Neurological disorders as a window into cognitive function

The neural dynamics of emotional memory consolidation are not well understood. Here, the authors analyse intracranial recordings from human participants after emotional memory encoding, showing that ripple-locked activity in the amygdala and hippocampus is predictive of subsequent memory.

Slow waves in sleep are crucial for homeostatic regulation of brain function. Here the authors show similar slow wave activity occurs during wakefulness in people with epilepsy to counter the impact of abnormal, epileptic, brain activity.

How neurons represent competing values during decision making remains poorly understood. Here, the authors find evidence that context modulates value representation in the human cortex.

Here the authors show in freely moving human participants that deep brain oscillations in the medial temporal lobe flexibly encode both memory and spatial information, depending on the current cognitive task demands.

The functional role of the human thalamus in reinforcement learning is debated. Here, using intra-thalamic recordings in humans, the authors report that thalamic low-frequency oscillations correlate with variables for learning from both reward and punishment.

The human brain is a distributed system composed of highly interconnected hubs. Here, patients undergoing a rare operation reveal the immediate impact and compensatory brain network changes that occur when a key hub is removed.

Filtering or gating relevant information into working memory has been attributed to the striatum. Here, the authors reveal neocortical filtering mechanisms, namely, rapid changes in oscillatory theta networks, that predict fast and flexible human behavior.

The anatomy of white matter tracts which coordinate the computations of cognitive control are not well understood. Here, the authors show that lesions in white matter connecting left frontoparietal regions are associated with deficits in cognitive control performance.

The ventromedial frontal lobes (VMF) contribute to encoding of value. Here the authors show that individuals with VMF damage have less stable, but fundamentally transitive preferences, suggesting that valuation does not solely rely on the VMF.

The authors investigate the influence of brain injury (strokes) on the criticality of neural dynamics using directly measured connectomes and whole-brain models. They show that lesions engender a sub-critical state that recovers over time in parallel with behavior.

Low-dimensional representations of functional brain anatomy relevant for dementia syndromes may exist. Here the authors propose a computational model of mental functions to catalogue this anatomy in Alzheimer’s and related dementias.

The authors show that damage to both the supplementary and the cingulate eye fields specifically causes visuo-motor exploratory neglect. This suggests that the medial eye field network contributes to the voluntary control of spatial attention

Exploring virtual pharmacological treatments using whole-brain models and deep learning reveals improvements in disorders of consciousness models when stimulating serotonergic and opioid receptors.

fMRI-neurofeedback targeting a hallucination-related whole-brain network allows individuals to willfully control its temporal properties and modify proneness the hallucination induction, showing promise for investigating future therapies in disease.

This study reveals disrupted brain functional connectivity as an early biomarker in cognitively healthy individuals with pathological CSF amyloid/tau, aiding early Alzheimer’s detection.

A study of cognitive reserve in neurodegenerative disease combining drift diffusion models with MRI highlights a reorganization of decision-making processes correlated to left parietal and hippocampal hypertrophy.

A lesion symptom mapping and lesion network mapping study suggests that lesions in the left ventral thalamic nuclei, linked to thalamic aphasia, map onto a common left-hemispheric network, with Broca’s area showing the strongest associations.

This article explores novel routes to better analyze neural processes underlying the brain’s adaptability and cognitive functioning, focusing on executive functions and cognitive control. It delves into the concept of “metacontrol”, proposing a dynamic balance of processes based on situational demands, and discusses the role of different concepts of neural dynamics in supporting adaptive behavior and understanding psychiatric disorders.

A virtual reality study suggests that multisensory input shifts computations to extrahippocampal regions that support spatial navigation, as multisensory input improves memory-guided spatial navigation in humans with and without hippocampal lesions.

Spectral dynamic causal modeling on task-residual 7 T fMRI time series from patients with transient ischemic attack reveals increased excitatory connections toward the ipsilateral M1 and decreased connections toward the SMA during hand movements.

Analysis of diffusion MRI and word production through spoken language and singing in a cohort of 45 stroke survivors demonstrates that impaired speech and singing ability relies on the disruption of partially overlapping brain circuits.

Analysis of intracranial EEG from epilepsy patients suggests three neural patterns associated with spatial attention and consciousness, and implicate high-level visual areas and lateralized fronto-parietal networks in shaping human conscious experience.

A framework is developed that enables focal and connectomic mapping of transiently disrupted brain function, with its utility being demonstrated using data from individuals with focal epilepsy.

Bayesian modeling of anatomical lesion patterns and clinical language outcomes in a cohort of 1401 stroke patients identifies sex-biased lesion-outcome effects after stroke.

Direct electrical stimulation of the basal ganglia using implanted SEEG electrodes produced a variety of motor and non-motor effects in human participants, providing insight into the functional architecture of this key brain region.

Neuropsychological profiling and clinical DTI of three stroke patients highlight the importance of the ventral language system in normal language comprehension and cognition.

In this study, intracranial EEG recordings show that neural representations of imagined images can still be present in humans even when they are shown conflicting images.