Category: Clinical relevance

Categories
Clinical relevance Computational Modelling Grants Neural dynamics Voice

Hooray! The Col­lab­o­ra­tive Research Grant “Foun­da­tions of Cir­ca­di­ane Med­i­cine” is here (to stay).

Very hap­py that our lab will be part of the new DFG-fund­ed Col­lab­o­ra­tive Research Cen­tre („Son­der­forschungs­bere­ich“, SFB) Tran­sre­gio 418 between the Char­ité Berlin and Uni­ver­si­ty of Lübeck, spear­head­ed by chrono­bi­ol­o­gy wiz­ards Achim Kramer (Berlin) and Hen­rik Oster (Lübeck) — “Foun­da­tions of Cir­ca­di­an Med­i­cine”.

A CRC/SFB col­lects about 15 projects, cen­tral funds, and many prin­ci­pal inves­ti­ga­tors from both loca­tions, and will fund a whole new gen­er­a­tion of researchers at the verge of med­i­cine,  neu­ro­science, and sys­tems biol­o­gy for ini­tial­ly 4 years. A CRC/SFB can exist up to 12 years in total.

Our lab will run, joint­ly with Hen­rik Oster, an ambi­tious study on Ket­a­mine and its inter­ac­tions with the inter­nal clock and endocrine (esp. glu­co­cor­ti­coid) sys­tem of the human body, with the ulti­mate goal of under­stand­ing bet­ter how and why Ket­a­mine can exert its ben­e­fi­cial effects on mood.

Stay tuned for more, and con­grat­u­la­tions to all involved!

Categories
Auditory Perception Clinical relevance Degraded Acoustics Effort Executive Functions Hearing Loss Papers Perception Psychology Speech perception Uncategorized

New paper in Trends in Hear­ing: Hear­ing aids add a demon­stra­ble amount of cog­ni­tive burden

A true Hoer­hanse col­labo: Markus Kem­per and our col­leagues from the Deutsche Hörg­eräte Insti­tut (DHI) show, with Jonas’ help, and using data acquired in our lab, that hear­ing aids do take their how­ev­er slight toll on the cog­ni­tive system: 

Despite the unques­tion­ably great help that hear­ing devices do pro­vide to those with impaired hear­ing, the tech­ni­cal noise and dig­i­tal sig­nal pro­cess­ing chain of hear­ing aids do ampli­fy mea­sur­ably the typ­i­cal sig­na­tures of effort­ful listening.

Espe­cial­ly the pupil dila­tion, hall­mark of increased locus coeruleus/noradrenergic activ­i­ty in response to sensory–cognitive chal­lenges, is notably more pro­nounced when lis­ten­ers respond to a stan­dard speech-intell­gi­bil­i­ty test (OLSA) while lis­ten­ing through a “trans­par­ent” (i.e., switched-on, but not ampli­fy­ing) hear­ing aid.

Out now in Trends in Hear­ing.

Categories
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.

Categories
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.”

 

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!

Categories
Ageing Clinical relevance Papers Psychiatry Publications Uncategorized

New papers in autumn 2023:

Twen­ty-twen­tythree has prob­a­bly not been our most pro­lif­ic year in terms of putting out new research find­ings, which in part is an inter­est­ing delayed con­se­quence of the lab close-down/s­low-down in the pan­dem­ic years. But …

… here we are in autumn 2023 with no less than three fresh find­ings and perspectives:

First, grad­u­ate trainee Frauke Kraus has pub­lished in the Soci­ety for Neu­ro­science out­let eNeu­ro her new find­ings on how moti­va­tion­al state is able to affect lis­ten­ing behav­iour and lis­ten­ing effort (as prox­ied by pupil dilation).

Sec­ond, with our col­leagues from the trans­la­tion­al psy­chi­a­try unit, main­ly Christi­na Andreou and Ste­fan Borg­wardt, Jonas con­tributed to an umbrel­la review on the most like­ly can­di­date pre­dic­tors of an indi­vid­ual at risk tran­si­tion­ing into psy­chosis, in the Jour­nal Trans­la­tion­al Psy­chi­a­try (a spin-off by the mar­ket­ing genius­es at Nature Springer) – the umbrel­la review pos­es a corol­lary of our joint work on hal­lu­ci­na­tions and meta-cog­ni­tion in nor­mal and aber­rant per­cep­tion (stay tuned for more on that one!).

Not least, a new review and a true col­lab­o­ra­tive effort from many neu­ro­science col­leagues here at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Lübeck led by Nico Bun­zeck, we are argu­ing in Neu­ro­science and Biobe­hav­iour­al  Reviews that patho­log­i­cal aging might begin in earnest when and if the typical/healthy func­tion­al com­pen­sa­tion for brain struc­tur­al decline breaks down. Check it out.

Ref­er­ences

Categories
Auditory Cortex Auditory Neuroscience Auditory Perception Brain stimulation Clinical relevance Neural Oscillations Papers Psychiatry Psychology Voice

New Review paper on Cir­ca­di­an Rhythms in Audi­to­ry Hal­lu­ci­na­tions and Psy­chosis to come out in “Acta Physiologica”

As part of our increased efforts to under­stand the impact of chrono­bi­ol­o­gy in sen­sa­tion and per­cep­tion, a new review arti­cle by senior researcher Hong-Viet Ngo in the lab and Jonas Obleser, togeth­er with psy­chi­a­trist Christi­na Andreou and chrononeu­ro­phys­i­ol­o­gist Hen­rik Oster is forthcoming!

The paper sum­maris­es our (sketchy) knowl­edge on how cir­ca­di­an rhythms impact audi­to­ry hal­lu­ci­na­tion propen­si­ty, and how key neur­al sig­na­tures E:I (dys-)balance and dopamin­er­gic sig­nalling joint­ly might con­tribute to hal­lu­ci­na­tions as a key symp­tom in  psy­chosis. The paper has been accept­ed in the clas­sic jour­nal Acta Phys­i­o­log­i­ca. A preprint ver­sion is avail­able here.

Categories
Ageing Auditory Neuroscience Clinical relevance Editorial Notes Hearing Loss Neural dynamics Uncategorized

It’s a wrap: The ERC Con­sol­ida­tor Project “Audadapt” has suc­cess­ful­ly ended

Six years in our lab with the age­ing, adapt­ing, lis­ten­ing brain and mind cen­ter-stage have come to a suc­cess­ful close.  Jonas’ ERC Con­sol­ida­tor grant had been grant­ed dur­ing the Audi­to­ry Cog­ni­tion lab’s tenure at the Max Planck Insti­tute in Leipzig orig­i­nal­ly, and it has shaped our start and set­tling-in at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Lübeck ever since 2016.

Jonas: “In total almost 500 ses­sions of behav­iour, EEG and fMRI record­ed; more than 160 brave Lübeck folks and their brains fol­lowed lon­gi­tu­di­nal­ly over two years; 25 pub­li­ca­tions put out; and not least two PhDs fin­ished and five post­doc careers kick­start­ed — I am very grate­ful for the help of all these peo­ple, my host Insti­tu­tion Uni­ver­si­ty of Lübeck and the Euro­pean Research Coun­cil (ERC) hav­ing made this all hap­pen. Thank you all.”

All data will be or are already pub­licly avail­able on OSF, and we will update our ded­i­cat­ed “AUDADAPT” project page once the final report is in.