Clinical Neurophysiology & Memory

Clinical Neurophysiology & Memory Research

Episodic memory enables humans to think back in time and re-experience particular events of their past. Our aim is to better understand how the neocortex and the limbic system interact during episodic memory formation and retrieval. We investigate this cortico-limbic cross-talk using brain imaging techniques such as magnetoencephalography (MEG), electroencephalography (EEG), and magnetic resonance imaging and complement these studies with neuropharmacology. We are also interested in how biologically salient aspects of stimuli, such as their novelty, their emotional valence or their reward value, modulate cortico-limbic cross-talk and long-term storage. Finally, we study how local structural and/or metabolic brain dysfunction in the elderly and in patients with neurological and psychiatric disorders affect these aspects of episodic memory.

Epilepsy

One clinical emphasis of this group is neurophysiological research in patients with epilepsy. Our goals are to characterize structural and functional reorganisation caused by epileptogenic lesions, to identify mechanisms of cognitive impairment and of functional compensation, and to develop new tools for the non-invasive characterization of epileptogenic zones. This work is closely integrated with existing projects of the Clinical and Experimental Epilepsy Unit at the Institute of Neurology.

Collaborations

This group also collaborates with the Centre for Advanced Imaging of the Otto-von-Guericke University of Magdeburg , Germany . These collaborations include studies on memory-related plasticity in the limbic system on a newly acquired 7 Tesla MRI system in Magdeburg and the impact of genetic polymorphisms (for instance in dopamine inactivation pathways) on encoding and long-term plasticity.