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Reposted by Joel I Berger

Melissa Franch, PhD @mfranch.bsky.social · Feb 27

I am incredibly proud to share my first, first-author paper as a postdoc with @benhayden.bsky.social . How does the human hippocampus, known for encoding concepts, represent the meanings of words while listening to narrative speech?
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

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Reposted by Joel I Berger

Oscar Woolnough @owoolnough.bsky.social · Feb 24

Out now in Nature Comms. To learn a new word, we need to remember it. We track factors driving memory of novel words, showing which words we remember or forget is predictable across people, and isolate a distinct region of fusiform cortex sensitive to this memorability.

🧠📈 #VisionScience 🧠💬

🧵👇

Memorability of novel words correlates with anterior fusiform activity during reading - Nature Communications

To learn new written words, we need to be able to remember their associated letters. Here, the authors show the factors that predict how memorable or forgettable new words are and show a region of hum...

doi.org

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Joel I Berger @joelberger.bsky.social · Mar 14

These results also constitute some of the only - if not the only (to my knowledge!) - reports of single neurons from human anterior insula. Reports from auditory cortex and posterior insula are also surprisingly scarce. Thanks as always to our amazing patients and my awesome co-authors. (5/5)

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Joel I Berger @joelberger.bsky.social · Mar 14

Overall, these results are consistent with what others have shown in LFPs, though usually those are examined in behaviorally-relevant contexts. These findings highlight that insula cares about fundamental sound attributes, which is important to know when considering responses to other stimuli. (4/5)

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Joel I Berger @joelberger.bsky.social · Mar 14

Many of these neurons also showed clear preferred tuning to particular tone frequencies - completely unsurprising for auditory cortex, but an interesting finding for insula. An important aspect is that there was no task required, so there was no behavioral context for these stimuli. (3/5)

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Joel I Berger @joelberger.bsky.social · Mar 14

We find that the activity of ~30% of posterior insula neurons and up to ~15% of anterior insula neurons is significantly modulated in response to these basic sounds. The latencies of these responses are very similar to primary auditory cortex, though the responses are much more transient. (2/5)

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Joel I Berger @joelberger.bsky.social · Mar 14

Our new preprint is up now, wherein we directly record from a relatively large population of single neurons in human insula, as well as primary auditory cortex, while intracranial participants passively listen to simple sounds (tones/clicks). doi.org/10.1101/2025... (1/5) 🧠📈🧵👇

Human insula neurons respond to simple sounds during passive listening

The insula is critical for integrating sensory information from the body with that arising from the environment. Although previous studies suggest that posterior insula is sensitive to sounds, auditor...

doi.org

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Joel I Berger @joelberger.bsky.social · Mar 14

Thank you very much, Liberty! Your awesome work was particularly an inspiration for putting this together, though it's hard to fully convey that in a paper.

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Reposted by Joel I Berger

Earl K. Miller @earlkmiller.bsky.social · Mar 21

New results!

Despite their varied molecular actions, anesthetics alter brain wave alignment in the same way.

Convergent effects of different anesthetics are due to changes in phase alignment of cortical oscillations
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
#neuroscience

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Joel I Berger @joelberger.bsky.social · Feb 21

Thanks as always to my co-authors, and you for reading this! 4/4

Joel I Berger @joelberger.bsky.social · Feb 21

Ultimately, we hope that by clarifying the specific roles of various brain regions in tinnitus, we can start to work towards considering novel treatment approaches that might better account for differences in symptoms and treatment response across individuals. 3/4

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Joel I Berger @joelberger.bsky.social · Feb 21

The idea is to re-focus the specific role of this brain structure in tinnitus. In most other literature outside of tinnitus, the hippocampus being involved in maintaining memories is pretty uncontroversial, while in tinnitus it's most often referred to in an "emotional" role. 2/4

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Joel I Berger @joelberger.bsky.social · Feb 21

Our new paper on tinnitus and the hippocampus is out now in Human Brain Mapping: doi.org/10.1002/hbm.... The TL;DR is that we are highlighting a role for the hippocampus that focuses on sustaining the memory of a phantom percept, based on current literature. 1/4
🧠📈 #PsychSciSky

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Joel I Berger @joelberger.bsky.social · Jan 26

Our study examining intracranial responses to vocoded speech, relevant to cochlear implants, is out now ( www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.... ), led by Kirill Nourski & Mitch Steinschneider. Some very interesting dorsal/ventral stream differences dependent on task performance.

Intracranial electrophysiology of spectrally degraded speech in the human cortex

Cochlear implants (CIs) are the treatment choice for severe to profound hearing loss. Variability in CI outcomes remains despite advances in technology and is attributed in part to differences in cort...

www.frontiersin.org

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Joel I Berger @joelberger.bsky.social · Nov 10

I'll be presenting the poster below at APAN this afternoon and SfN on Tuesday afternoon, based on the intracranial local field potential and unit data we collect at Iowa. Come and say hi! Thank you to my lovely colleagues and our patients 🧠🟦

A poster on auditory working memory local field potential and single neuron data collected intracranially in humans.

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Reposted by Joel I Berger

Cogan Lab @coganlab.bsky.social · Nov 6

Our work on decoding speech using high-density micro-scale recordings was published today in Nature Communications! We demonstrate the potential of high-spatial sampling technology for future neural speech prostheses.
nature.com/articles/s4146…
The thread below outlines our main findings.

https://nature.com/articles/s4146…

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Reposted by Joel I Berger

Micah G. Allen @micahgallen.com · Nov 2

Have you heard that PLOS Mental Health is now open for submissions? Learn more about this new global, multidisciplinary #OpenAccess journal: plos.io/MHOpen

PLOS Mental Health

plos.io

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Reposted by Joel I Berger

Sylvain Baillet @sylvainbaillet.bsky.social · Oct 25

We publish today with @alexwiesman.bsky.social in Progress in Neurobiology another advance in the fight against Parkinson’s disease.

Slowing of 🧠 activity is not systematically an adverse effect of pathology: it can also be a sign of compensatory activity that preserves cognitive functions.

Adverse and compensatory neurophysiological slowing in Parkinson’s disease

Patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD) exhibit multifaceted changes in neurophysiological brain activity, hypothesized to represent a global cortical …

www.sciencedirect.com

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Reposted by Joel I Berger

Micah G. Allen @micahgallen.com · Oct 25

Are you a neuroscientist who recently joined Blue Sky? Don't forget to like and pin #neuroskyence, the largest channel for all things brain-science related! You can post with #neuroskyence or 🧠🟦 ! #psychscisky 🧪 #academicsky bsky.app/profile/did:...

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Joel I Berger @joelberger.bsky.social · Oct 22

I will do - he was speaking highly of you the other day, in fact!

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Joel I Berger @joelberger.bsky.social · Oct 21

Thanks as always to my co-authors, Sukhbinder Kunar, Paris Ash, Ester Benzaquén and Phil Gander, as well as everyone who took part in the large online misophonia study. And you, for getting to the end of this thread! (6/6)

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Joel I Berger @joelberger.bsky.social · Oct 21

Ultimately, all of this works towards reframing misophonia in a way that we can properly understand the mechanisms behind the disorder and lead towards developing effective treatments for individuals with misophonia. (5/6)

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Joel I Berger @joelberger.bsky.social · Oct 21

In the second paper, Sukhbinder, Phil & I frame misophonia within a social cognitive framework, highlighting that a sound-based model of misophonia misses key components, such as importance of social context, involvement of motor cortex & insula, and high mimicry prevalence. (4/6)

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Joel I Berger @joelberger.bsky.social · Oct 21

Mimicry is elicited most frequently during orofacial trigger sounds and can often provide some degree of relief. These results and previous imaging literature highlight the importance of the perception of the actions of others in triggering misophonia. Hence the next paper... (3/6)

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Joel I Berger @joelberger.bsky.social · Oct 21

The first paper was based on hypotheses created by some of Sukhbinder's and others' earlier fMRI findings, which implicated the motor cortex in misophonia, as well as anecdotal and small case reports. In a large cohort, we find a high prevalence of mimicry in misophonia (2/6)

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