Our latest results presented on the world’s largest neuroscience conference 25 października 2019 – Posted in: News – Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Our BME lab demonstrated exciting new findings from the Ph.D. projects of Victoria Marks (Mayo Graduate School) and Cagdas Topcu (Gdansk University of Technology) at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in Chicago, USA, which was attended by almost 30 000 brain scientists from all across the globe. Tory and Cagdas had a chance to discuss and share their analysis results presented as posters with other peers and experts from the field and beyond. Theo Thayib also joined us at the conference as a guest to present his recent video revealing brain wave activity underlying remembering of words (see July BME news for more details). All three projects provide converging evidence for a special role of the brain region localized in the very front tip of our head called the frontal pole, which has not been observed in the previous studies. Thanks to a very comprehensive analysis approach that Tory and Cagdas took in their projects, and insights from the video created by Theo, we were able to identify a new ‚hotspot’ for verbal memory in the human brain.

These results address the three questions posed in our First Team grant from the Foundation for Polish Science: WHERE, WHEN and WHAT activity is underlying memory processing in the brain? We now begin to understand how slow brain wave activities in the ‚theta’ frequencies (cycling a few times every second) can support encoding of words at specific times of their presentation. Hence, the frontal pole presents a new target for modulating this encoding process with electrical or other stimulation to improve subsequent recall from memory. We are now working on preparing these results for journal publications and look forward to letting you know once these will be available!