Brain stimulation is increasingly used to modulate neural activity, with applications ranging from basic neuroscience to clinical interventions in epilepsy, depression, Parkinson’s disease, and disorders of consciousness. Yet one major challenge remains: the same stimulation can sometimes produce different effects depending on when it is delivered. This suggests that the brain is not a passiveLire la suite « Phase-dependent brain stimulation: why dynamic functional connectivity matters »
Archives de l’auteur : Equipe éditoriale
Detecting conscious perception in preverbal infants through Event Related Variability
A major challenge in developmental cognitive neuroscience is that preverbal infants cannot tell us what they perceive. This is especially difficult when studying conscious perception: how can we know whether an infant actually saw a stimulus, rather than merely processed it unconsciously? In this study, led by François Leroy and Ghislaine Dehaene at NeuroSpin, Saclay,Lire la suite « Detecting conscious perception in preverbal infants through Event Related Variability »
How basal ganglia subnetworks tune decision policies to increase reward rate
Adaptive decision-making is not only about choosing the correct option. It also requires choosing at the right speed. In uncertain environments, the brain must continuously manage the trade-off between accuracy and reaction time: waiting longer can improve decisions, but waiting too long may reduce reward rate. How cortico-basal ganglia-thalamic (CBGT) circuits learn to tune thisLire la suite « How basal ganglia subnetworks tune decision policies to increase reward rate »
Optimal inhibitory-to-excitatory balance for flexible brain communication
Neural oscillations are among the brain’s main strategies for coordinating activity across cells and circuits. Different frequency bands are often associated with different computational roles: slower rhythms can support long-range coordination, while faster rhythms such as gamma are thought to help structure local processing and information transfer. Yet an important question remains open: how canLire la suite « Optimal inhibitory-to-excitatory balance for flexible brain communication »
40 Hz light stimulation restores brain dynamics and memory in an early Alzheimer’s disease mouse model
Alzheimer’s disease is often described in terms of its “hardware” damage: amyloid plaques, tau pathology, neuronal loss, and progressive structural degeneration. But before the brain is visibly damaged, its activity may already be changing. In this study, we asked whether early Alzheimer-like alterations could be detected not only in brain structure, but in brain dynamicsLire la suite « 40 Hz light stimulation restores brain dynamics and memory in an early Alzheimer’s disease mouse model »
L-Dopa reshapes aperiodic brain bursts in Parkinson’s disease
Parkinson’s disease is classically associated with abnormal rhythmic activity in cortico-basal ganglia circuits, especially excessive beta-band synchronization. Yet brain activity is not made only of regular oscillations. It also contains brief, irregular, aperiodic bursts that propagate across regions and may reflect the brain’s capacity to flexibly coordinate distributed activity. In this study, in collaboration withLire la suite « L-Dopa reshapes aperiodic brain bursts in Parkinson’s disease »
What if all these different oscillations where entangled in a network of interdependence?
Linking neural activity to sensory, motor or cognitive processes is an ongoing goal in Neuroscience and articular attention has been devoted to the role of brain oscillations, analyzed by averaging over many trials in suitably designed tasks. Previous findings offer a glimpse of the complexity of the overall picture, but have also limitations. First, searchingLire la suite « What if all these different oscillations where entangled in a network of interdependence? »
CBGTPy: a flexible virtual laboratory for biological decision-making
Decision-making depends on the coordinated activity of cortico-basal ganglia-thalamic circuits. These circuits help the brain evaluate alternatives, select actions, suppress inappropriate responses, and learn from reward. Yet they are difficult to study because behavior emerges from interactions between many pathways, timescales, and cell populations. CBGTPy was developed to make these interactions easier to model, manipulate,Lire la suite « CBGTPy: a flexible virtual laboratory for biological decision-making »
A hypothalamus–habenula circuit for individual risk preference
When faced with a safe option and a risky option of similar expected value, individuals often show stable preferences: some consistently avoid risk, whereas others are more willing to accept uncertainty. How such individual risk preference is represented in neural circuits has remained poorly understood. Yaroslav Sych contributed to investigate how the brain encodes riskLire la suite « A hypothalamus–habenula circuit for individual risk preference »
Mapping the energy landscape of cognition in adolescent-onset schizophrenia
Cognitive difficulties are among the most disabling aspects of schizophrenia, and they are often particularly severe in adolescent-onset schizophrenia. Yet standard neuroimaging analyses usually focus either on regional activation — which areas are more or less active — or on functional connectivity — which areas fluctuate together. In this study, in collaboration with Konasale PrasadLire la suite « Mapping the energy landscape of cognition in adolescent-onset schizophrenia »