Séminaire de Rasa Gubilnaite

Friday March 10, 2023 at 14h30, Salle Henri Gastaut

Rasa Gubilnaite (Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience, Amsterdam)

(invited by Martin Szinte )

Resonance phenomena at macro- and mesoscales of neural activity

Abstract:
What is common between a vibrating guitar string and a morning coffee that more often than not spills when you walk from the coffee machine to your office desk? Both are examples of resonance that is inherent to most physical systems. Our sensory cortices too resonate when stimulated at or close to the frequencies it generates naturally.
Traditionally, studies on rhythmic sensory stimulation focused on temporal aspects of neural responses (e.g. frequency following response, entrainment, resonance), and less so on the spatial propagation of neural activity elicited by the stimuli. In this talk, I will first present the temporal dimension of resonance phenomena using examples from human EEG research on vision and touch. Thereafter, using widefield imaging data in mice I will demonstrate that resonance phenomena are preserved across species and across spatial scales of neural activity. Finally, I will discuss the spatial aspect of resonance phenomena and the emergence of standing waves, formation of which can be approximated by a linear wave equation, with Laplacian eigenmodes bearing high resemblance to empirically observed spatiotemporal response patterns.