On screen experiment showed that becoming a parent for the first time shifted people's priorities from themselves to their infant at 1 year of age

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS We are grateful to the student researchers who helped with the data collection. FUNDING INFORMATION This study was funded by The Center for Music in the Brain, which is funded by the Danish National Research Foundation (DNRF 117, awarded to PV). The project was further funded by an European Research Council Consolidator Grant CAREGIVING (no. 615539) to MLK.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

MEG Can Map Short and Long-Term Changes in Brain Activity following Deep Brain Stimulation for Chronic Pain

Deep brain stimulation (DBS) has been shown to be clinically effective for some forms of treatment-resistant chronic pain, but the precise mechanisms of action are not well understood. Here, we present an analysis of magnetoencephalography (MEG) data from a patient with whole-body chronic pain, in order to investigate changes in neural activity induced by DBS for pain relief over both short- and long-term. This patient is one of the few cases treated using DBS of the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). We demonstrate that a novel method, null-beamforming, can be used to localise accurately brain activity despite the artefacts caused by the presence of DBS electrodes and stimulus pulses. The accuracy of our source localisation was verified by correlating the predicted DBS electrode positions with their actual positions. Using this beamforming method, we examined changes in whole-brain activity comparing pain relief achieved with deep brain stimulation (DBS ON) and compared with pain experienced with no stimulation (DBS OFF). We found significant changes in activity in pain-related regions including the pre-supplementary motor area, brainstem (periaqueductal gray) and dissociable parts of caudal and rostral ACC. In particular, when the patient reported experiencing pain, there was increased activity in different regions of ACC compared to when he experienced pain relief. We were also able to demonstrate long-term functional brain changes as a result of continuous DBS over one year, leading to specific changes in the activity in dissociable regions of caudal and rostral ACC. These results broaden our understanding of the underlying mechanisms of DBS in the human brain

Whole-Brain Multimodal Neuroimaging Model Using Serotonin Receptor Maps Explains Non-linear Functional Effects of LSD

Understanding the underlying mechanisms of the human brain in health and disease will require models with necessary and sufficient details to explain how function emerges from the underlying anatomy and is shaped by neuromodulation. Here, we provide such a detailed causal explanation using a whole-brain model integrating multimodal imaging in healthy human participants undergoing manipulation of the serotonin system. Specifically, we combined anatomical data from diffusion magnetic resonance imaging (dMRI) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) with neurotransmitter data obtained with positron emission tomography (PET) of the detailed serotonin 2A receptor (5-HT2AR) density map. This allowed us to model the resting state (with and without concurrent music listening) and mechanistically explain the functional effects of 5-HT2AR stimulation with lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) on healthy participants. The whole-brain model used a dynamical mean-field quantitative description of populations of excitatory and inhibitory neurons as well as the associated synaptic dynamics, where the neuronal gain function of the model is modulated by the 5-HT2AR density. The model identified the causative mechanisms for the non-linear interactions between the neuronal and neurotransmitter system, which are uniquely linked to (1) the underlying anatomical connectivity, (2) the modulation by the specific brainwide distribution of neurotransmitter receptor density, and (3) the non-linear interactions between the two. Taking neuromodulatory activity into account when modeling global brain dynamics will lead to novel insights into human brain function in health and disease and opens exciting possibilities for drug discovery and design in neuropsychiatric disorders.ERC Advanced Grant DYSTRUCTURE (295129), the Spanish Research ProjectPSI2016-75688-P, and the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Framework Programme for Research and Innovation under the Specific Grant Agreement No. 785907 (Human Brain Project SGA2). ERC Consolidator Grant: CAREGIVING (615539) and Center for Music in the Brain, funded by the Danish National Research Foundation (DNRF117). Alex Mosley Charitable Trust, and the study that yielded the empirical LSD data was carried out as part of a Beckley-Imperial research collaboration. J. Cabral is supported under the project NORTE-01-0145-FEDER-000023 from the Northern Portugal Regional Operational Program (NORTE 2020) under the Portugal 2020 Partnership Agreement through the European Regional Development Fund (FEDER). Cimbi database were supported by a centre grant from the Lundbeck Foundation (2010-5364

Perturbation of whole-brain dynamics in silico reveals mechanistic differences between brain states

Human neuroimaging research has revealed that wakefulness and sleep involve very different activity patterns. Yet, it is not clear why brain states differ in their dynamical complexity, e.g. in the level of integration and segregation across brain networks over time. Here, we investigate the mechanisms underlying the dynamical stability of brain states using a novel off-line in silico perturbation protocol. We first adjust a whole-brain computational model to the basal dynamics of wakefulness and deep sleep recorded with fMRI in two independent human fMRI datasets. Then, the models of sleep and awake brain states are perturbed using two distinct multifocal protocols either promoting or disrupting synchronization in randomly selected brain areas. Once perturbation is halted, we use a novel measure, the Perturbative Integration Latency Index (PILI), to evaluate the recovery back to baseline. We find a clear distinction between models, consistently showing larger PILI in wakefulness than in deep sleep, corroborating previous experimental findings. In the models, larger recoveries are associated to a critical slowing down induced by a shift in the model's operation point, indicating that the awake brain operates further from a stable equilibrium than deep sleep. This novel approach opens up for a new level of artificial perturbative studies unconstrained by ethical limitations allowing for a deeper investigation of the dynamical properties of different brain states.GD was supported by the ERC Advanced Grant: DYSTRUCTURE (n. 295129), by the Spanish Research Project SAF2010-16085 and the FP7-ICT BrainScales. MLK and JC were supported by the ERC Consolidator Grant: CAREGIVING (n. 615539) and Center for Music in the Brain, funded by the Danish National Research Foundation (DNRF117). JC was supported under the project NORTE-01-0145-FEDER-000023, supported by the Northern Portugal Regional Operational Programme (NORTE 2020), under the Portugal 2020 Partnership Agreement, through the European Regional Development Fund (FEDER).info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Hedonic Quality or Reward? A Study of Basic Pleasure in Homeostasis and Decision Making of a Motivated Autonomous Robot

© The Author (s) 2016. Published by SAGE. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).We present a robot architecture and experiments to investigate some of the roles that pleasure plays in the decision making (action selection) process of an autonomous robot that must survive in its environment. We have conducted three sets of experiments to assess the effect of different types of pleasure---related versus unrelated to the satisfaction of physiological needs---under different environmental circumstances. Our results indicate that pleasure, including pleasure unrelated to need satisfaction, has value for homeostatic management in terms of improved viability and increased flexibility in adaptive behavior.Peer reviewedFinal Published versio

Effects of classic psychedelic drugs on turbulent signatures in brain dynamics

Psychedelic drugs show promise as safe and effective treatments for neuropsychiatric disorders, yet their mechanisms of action are not fully understood. A fundamental hypothesis is that psychedelics work by dose-dependently changing the functional hierarchy of brain dynamics, but it is unclear whether different psychedelics act similarly. Here, we investigated the changes in the brain’s functional hierarchy associated with two different psychedelics (LSD and psilocybin). Using a novel turbulence framework, we were able to determine the vorticity, that is, the local level of synchronization, that allowed us to extend the standard global time-based measure of metastability to become a local-based measure of both space and time. This framework produced detailed signatures of turbulence-based hierarchical change for each psychedelic drug, revealing consistent and discriminate effects on a higher level network, that is, the default mode network. Overall, our findings directly support a prior hypothesis that psychedelics modulate (i.e., “compress”) the functional hierarchy and provide a quantification of these changes for two different psychedelics. Implications for therapeutic applications of psychedelics are discussed

Impulsivity is Associated with Increased Metabolism in the Fronto-Insular Network in Parkinson’s Disease

Front. Behav. Neurosci. 9:317. doi: 10.3389/fnbeh.2015.00317 Various neuroimaging studies demonstrated that the fronto-insular network is implicated in impulsive behavior. We compared glucose metabolism (as a proxy measure of neural activity) among 24 patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD) who presented with low or high levels of impulsivity based on the Barratt Impulsiveness Scale 11 (BIS) scores. Subjects underwent 18-fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography (FDG-PET) and the voxel-wise group difference of FDG-metabolism was analyzed in Statistical Parametric Mapping (SPM8). Subsequently, we performed a partial correlation analysis between the FDG-metabolism and BIS scores, controlling for covariates (i.e., age, sex, severity of disease and levodopa equivalent daily doses). Voxel-wise group comparison revealed higher FDG-metabolism in the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), and right insula in patients with higher impulsivity scores. Moreover, there was a positive correlation between the FDG-metabolism and BIS scores. Our findings provide evidence that high impulsivity is associated with increased FDG-metabolis

Effects of External Stimulation on Psychedelic State Neurodynamics

Recent findings have shown that psychedelics reliably enhance brain entropy (understood as neural signal diversity), and this effect has been associated with both acute and long-term psychological outcomes, such as personality changes. These findings are particularly intriguing, given that a decrease of brain entropy is a robust indicator of loss of consciousness (e.g., from wakefulness to sleep). However, little is known about how context impacts the entropy-enhancing effect of psychedelics, which carries important implications for how it can be exploited in, for example, psychedelic psychotherapy. This article investigates how brain entropy is modulated by stimulus manipulation during a psychedelic experience by studying participants under the effects of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) or placebo, either with gross state changes (eyes closed vs open) or different stimuli (no stimulus vs music vs video). Results show that while brain entropy increases with LSD under all of the experimental conditions, it exhibits the largest changes when subjects have their eyes closed. Furthermore, brain entropy changes are consistently associated with subjective ratings of the psychedelic experience, but this relationship is disrupted when participants are viewing a video─potentially due to a "competition" between external stimuli and endogenous LSD-induced imagery. Taken together, our findings provide strong quantitative evidence of the role of context in modulating neural dynamics during a psychedelic experience, underlining the importance of performing psychedelic psychotherapy in a suitable environment

Uncovering the underlying mechanisms and whole-brain dynamics of deep brain stimulation for Parkinson's disease

Deep brain stimulation (DBS) for Parkinson's disease is a highly effective treatment in controlling otherwise debilitating symptoms. Yet the underlying brain mechanisms are currently not well understood. Whole-brain computational modeling was used to disclose the effects of DBS during resting-state functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging in ten patients with Parkinson's disease. Specifically, we explored the local and global impact that DBS has in creating asynchronous, stable or critical oscillatory conditions using a supercritical bifurcation model. We found that DBS shifts global brain dynamics of patients towards a Healthy regime. This effect was more pronounced in very specific brain areas such as the thalamus, globus pallidus and orbitofrontal regions of the right hemisphere (with the left hemisphere not analyzed given artifacts arising from the electrode lead). Global aspects of integration and synchronization were also rebalanced. Empirically, we found higher communicability and coherence brain measures during DBS-ON compared to DBS-OFF. Finally, using our model as a framework, artificial in silico DBS was applied to find potential alternative target areas for stimulation and whole-brain rebalancing. These results offer important insights into the underlying large-scale effects of DBS as well as in finding novel stimulation targets, which may offer a route to more efficacious treatmentsIn this work, Gustavo Deco is supported by the ERC Advanced Grant: DYSTRUCTURE (n. 295129), by the Spanish Research Project PSI2016-75688-P and by the the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement n. 720270 (HBP SGA1). Morten Kringelbach is supported by the ERC Consolidator Grant CAREGIVING (n. 615539) and the Center for Music in the Brain, funded by the Danish National Research Foundation (DNRF117). Victor M Saenger is supported by the Research Personnel Training program PSI2013-42091-P funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio