Curious?

The Interdisciplinary College (IK) will take from 13 to 20 March 2020 in Günne/Möhnesee, Germany, with this year’s focus theme: Curiosity, Risk & Reward: Shaping Autonomous Intelligence.

Together with Till Bockemühl (University of Cologne) I will teach Introduction to Neuroscience

The brain, the cause of – and solution to – all of life’s problems. According to our brains it is the most fascinating structure in the known universe. Consisting of about 86 billion neurons of which each can form thousands of connections to other neurons it is also the most complex structure in the known universe. In this course we would like to give you a rough guide and introduction to the basic principles, fundamental theories, and methods of neuroscience.

We will demonstrate that neuroscience can be seen as a multi-modal, multi-level, multi-disciplinary research framework that aims at addressing the challenges of this megalomaniac scientific endeavor. We will see that different frameworks and methods can lead to conflicting empirical evidence, theoretical assumptions, and heated debates. However, we argue that this might be the only way to uncover the mysteries of our brain. Read more about our course.

@orf1 – okidoki on fear

Finally, I was asked for an interview in the children’s television show okidoki. A childhood’s dream come true :) I was asked to explain what happens in the brain and the body when we are afraid. A very suitable topic for Halloween, I guess.

More evidence for dopamine’s involvement in creativity

Anna-Lisa Schuler has been working on our CREAM data and found out that people with stronger brain connectivity of the dopaminergic midbrain also show higher levels of creativity. She did her analysis on resting state data, this means, at that time our participants did not perform any specific task. Instead, while lying inside our comfortable MRI scanner, they engaged in daydreaming. Karl Friston has called this state of mind unconstrained cognition because people are not distracted by our experimental stimuli.

We previously observed stronger dopaminergic midbrain connectivity in people who have an Aha! moment. Now, Anna-Lisa’s new finding links a personality trait to brain connectivity. The next question is, does frequent engagement in creative trinking and repeated experience of Aha! moments boost your creativity – or are creative people more likely to have Aha! moments?

Schuler A, Tik M, Sladky R, Luft CDB, Hoffmann A, Woletz M, Zioga I, Bhattacharya J, Windischberger C. Modulations in resting state networks of subcortical structures linked to creativity. Neuroimage. 2019 Mar 29;195:311-319. 2019.

Is this is a trend?

Trends are not always a good thing. Sometimes trends can obscure the things that are really important. A common problem in signal processing is that measured data can be affected by signal drifts – for example, due to temperature changes in your sensor or the thing that you try to measure. To get rid of these drifts the signal can be detrended. This filtering is a standard data processing step for many applications.

However, in real-time fMRI we need to perform this detrending online, that is, while we acquire the data. This is not so trivial, so Rotem Kopel, Frank Scharnowski, and I wrote a paper about it.

Kopel R & Sladky R, Laub P, Koush Y, Robineau F, Hutton C, Weiskopf N, Vuilleumier P, Van De Ville D, Scharnowski F. No time for drifting: Comparing performance and applicability of signal detrending algorithms for real-time fMRI. NeuroImage 2019

Can cocaine users self-regulate their dopaminergic reward circuit using neurofeedback?

We found evidence that people can upregulate their dopaminergic reward circuit using mental imagery. This works even better when they receive fMRI neurofeedback of their substantia nigra brain region. Interestingly, this also appears to work in cocaine users – at least in those without strong obsessive-compulsive drug use.

Like we showed in our study on the Aha!-moment, mentally generated feelings of reward can activate brain areas that produce dopamine. Could neurofeedback be a new form of self-guided cognitive brain stimulation?

Self-regulation of the dopaminergic reward circuit in cocaine users with mental imagery and neurofeedback. Matthias Kirschner, Ronald Sladky, Amelie Haugg, Philipp Stämpfli, Elisabeth Jehli, Martina Hodel, Etna Engeli, Sarah Hösli, Markus R Baumgartner, James Sulzer, Quentin J M Huys, Erich Seifritz, Boris B Quednow, Frank Scharnowski, Marcus Herdener. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/ebiom/article/PIIS2352-3964(18)30472-9/fulltext



Chair elect for Interdisciplinary College 2018

I am happy (and extremely proud) that Prof. Ipke Wachsmuth (left, Professor (emerit.) for Artificial Intelligence, Bielefeld University), me (and Lea, who attended IK for the second time), and Dr. Katharina Krämer (right, Psychologist, University of Cologne) will be given the opportunity to chair the next Interdisciplinary College.

Our Focus theme will be: Me, my Self and I. Who am I? Where is my self? What is it like to be ‘me’? We now have started working on an interdisciplinary course program that covers different aspects of self models, self perception, and selfhood.

First Brainhack Zurich

 

Together with Amelie Haugg, Franz Liem, Jessica Oschwald, Frank Scharnowski, and Vivian Steiger, I will co-organize the first Brainhack in Zurich.

Brainhack workshops offer an open platform for brain-imaging scientists of all levels of experience to meet and discuss new ideas. In the beginning of March, over forty sites across the globe will simultaneously hold Brainhack events (http://www.brainhack.org)

The Zurich Brainhack will focus on introductory hands-on tutorials on tools for (neuroimaging) data analysis to promote reproducible science. The event also aims to connect the Swiss neuroscience community by providing a space for open discussion.

The admission is free but registration until February 24th is required. More information on http://dynage.github.io/brainhack-zh/

New interview: ‘From Star Trek to human enhancement’

My new interview for a Slovenian CogSci platform is online:

The last conversation this year in the Scientific Cognition series features Dr. Toni Pustovrh, assistant professor and researcher at the Faculty of Social Sciences (FSS) at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and Dr. Ronald Sladky, postdoctoral researcher at the University of Zurich, Switzerland.
Dr. Toni Pustovrh is an assistant professor at the Chair for Cultural Studies and a researcher at the Centre for Social Studies of Science at FSS in Ljubljana. He focuses on ethical, legal and social implications of new emerging technologies, human enhancement, bioethics and neuroethics. He also works as a translator of scientific articles and books on science and technology.
Dr. Ronald Sladky is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department for Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics at the University Hospital of Psychiatry at the University of Zurich. For his doctoral thesis in medical physics at the Medical University of Vienna, he investigated the methodology of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and brain connectivity. He is now focusing on how neurofeedback in fMRI studies may benefit psychiatric patients.

Here is the link to the interview transcript and the YouTube video:

Dr. Toni Pustovrh & Dr. Ronald Sladky: From Star Trek to human enhancement

 

Interdisciplinary College 2017 – Creativity and Intelligence in Brains and Machines: From Individuals to Societies

As a member of the Executive Board, I would like to spread the word about the Interdisciplinary College in March 2017:

The Interdisciplinary College (IK) is an annual, intense one-week spring school which offers a dense state-of-the-art course program in neurobiology, neural computation, cognitive science/psychology, artificial intelligence, machine learning, robotics and philosophy. It is aimed at students, postgraduates and researchers from academia and industry. The focus topic of the IK 2017 directs the attention to creativity and intelligence as prototypically human characteristics and capacities, investigating their role and importance for the individual but also for society as a whole.

Chairs

  • Luc Steels (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain)
  • Dieter Jaeger (Emory University, Atlanta, USA)
  • Tarek R. Besold (University of Bremen, Bremen, Germany)

Over the last years creativity has become the focus of numerous research projects and entire disciplines, ranging from investigations into the neural foundations of human creativity to Computational Creativity as attempted “computerization” of creative processes (or parts thereof). Creativity is usually conceptualized as sharing a close connection with intelligence, for instance in that the latter often is taken as a precondition of creativity. But creativity also is a necessarily social phenomenon: While creativity
often starts out on an individual basis, and creative acts are ultimately implemented by individuals, society very often enables creativity to happen either in making creative individuals collaborate, or in emergently giving rise to a genuinely collective creative process.

Language serves as connecting thread between the topics creativity, intelligence, the individual, and society. Creativity and intelligence often manifest in language, and individuals and society rely on (different forms of) language as indispensable medium of communication.

Correspondingly, the IK 2017 will consider the mentioned topics from different theoretical as well as applied perspectives, offering courses clustered into four interwoven blocks:

  • Creativity
  • Neuroscience – From Data to Theory and Back
  • Language
  • The Social

http://www.interdisciplinary-college.de