Speaker: Prof. Josef Parvizi (Neurology & Neurological Sciences, Stanford University) 

Title: How the Human Brain Encodes and Retrieves Information

Intracranial Study of Cortical and Subcortical Interactions During Experimental Memory Encoding and Recall

Time: March 26, 2024, 1:00-2:30 pm

Venue: Room 1113, Wangkezhen Building

Host: Prof. Fang Fang, Dr. Qian Wang

Abstract

For any brain to operate, populations of neurons across anatomical structures must coordinate their activity within milliseconds. To date, our understanding of the dynamics of cross regional interactions  stems from neuroimaging methods that provide valuable insights into the functional architecture of the human brain in the ultra slow temporal scale and examining the fast interactions and truly causal connections across regions remains limited, if not prohibitive.   In our research endeavors, we strive to build upon existing neuroimaging by investigating the dynamics of cross-regional communication on a subsecond scale using simultaneous intracranial recordings across various brain regions under different experimental conditions. To assess and quantify causal effective connectivity across these regions, we employ repeated single electrical pulse stimulations. While simultaneous recordings across spatially distributed brain regions provide a precise lens on human circuit-level dynamics (at the level of discrete neuronal populations) stimulation measures provide unique causal information in humans regarding the effect of stimulating one neuronal population on the activity of other sites as the dynamics of relationship between that site and others. In this lecture, I will present novel data regarding cross regional dynamics of activity during memory encoding and retrieval.

Short Bio

Dr. Parvizi completed his medical internship at Mayo Clinic, neurology training at Harvard, and subspecialty training in clinical neurophysiology and epilepsy at UCLA before joining the Department of Neurology and Neurological Sciences at Stanford in 2007. Dr. Parvizi directs the Stanford Program for Medication Resistant Epilepsies and specializes in surgical treatments of intractable focal epilepsies. Dr. Parvizi is the principal investigator in the Laboratory of Behavioral and Cognitive Neuroscience, where he leads a team of investigators to study the human brain.

http://med.stanford.edu/parvizi-lab.html.