Making brain research popular…

This month was marked by multiple media appearances, including local and national radio and television. Our news release for the last month (see February 2021) about the first study of memory processing during a Deep Brain Stimulation surgery in Poland sparked a substantial amount of public interest. A short highlight material was broadcasted in the main issue of Teleexpress, together with a longer report in the regional Panorama. Dr. Kucewicz also gave a more comprehensive interview about this…

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First intra-operative recordings in Poland

We are delighted to share our next breakthrough with advancing clinical neuroscience research in Poland. This month we have recorded for the first time pupil responses to electrical stimulation in the deep brain structures called the basal ganglia. The recordings were part of a standard therapy for Parkinson’s disease and movement disorders called the Deep Brain Stimulation. In this therapy, electrical stimulation is delivered through special electrodes implanted in the brain of an awake patient…

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The new year of breakthroughs and harvest for the neuroscience in Poland

The beginning of 2021 was marked by a rapid acceleration of our endeavours to pioneer intracranial brain recordings and stimulation in Poland. Together with our project partners at the Wroclaw Medical University we implemented recently purchased, state-of-the-art system called ‘Atlas’ (by Neuralynx Inc.) for clinical and research electrophysiological studies in the human brain. Two entire days in Wroclaw were dedicated to assemble and present the system to a team of experts at the university hospital. The…

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Foundation for Polish Science extended funding for our First Team research project

We are closing the 2020 calendar year with great news about obtaining additional funding to support the main research project in our Brain and Mind Electrophysiology lab entitled: ‘Neurophysiological mapping and stimulation of the human brain for memory enhancement’. The decision was based on reviewing the progress and plans for continuing research in this project. One of the main discoveries made so far is a new area in the left frontal lobe of our cortex,…

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Invited presentation on the national “Zdrowie Polakow” congress

Dr. Kucewicz from our laboratory was invited to prepare a video talk about our work for the largest health conference in Poland. In the talk he described the latest methods that were developed in our group to analyze electrophysiological signals from the human brain. One of them employs an Artificial Intelligence (AI) approach to automatically select electrodes that record from brain regions that engage in memory functions without a need for expert review and manual selection. This approach also…

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How to decipher the code of the human mind? A new Interview with Dr. Kucewicz

Gdansk University of Technology (PG), where our BME lab is based, has received a prestigious recognition from the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education for the second best research university in the country (the top technical university). This recognition comes with new developments and investments not only in the research itself but also in public awareness and international promotion. A new interview with Dr. Kucewicz from our lab was published this month on the university website, pioneering…

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New student projects to help us ‘crack the code’ of verbal memory and predict its recall from eye movements

Karolina Kacprzycka joined our BME team to study how words are represented in the human brain. For this she will be using our latest intracranial recordings from Mayo Clinic patients performing tasks to remember words. We hypothesize that bursts of the fast brain waves (aka ‘high frequency oscillations’) in particular brain regions reflect firing of neuronal assemblies that encode particular words. If true, then these fast waves can be used to identify specific words being processed at…

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BME lab highlighted in the radio series about Gdansk University of Technology

Dr. Kucewicz was selected for one of the five interviews in a weekly series about the Gdansk University of Technology presented by Radio Gdansk. The series is dedicated to highlight some interesting research projects conducted at the university, which has recently received a national ministerial award for the best technical research university and the second best overall in the country. This was the third presentation that followed an interview with the chancellor, Prof. Wilde, and with a…

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Dr. Kucewicz and our research highlighted in a book about Gdansk

The story of our BME lab is one of the highlights of a new book entitled: ‘Gdansk wczoraj i dzis 1990-2020. 30 lat samorzadnosci’ (‘Gdansk yesterday and today 1990-2020. 30 years of the local government’), which was published on the anniversary of the first democratic local government elections. The book summarizes key achievements in the last thirty years of the city. Our story is in the education section (see the photo), relating back to the Fahrenheit scholarships for…

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Which hemisphere dominates your world?

We have not given up on our mission to promote and popularize neuroscience during the pandemic. On the contrary, virtual reality of teleconference meetings, online teaching and sharing videos opened an opportunity to reach a wider audience. Our lab was invited by the Experyment science center in Gdynia to create an educational video about a topic related to our research. The video we created explores the differences between the left and the right hemisphere of our brain… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXz3g7DtMog…