New BME lab video is going to show how the brain memorizes words!

Theodore Thayib joined our BME lab as a summer undergrad student to help us with a challenging task to visualize brain activity collected from over 150 patients remembering lists of words. Theo’s skills and talents in computer sciences, which he studies as major at the Iowa State University, enabled us to follow the brain waves that underlie thinking and memorizing words across multiple dimensions of the 3D brain anatomy, time of word presentation, and six different…

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Our article is in the top 100 neuroscience Scientific Reports papers in 2018

It is our great pleasure to announce that our recent discovery published in the article entitled: ‚Pupil size reflects successful encoding and recall of memory in humans’ received over two thousand article views in 2018, placing it as one of the top 100 read neuroscience papers for the Nature group journal Scientific Reports. The journal published more than 1600 neuroscience papers in the same year. In the article, we showed by taking careful measurements of the pupil size in the eyes…

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First patient data collected at Mayo Clinic!

The first quarter of 2019 is marked with a major milestone for our BME lab. We collected behavioral and electrophysiological recordings from 128 channels of multiple electrodes implanted in three patients when they were performing computer tasks with tracking their eye movements. To our knowledge this is the first such recording with EEG signals collected directly from the patient brain during performance of verbal memory and other tasks combined with high-accuracy estimation of the pupil…

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How is memory organized in the brain? New research article from our BME lab

Where is memory encoded in the brain? Is there one or multiple brain regions involved? How is it organized in anatomical space and time of memory encoding? In our latest article published this month in the open-access journal eNeuro of the Society for Neuroscience we addressed these questions using brain recordings from epilepsy patients performing a simple task to remember lists of words. We found an organized network of multiple brain regions showing differences in…

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Members of the BME lab published their new paper about assessing consciousness with eye-tracking

Members of the BME lab, Michal Lech and Michal Kucewicz, have just published a paper in Frontiers in Neurology with Prof. Andrzej Czyżewski from the Multimedia Systems Department of Gdansk University of Technology’ entitled: ‘Human Computer Interface (HCI) for tracking eye movements improves assessment and diagnosis of patients with acquired brain injuries’. In the paper, we show that our HCI interface called ‘Cyber Eye’, which was developed by Prof. Czyżewski’s team, can detect minimally conscious…

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Research at Mayo Clinic started!

Our postdoc, Michal Lech, and Ph.D. student, Cagdas Topcu, officially started their research training with our strategic partner Mayo Clinic on December 3rd after arriving to Minnesota in a heavy blizzard (Winters start early in this part of the world!). This research is based in the Mayo Systems Electrophysiology Lab led by Prof. Gregory Worrell (www.msel.mayo.edu) and will involve epilepsy patients with electrodes implanted in the brain to treat refractory seizures. For the next one…

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Can you supercharge your memory? | New Scientist | Dr. Michal Kucewicz

Dr. Kucewicz comments on the progress of brain stimulation technologies for the popular science magazine ‘New Scientist’ In the article ‘Can you supercharge your memory?’ published on Oct 24th in the ‘Memory special’ issue of the magazine, Jessica Hamzelou summarizes the state-of-the-art in the field of memory enhancement devices aka memory prostheses. Even though these are developed for patients presenting deficits in memory and cognition, possible applications can be extended to the healthy population to enhance…