What do cortical activity patterns tell us?

Date: Friday, April 4, 2014
Time: 13:00 - 17:00, followed by drinks
Place: Utrecht Se7en(route)
Registration: Limited to 60 participants. Deadline April 1; register here
Program committee: Nick Ramsey, Jaap van Pelt, Rembrandt Bakker, Paul Tiesinga

Source youtube, David Gow.
When probing the collective behavior of populations of neurons, the typical asynchronous irregular spiking behavior of the individual neurons does not cancel out. On the contrary, the collective behavior produces very characteristic activity patterns. Do these patterns serve a particular purpose or do they simply reflect the network topology? Are they related to function, and why are they so different when we sleep or are anesthetized? The superficial electrical behavior of the brain has been measurable for ages, and the advances in brain imaging make them even more intriguing. Even at the coarse resolution of fMRI signals we find consistent macro-scale statistical corellation patterns. What are these patterns trying to tell us?

In this workshop five speakers will address the characteristics and the potential meaning of oscillations in electrical and haemodynamic brain signals.

Program (some titles provisional)
12:45 Doors open and coffee
13:05 Workshop introduction
13:10 Nick Ramsey
(UMC Utrecht)		 Decoding neural activity in space en time, and BCI implants
13:50 Martijn van den Heuvel
(UMC Utrecht)		 Network analysis of connectome data
14:30 Conrado A. Bosman
(University of Amsterdam)		 Increasing the efficiency of neuronal processing through neuronal synchronization
abstract The talk is about how electrocorticography (ECoG) allows us to directly observe brain networks during several cognitive tasks and to disentangle neuronal network patterns of communication during several cognitive tasks. These networks interact through phase synchronization of the on-going LFP-spike activity. In the first part of my talk, I will show how during visual free viewing, specific patterns of gamma (30-80 Hz) band activity in visual area V1 and V4 are observed during visual free viewing in monkeys. In addition, how selective synchronization of gamma band activity between V1 and V4 implements selective attention in these networks. In the second part of my talk, I will show how the directionality patterns of different frequency bands can predict the anatomical hierarchy of the visual system. I will finish with the results of a combined ECoG-LFP, single-unit spike study that show how gamma synchronization increases -and spike rate decreases- through stimulus repetition in visual areas; which introduces the concept of how besides dynamic routing of information; neuronal entrainment to cortical rhythms can facilitate neuronal process with less metabolic costs
15:00 Coffee break
15:20 Francesco Battaglia
(Radboud Univ. Nijmegen)
Cortico-hippocampal assemblies for decision making and memory
16:00 Mathijs Raemaekers
(UMC Utrecht)		 Resting state connecivity
16:40 Plenary discussion
17:00 Drinks


Route to Poort van Kleef

Walk from Utrecht Central Station into shopping mall Hoog Catharijne, take a right after 50m at ABN-AMRO. Walk past the Albert Heijn, and leave the mall at exit 'Moreelsepark'. Go left, cross Catharijnesingel, continue for 150m on Mariaplaats, follow the right turn and find Grand Café Carré on the left hand side. Inside Café Carré there is a white door that hides the stairway to the Poort van Kleef meeting center.

Date/period: 
Friday, April 4, 2014 - 13:00
Location: 
Utrecht near Central Station
Date status: 
Fixed
Organizer: 
NeuroInformatics.NL