CHBH Seminar Series 2021

The CHBH had the pleasure of welcoming Dr Matias Ison, Assistant Professor in Psychology at the School of Psychology, University of Nottingham, to present a CHBH Seminar on his research on Thursday 28th January 13:00-14:00 2021.

Combining methodologies to understand the brain: Insights from EEG, eye movements, and human single neuron recordings

Emerging technologies and novel analysis methods allow us to look at brain signals in unprecedented ways. Yet, no experimental technique has been developed to fully understand how the brain works. My approach is to develop and apply quantitative tools to study neural activity at different scales using a variety of techniques. In this talk, I will first show how we can combine eye tracking with EEG (and MEG, if time allows) to study macroscopic brain activity under naturalistic conditions. I will then move to a much smaller scale and tell you how we study the simultaneous activity of single neurons recorded from microwires implanted in the brain of epileptic patients for possible curative surgery. In particular, I will discuss how this approach led us to show that individual neurons in the human brain change their firing to link associations when a new memory is formed.

Biography

Dr Matias Ison received his MSc and Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Before starting his lab at the School of Psychology, University of Nottingham, he held appointments at the University of Leicester and visiting appointments at King’s College Hospital, UCLA Medical Center, and the University of Buenos Aires. Dr Ison’s research programme focuses on memory formation and visual search using a variety of techniques including single-cell recordings in humans, computational modelling, eye-tracking and non-invasive EEG/MEG. He has published over 30 journal articles in leading journals including Neuron, Nature Communications, Nature Neuroscience, and PNAS.