Friday, October 29, 2010

Lundbeckfonden Auditorium,
Copenhagen Biocenter

Theme of this year

"Mind control"

program
Neurodag website

Organizers: Christina R. Kruuse, Lone Helboe, Lisbeth Causse, Rune W. Berg, & Nicolas C. Petersen

Welcome by Albert Gjedde

Head of Department of Neuroscience and Pharmacology

1st keynote presentation

Henrik Ehrsson

Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm

"How we come to experience that we own our body"

"Body swap"

In 2006 Henrik Ehrsson lectured in Copenhagen during Brain Awareness Week on experiments with the rubber hand illusion, whereby feelings of ownership are manipulated. In this presentation, he went on to describe a series of clever experiments that create elements of the out-of-body experience. Specifically, by pairing a viewpoint of the body from the outside (by a camera and video-goggles) and syncronized strokes on the body and at the seen location, the experience of own body is removed from the physical body.

Professor Henrik Ehrsson

Stockholm

Jesper Tobias Andreasen

On anhedonia and 'cognitive' deficits in a mouse stress model and their  reversal by nicotine

Ann-Louise Bergstrøm

On studies using a graft model suggesting that alpha-synuclein (forming Lewy bodies in PD) can be excreted by cells and taken up by neighboring cells and seem to have (almost) prion-like properties

Casper R. Gøtzsche

Ayna Nejad

Impaired flexibility in the allocation of neural resources in antipsychotic-naive patients with first-episode schizophrenia

This work was done in a collaboration between the Schizophrenia Research Group at Glostrup and the MR Research Centre at Hvidovre, where Ayna is a ph.d.-student

Brith Klarborg

Right fronto-parietal white matter microstructure predicts sustained selective attention performance in children

Brith Klarborg is a member of the MR  research group at Hvidovre. She obtained her candidate degree in psychology earlier this month. Congratulations!

Kathrine Skak Madsen

Motor system microstructure associated with choice reaction time in children

Kathrine Skak Madsen is a ph.d.-student at the MR Research Center at Hvidovre. An interesting and well-written related paper based on the stop-signal task was published earlier this year in Neuropsychologia pdf

Mette Ødegaard Nielsen

Mette Ødegaard Nielsen is a ph.d.-student at the schizophrenia research group at Glostrup

Peter Petersen

Andrew B. Schwartz

University of Pittsburg

During the 1980's, Schwartz and co-workers developed the concept of directional tuning and population-based movement representation. Later, he developed a paradigm to study the continuous cortical signals generated throughout volitional arm movements.  He did this by using monkeys trained to draw shapes while he recorded single-cell activity from the motor cortex with an array of electrodes. The movement trajectories were, he found, represented continously in the cortical activity and contained many of the kinematic invariants of natural movement.

This knowledge is  used now to develop cortical neural prosthetics recording acticity in populations of single cells  with chronic electrode arrays.

In his presentation, Andrew Schwartz showed how a monkey can use these recorded signals to control a motorized arm prosthesis to reach out to grasp a piece of marshmallow to feed itself.