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AmediAbstractTitle: “The plastic multisensory human brain: insights from spectral analysis approaches to fMRI. Amir Amedi, Dept. of Medical Neurobiology, IMRIC, Faculty of Medicine & Program of Cognitive Science, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HUJI), Jerusalem, Israel. Inter-disciplinary center for neuronal computation (ICNC), HUJI. Abstract: In the talk I will cover novel spectral analysis approaches to study the human brain using fMRI. These methodologies were applied to study central questions in perception, brain plasticity, large-scale brain dynamics and multisensory integration. In unisensory perception experiments we used it to reveal many novel topographical maps of the body (somatosensory, motor, visual). For brain plasticity and brain dynamics we used it to reveal the large scale re-organization in the blind (but also in sighted, i.e. developmental vs. adult plasticity). I will focus on recent behavioral and neuroimaging results from blind individuals before and after learning to use visual-to-auditory sensory substitution algorithms to ‘see’ using a webcam and soundscapes (aka artificial vision). Finally, I will present how such methods can be used to start looking into the merging of the senses (in vision, audition and touch) and the binding problem: how we integrate information into a coherent percept, an old question in neuroscience which has relatively poor answers, especially in humans. Acknowledgment: This work was supported by the Human Frontiers Science Program Career Development Award, an EU-FP7 MC International Reintegration Grant, an Israel Science Foundation grant and a German Israeli Foundation grant (to AA). Lab website: http://brain.huji.ac.il/ contact: amir.amedi@ekmd.huji.ac.il |