Human Neurophysiology
Gezondheid en Leven
Claire Snel
Jaar 3, 2024
,Inhoudsopgave
Lecture 1: Kick-off + Cognitive neuroimaging .................................................................................................... 2
Part 1a: Kick-off .................................................................................................................................................. 2
Part 1b: Spontaneous brain activity, thoughts and feelings ............................................................................... 2
Lecture 2: Neuronal basis of EEG ...................................................................................................................... 9
EEG summary slides .......................................................................................................................................... 19
Lecture 3: Basics of digital signal processing & Neuronal oscillations: Mechanisms, diversity and functions .. 21
Lecture 4: EEG demo ...................................................................................................................................... 30
Lecture 5: The theory of critical brain dynamics ............................................................................................. 31
Lecture 6: ERPs + synchrony + NBT assignment .............................................................................................. 48
Lecture 7: EEG biomarkers of brain disorders ................................................................................................. 54
Neuronal oscillations: Functional importance of synchrony ............................................................................ 62
Lecture 8: Guest lecture Natalia Goriounova – Human neurons in cognition .................................................. 66
Part 1 ................................................................................................................................................................ 66
Part 2 ................................................................................................................................................................ 72
Lecture 9: BCI, neurofeedback and synchrony ................................................................................................ 78
EEG biofeedback therapy.................................................................................................................................. 83
Lecture 10: Guest lecture: Niels Cornelisse – Studying human neurophysiology in a dish ............................... 87
1
,Lecture 1: Kick-off + Cognitive neuroimaging
Part 1a: Kick-off
- Paradigm shift in cognitive neuroscience: from stimulus processing to resting-state
neuroimaging
Resting-state neuroimaging is booming
- The hallmark of many neurological and psychiatric disorders relate to such inner experiences,
rather than deficits in sensory processing or related interaction with the environment
- Thus, possibly, thoughts and feelings experienced during rest could show promise for
understanding brain disorders or the effects of therapeutic intervention
Amsterdam resting-state questionnaire
➢ = first validated questionnaire to quantify thoughts and feelings during rest
➢ Ask people to sit still 5 minutes with eyes closed
and prevent falling asleep
➢ Adults with autism spectrum disorder show
atypical patterns of thoughts and feelings during
rest
Core concept and key questions of human
neurophysiology
- Core concept:
o Balance between the processing of internal and external information
- Key question:
o How is spontaneous brain activity, thoughts and feelings affected and related in
health and disease?
➢ Artefacts during EEG should be filtered out (such as eye blinking, breathing, heartbeat)
Part 1b: Spontaneous brain activity, thoughts and feelings
Learning objectives
You will be able to explain:
- The difference between stimulus-driven (exogenous) and spontaneous (endogenous) brain
activity
- Why ‘daydreaming’ and its neuronal basis is important to investigate.
- The methods available for your projects.
- How EEG and cognition data are measured and related to each other
Outline
➢ What made resting-state neuroimaging become a hot topic?
➢ What is mind wandering and why is it important?
➢ Details on the Amsterdam Resting-State Questionnaire (ARSQ)
➢ Details on your research projects
2
, What is “cognitive neuroscience”?
Cognitive Neuroscience:
- The combined study of mind and brain
- Revolutionized by neuroimaging techniques
- Allow exploring the biology of:
o Conscious experience (Neural Correlates of Consciousness)
o Unconscious processes (decision making, intuition, subliminal perception, …)
o The disordered mind
- Aims to improve also diagnosis and treatment of brain-disorders and increasingly inspires
artificial intelligence (e.g., deep learning)
- Resilience is important in neurological diseases, if they would have built resilience, they
might not have developed the disorder
Cognitive neuroscience kick-started with Positron emission tomography (PET)
imaging
Principle:
• You add radioactive material to a sugar and inject it into the
bloodstream (e.g., fluorodeoxyglucose, FDG)
• The FDG sugar accumulates in brain areas that are metabolically active
• The decay of FDG gives off a neutron and a positron
• The positron hits an electron and annihilates into 2 gamma rays,
which are detected
• You can compute back to where the gamma ray is coming from
• When a specific area is really active, more sugar is consumed, the blood that is circulating
with the radioactive sugar is being spend more in the metabolically active brain area
• Indirectly we probe that a specific brain region is active
• Metabolic imaging with PET has poor temporal resolution (10-20 seconds), it gives
information where the activity happens but when it is happening (speed, what moment in
time) is poor
• If you want to study what is the speed of becoming conscious perception, or what
moment in time do you make a decision you don’t use PET
• Where in the brain does it happen? > you can use PET
Traditional task-dependent PET studies rely on subtraction
➢ PET revealed that the brain is extremely metabolically active, even
more than the heart
o The brain consumes 20% of the energy in the body
➢ Raw imaging of metabolic activity in the brain, during different
conditions (visual fixation, viewing words etc) it looks the same but
there are differences in active regions
Early successes of cognitive neuroimaging
- Early PET findings of functional specialization of anatomical areas
- Without intervening with the brain, scientists became able to
perform non-invasive functional brain mapping
- Different parts of the brain are activated during different tasks
– Hearing words activates Broca’s area in the frontal lobe
– Speaking words activates Wernicke’s area
– Seeing words activating the visual cortex
– Thinking about words activates frontal cortex
3
Gezondheid en Leven
Claire Snel
Jaar 3, 2024
,Inhoudsopgave
Lecture 1: Kick-off + Cognitive neuroimaging .................................................................................................... 2
Part 1a: Kick-off .................................................................................................................................................. 2
Part 1b: Spontaneous brain activity, thoughts and feelings ............................................................................... 2
Lecture 2: Neuronal basis of EEG ...................................................................................................................... 9
EEG summary slides .......................................................................................................................................... 19
Lecture 3: Basics of digital signal processing & Neuronal oscillations: Mechanisms, diversity and functions .. 21
Lecture 4: EEG demo ...................................................................................................................................... 30
Lecture 5: The theory of critical brain dynamics ............................................................................................. 31
Lecture 6: ERPs + synchrony + NBT assignment .............................................................................................. 48
Lecture 7: EEG biomarkers of brain disorders ................................................................................................. 54
Neuronal oscillations: Functional importance of synchrony ............................................................................ 62
Lecture 8: Guest lecture Natalia Goriounova – Human neurons in cognition .................................................. 66
Part 1 ................................................................................................................................................................ 66
Part 2 ................................................................................................................................................................ 72
Lecture 9: BCI, neurofeedback and synchrony ................................................................................................ 78
EEG biofeedback therapy.................................................................................................................................. 83
Lecture 10: Guest lecture: Niels Cornelisse – Studying human neurophysiology in a dish ............................... 87
1
,Lecture 1: Kick-off + Cognitive neuroimaging
Part 1a: Kick-off
- Paradigm shift in cognitive neuroscience: from stimulus processing to resting-state
neuroimaging
Resting-state neuroimaging is booming
- The hallmark of many neurological and psychiatric disorders relate to such inner experiences,
rather than deficits in sensory processing or related interaction with the environment
- Thus, possibly, thoughts and feelings experienced during rest could show promise for
understanding brain disorders or the effects of therapeutic intervention
Amsterdam resting-state questionnaire
➢ = first validated questionnaire to quantify thoughts and feelings during rest
➢ Ask people to sit still 5 minutes with eyes closed
and prevent falling asleep
➢ Adults with autism spectrum disorder show
atypical patterns of thoughts and feelings during
rest
Core concept and key questions of human
neurophysiology
- Core concept:
o Balance between the processing of internal and external information
- Key question:
o How is spontaneous brain activity, thoughts and feelings affected and related in
health and disease?
➢ Artefacts during EEG should be filtered out (such as eye blinking, breathing, heartbeat)
Part 1b: Spontaneous brain activity, thoughts and feelings
Learning objectives
You will be able to explain:
- The difference between stimulus-driven (exogenous) and spontaneous (endogenous) brain
activity
- Why ‘daydreaming’ and its neuronal basis is important to investigate.
- The methods available for your projects.
- How EEG and cognition data are measured and related to each other
Outline
➢ What made resting-state neuroimaging become a hot topic?
➢ What is mind wandering and why is it important?
➢ Details on the Amsterdam Resting-State Questionnaire (ARSQ)
➢ Details on your research projects
2
, What is “cognitive neuroscience”?
Cognitive Neuroscience:
- The combined study of mind and brain
- Revolutionized by neuroimaging techniques
- Allow exploring the biology of:
o Conscious experience (Neural Correlates of Consciousness)
o Unconscious processes (decision making, intuition, subliminal perception, …)
o The disordered mind
- Aims to improve also diagnosis and treatment of brain-disorders and increasingly inspires
artificial intelligence (e.g., deep learning)
- Resilience is important in neurological diseases, if they would have built resilience, they
might not have developed the disorder
Cognitive neuroscience kick-started with Positron emission tomography (PET)
imaging
Principle:
• You add radioactive material to a sugar and inject it into the
bloodstream (e.g., fluorodeoxyglucose, FDG)
• The FDG sugar accumulates in brain areas that are metabolically active
• The decay of FDG gives off a neutron and a positron
• The positron hits an electron and annihilates into 2 gamma rays,
which are detected
• You can compute back to where the gamma ray is coming from
• When a specific area is really active, more sugar is consumed, the blood that is circulating
with the radioactive sugar is being spend more in the metabolically active brain area
• Indirectly we probe that a specific brain region is active
• Metabolic imaging with PET has poor temporal resolution (10-20 seconds), it gives
information where the activity happens but when it is happening (speed, what moment in
time) is poor
• If you want to study what is the speed of becoming conscious perception, or what
moment in time do you make a decision you don’t use PET
• Where in the brain does it happen? > you can use PET
Traditional task-dependent PET studies rely on subtraction
➢ PET revealed that the brain is extremely metabolically active, even
more than the heart
o The brain consumes 20% of the energy in the body
➢ Raw imaging of metabolic activity in the brain, during different
conditions (visual fixation, viewing words etc) it looks the same but
there are differences in active regions
Early successes of cognitive neuroimaging
- Early PET findings of functional specialization of anatomical areas
- Without intervening with the brain, scientists became able to
perform non-invasive functional brain mapping
- Different parts of the brain are activated during different tasks
– Hearing words activates Broca’s area in the frontal lobe
– Speaking words activates Wernicke’s area
– Seeing words activating the visual cortex
– Thinking about words activates frontal cortex
3
