with new toys and objects, through which they learn how the world around them works, e.g., that glass shatters when dropped, but a rubber ball does not. When their predictions are proven incorrect, such as whe ...

EPFL2024

The interplay between white adipose tissue, adipokines, and structural gray matter changes

Jean-Philippe Thiran, Elda Fischi Gomez, Gabriel Girard, Liana Okudzhava

The growing global obesity issue emphasizes the importance of understanding its health implications. Previous research has identified consistent alterations in gray matter (GM) volume in connection with obesity. Given the various implications of distinct f ...

Wiley2024

An immersive virtual reality tool for assessing left and right unilateral spatial neglect

Olaf Blanke, Andrea Serino, Roberta Ronchi

The reported rate of the occurrence of unilateral spatial neglect (USN) is highly variable likely due to the lack of validity and low sensitivity of classical tools used to assess it. Virtual reality (VR) assessments try to overcome these limitations by pr ...

Wiley2024

Parental status and markers of brain and cellular age: A 3D convolutional network and classification study

Donal Patrick Hill

Recent research shows prominent effects of pregnancy and the parenthood transition on structural brain characteristics in humans. Here, we present a comprehensive study of how parental status and number of children born/fathered links to markers of brain a ...

Pergamon-Elsevier Science Ltd2024

Involvement of prelimbic cortex neurons and related circuits in the acquisition of a cooperative learning by pairs of rats

Maria del Carmen Sandi Perez, Elias Georges Gebara, Ana del Rocio Conde Moro

Social behaviors such as cooperation are crucial for mammals. A deeper knowledge of the neuronal mechanisms underlying cooperation can be beneficial for people suffering from pathologies with impaired social behavior. Our aim was to study the brain activit ...

Springer2024

Non-invasive stimulation of the human striatum disrupts reinforcement learning of motor skills

Elena Beanato, Esra Neufeld, Friedhelm Christoph Hummel, Takuya Morishita, Maximilian Jonas Wessel, Traian Popa, Pierre Theopistos Vassiliadis, Julie Duqué, Fabienne Windel

Reinforcement feedback can improve motor learning, but the underlying brain mechanisms remain underexplored. In particular, the causal contribution of specific patterns of oscillatory activity within the human striatum is unknown. To address this question, ...

Nature Portfolio2024

Single-cell epigenomic reconstruction of developmental trajectories from pluripotency in human neural organoid systems

Fides Zenk

Cell fate progression of pluripotent progenitors is strictly regulated, resulting in high human cell diversity. Epigenetic modifications also orchestrate cell fate restriction. Unveiling the epigenetic mechanisms underlying human cell diversity has been di ...

Nature Portfolio2024

Task-driven neural network models predict neural dynamics of proprioception: Neural network model weights

Axel Bisi, Alberto Silvio Chiappa, Alexander Mathis, Alessandro Marin Vargas

Proprioception tells the brain the state of the body based on distributed sensors in the body. However, the principles that govern proprioceptive processing from those distributed sensors are poorly understood. Here, we employ a task-driven neural network ...

Zenodo2024

Non-invasive neuromodulation of the right temporoparietal junction using theta-burst stimulation in functional neurological disorder

Serafeim Loukas

Background Disrupted sense of agency (SoA)-the sense of being the agent of one's own actions-has been demonstrated in patients with functional neurological disorder (FND), and a key area of the corresponding neuronal network is the right temporoparietal ju ...

Bmj Publishing Group2024

Integrated Wireless Power, Data Communication, and Thermal Sensing System for Autonomous Multisite Brain Implants

Implanted medical devices (IMDs) have been widely developed to support the monitoring and recording of biological data inside the body or brain. Wirelessly powered IMDs, a subset of implantable electronics, have been proposed to eliminate the limitations r ...

EPFL2024

Trio preserves motor synapses and prolongs motor ability during aging

Evelyne Ruchti, Greta Limoni, Brian Donal McCabe, Wei Jiao, Soumya Banerjee, Samuel William Vernon

The decline of motor ability is a hallmark feature of aging and is accompanied by degeneration of motor synaptic terminals. Consistent with this, Drosophila motor synapses undergo characteristic age -dependent structural fragmentation co -incident with dim ...

Cell Press2024

Safety, tolerability and blinding efficiency of non-invasive deep transcranial temporal interference stimulation: first experience from more than 250 sessions

Elena Beanato, Friedhelm Christoph Hummel, Maximilian Jonas Wessel, Pierre Theopistos Vassiliadis, Fabienne Windel, Emma Marie D Stiennon

Objective. Selective neuromodulation of deep brain regions has for a long time only been possible through invasive approaches, because of the steep depth-focality trade-off of conventional non-invasive brain stimulation (NIBS) techniques. Approach. An appr ...

Iop Publishing Ltd2024

Probing and modulating inter-areal coupling in the cortical visual motion processing pathway with non-invasive brain stimulation

Michele Bevilacqua

In the last few years, stroke ranked as the second most common cause of death and is the third most significant condition affecting disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) worldwide. Being the most prevalent and quality of life impacting post-stroke symptom ...

EPFL2024

Unveiling the complexity of learning and decision-making

Wei-Hsiang Lin

Reinforcement learning (RL) is crucial for learning to adapt to new environments. In RL, the prediction error is an important component that compares the expected and actual rewards. Dopamine plays a critical role in encoding these prediction errors. In my ...

EPFL2024