Neuroscience and Vision Symposium NIN

Wireless deep brain stimulation in freely moving mice with nonresonant powering of magnetoelectric nanoparticles
Prof. Ali Jahanshahi Jahanshahianvar
Neurochirurgie, School for Mental Health and Neuroscience, Faculty of Health, Medicine and Life Sciences Devices that electrically modulate the deep brain have enabled important breakthroughs in the management of neurological and psychiatric disorders. Such devices are typically centimeter-scale, requiring surgical implantation and wired-in powering, which increases the risk of hemorrhage, infection, and damage during daily activity. Recently, several remotely powered devices have emerged that could enable less invasive neuromodulation. The most promising of these still rely on transgenesis of neural tissue to achieve neuromodulation. Herein, we present injectable, magnetoelectric nanoelectrodes that wirelessly transmit electrical signals to the brain in response to an external magnetic field. Importantly, this mechanism of modulation requires no genetic modification of neural tissue and allows animals to freely move during stimulation. Using these nanoelectrodes, we demonstrate neuronal modulation in vitro and in deep brain targets in vivo, leading to behavioral changes in mice. We have shown that we can stimulate Magnetoelectric Nanoparticles (MENPs) with a magnetic field to remotely generate electric polarization of the MENPs. This work demonstrates the potential of magnetoelectric materials as nanoelectrodes for wireless electrical modulation of deep brain targets.
The influence of objecthood on the representation of natural images in the visual cortex
Dr. Paolo Papale
Vision and Cognition, Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience
Neurons in early visual cortex are sensitive to the image elements in their receptive field and to the context determining whether the elements are part of an object or background. We assessed the effect of objecthood in natural images on neuronal activity in early visual cortex, with fMRI in humans and electrophysiology in monkeys. We observed that boundaries and interiors of objects elicit more activity than the background. Also, we found that visual cortical neurons are tuned to features characterizing object boundaries in natural images and that object representations are remapped across eye-movements.