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Editorial Notes Neural dynamics Neural Oscillations Uncategorized

eLife insight on uni­fy­ing brain networks

Oble­ser­lab net­work-sci­ence wiz and des­ig­nat­ed head of OPM-mag­ne­toen­cephalog­ra­phy oper­a­tions in Lübeck, Mohsen Alavash has pro­vid­ed a neat lit­tle “insight” (a mag­a­zine-like brief arti­cle, essen­tial­ly) in sci­en­tif­ic jour­nal eLife, “Brain Activ­i­ty: Uni­fy­ing net­works of a rhythm”.

In his eLife insight, Mohsen cov­ers a new study on brain-wide beta oscil­la­to­ry net­works and their link to the dopamin­er­gic sys­tem. The study emerges from the lab of Julian Neu­mann, with Meera Chik­er­mane as lead author. Check it out. 

 

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Clinical relevance Statistics

New paper out in Sci­ence Advances: Sta­tis­ti­cal con­tri­bu­tions to find­ing a Hepati­tis C vaccine

The ways of sci­ence can be quite long-wind­ed and intri­cate sometimes:

In such a project, Oble­ser­lab team mem­bers Sarah Tune and myself (J.O.) had been mak­ing inter­est­ing con­tact with the very remote fields of bio­chem­istry and infec­ti­ol­o­gy, through the lab of Lübeck‘s Thomas Krey and their quite excit­ing project: Design­ing a new can­di­date for an hith­er­to unavail­able vac­cine against the Hepati­tis C virus; and then going on to test its poten­cy in a series of experiments.

Ulti­mate­ly, the Oble­ser­lab con­tributed sta­tis­ti­cal mod­el­ling for these exper­i­men­tal data — The final paper is now out in Sci­ence Advances. Sarah and I (J.O.) made it a mis­sion to apply some state-of-the-art lin­ear mixed mod­els and ade­quate data trans­forms not com­mon­ly used in this kind of work (see screen­shot attached.)
Thanks to Kumar and Thomas and all teams involved, for let­ting us ven­ture far out­side of our com­fort zone with this intrigu­ing col­lab­o­ra­tive effort.

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Auditory Cortex Auditory Neuroscience Auditory Perception Clinical relevance EEG / MEG

New paper with the Weisz lab in eLife: Aber­rant per­cep­tu­al pre­dic­tions in Tinnitus

Now out in eLife, Lisa Reisinger and Nathan Weisz (Salzburg) with a diverse team includ­ing myself (J.O.) show, using state of the art decod­ing mod­els and a rig­or­ous  approach of inter­nal, pre-reg­is­tered repli­ca­tion, that peo­ple liv­ing with tin­ni­tus (a chron­ic and often very dis­tress­ing audi­to­ry “phan­tom per­cept”) show altered pat­terns of pre­dic­tive audi­to­ry pro­cess­ing. Check it out!

The eLife edi­to­r­i­al assess­ment reads like this: “This impor­tant work presents two stud­ies on pre­dic­tive process­es in sub­jects with and with­out tin­ni­tus. The evi­dence sup­port­ing the authors’ claims is com­pelling, as their sec­ond study serves as an inde­pen­dent repli­ca­tion of the first. Rig­or­ous match­ing between study groups was per­formed, espe­cial­ly in the sec­ond study, increas­ing the prob­a­bil­i­ty that the iden­ti­fied dif­fer­ences in pre­dic­tive pro­cess­ing can tru­ly be attrib­uted to the pres­ence of tin­ni­tus. This work will be of inter­est to researchers, espe­cial­ly neu­ro­sci­en­tists, in the tin­ni­tus field.”

 

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Computational Modelling EEG / MEG Events Uncategorized

Joint lab meet­ing with the Don­ner lab

Last week, we ven­tured over to Ham­burg (a mere 65 km south­east of Lübeck) and spent a won­der­ful day with our friend­ly hosts, the Tobias Don­ner lab, at the Uni­ver­si­ty Clin­ic Eppen­dorf (UKE).

It was very inspir­ing to iden­ti­fy and dis­cuss the many com­mon threads that dri­ve our join inter­est in per­cep­tion and deci­sion-mak­ing, in fus­ing com­pu­ta­tion­al mod­el­ling of behav­iour with M/EEG and fMRI data, and in neu­ro­phys­i­o­log­i­cal con­cepts of arousal or excitation/inhibition bal­ance. Stay tuned for more to come from this excit­ing joint ven­ture with our local neigh­bours! Thanks, Tobias and team, for hav­ing us.

PS. I hope you like my attempts of shoot­ing a prop­er “boomer selfie”.

Obleser lab boomer selfie

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Auf deutsch Editorial Notes Media Uncategorized Website

Der neue Hör-Newslet­ter ist da

Unsere diesjährige Aus­gabe des Hör-Newslet­ter mit eini­gen Neuigkeit­en aus Lübeck und aus unserem Forschungsla­bor ist da. Viel Spaß beim Stöbern!

Categories
Attention Clinical relevance EEG / MEG Neural Oscillations Psychiatry Speech perception

A busy talk sched­ule at the Obleser lab

These two weeks, we have been for­tu­nate to host two superbe guest talks by Philipp Sterz­er from Uni­ver­sität Basel and Ayelet Lan­dau from Hebrew Uni­ver­si­ty of Jerusalem here at the Cen­ter of Brain, Behav­ior and Metab­o­lism.

Philipp Sterz­er spoke of his rich and intru­ig­ing body of work show­ing how the pre­dic­tive per­ceiv­ing mind appears to fluc­tu­ate between a more exter­nal­ly-ori­ent­ed, evi­dence-seek­ing mode (my words, JO) and a more inter­nal­ly-ori­ent­ed mode. Philipp’s stud­ies con­tin­ue to inspire ongo­ing work here at our lab, and it was a plea­sure to hypoth­e­sise about the effects of Ket­a­mine on audi­to­ry evi­dence accu­mu­la­tion. Thanks, Philipp!Ayelet Lan­dau pre­sent­ed us with her fas­ci­nat­ing account of how inter­nal, endoge­nous brain rhythms and exter­nal, envi­ron­men­tal (or oth­er indi­vid­u­als’ brain) rhythms match up and shape the human expe­ri­ence – with thought-pro­vok­ing links appear­ing between the organ­i­sa­tion of lan­guage, states of con­scious­ness, and not least trait-like dif­fer­ences from one per­son to anoth­er. Thanks, Ayelet!

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Editorial Notes Events

New research build­ing for the Uni­ver­si­ty of Lübeck: LEMMI is here to stay.

A very for­tu­nate devel­op­ment: The Uni­ver­si­ty of Lübeck has been grant­ed a new research build­ing (by rec­om­men­da­tion of the Wis­senschaft­srat, a piv­otal, joint fed­er­al- and state-lev­el agency for these matters) .

Jonas Obleser had the priv­i­lege to help steer the con­cep­tu­al stages of this new “Lübeck envi­ron­ment for minds and machines in inter­ac­tion” (LEMMI – named after no famous cul­tur­al icon in par­tic­u­lar). See here for the press release by the Wis­senschaft­srat; the final say – as usu­al – will be with the „Gemein­same Wis­senschaft­skon­ferenz“ (GWK) of Ger­man fed­er­al and state gov­ern­ments, which will con­vene next in July 2024.

The uni­ver­si­ty came out with a press release just now, and we are all very excit­ed that in the years to come a new, 3.000+ m2 research build­ing worth up to 63 mil­lion € might be built on Lübeck cam­pus premis­es that will cater specif­i­cal­ly to the needs of immer­sive AI-steered envi­ron­ments and all specifics of psy­cho­log­i­cal, com­put­er-sci­en­tif­ic and robot­ic research on human–AI interactions. 

Categories
Auditory Neuroscience Editorial Notes Grants Uncategorized

Jonas elect­ed and appoint­ed as DFG review panelist

Jonas Obleser has been elect­ed by the Ger­man sci­en­tif­ic com­mu­ni­ty as one of the new mem­bers of the so-called “Fachkol­legium” (a select, stand­ing group of review pan­elists) of the Ger­man Research Foun­da­tion (DFG) in the field of sys­temic and cog­ni­tive neu­ro­science.

This is an hon­ourable, non-prof­it addi­tion­al task that pri­mar­i­ly involves sug­gest­ing fund­ings deci­sions for grant pro­pos­als in the field of neu­ro­science. Here’s to four excit­ing if work-intense years.