Tag "neuroscience"

The mega-grant allocated by the Russian government to the International Laboratory of Social Neurobiology, has been extended for 2022-23. The laboratory was founded two years ago and is headed by Iiro Jaaskelainen, a leading neurobiologist from Finland. Laboratory Head Vasily Klucharev spoke to the HSE News Service about the results the lab has already achieved and the prospects for the next two years.

A unique awake brain surgery has been carried out in Nizhny Novgorod with the participation of staff of the Centre for Language and Brain Studies. For the first time, neurolinguists in Nizhny Novgorod assisted in the removal of a brain tumour with mapping of a bilingual patient who is a native speaker of Tatar and Russian. The participants—Natalia Gronskaya, Director of the Centre for Language and Brain Studies, Alina Minnigulova, research assistant, and Lilia Mavlekhanova, invited expert and native speaker of Tatar—spoke about the specifics of the operation.

How can a small Russian research group become a world-famous scientific centre in less than a decade? A special edition of the Frontiers in Psychologyjournal devoted to increasing public awareness of neuroscience features an article about the HSE University Center for Language and Brain, including the successes and challenges of its early years.

The stronger the functional brain connections, the less inclined someone is to punish others for unfair behaviour. This conclusion was reached by HSE researchers following a neuroimaging experiment. Their paper ‘Wired to punish? Electroencephalographic study of the resting-state neuronal oscillations underlying third-party punishment’ was published in the journal Neuroscience.

What is affect and why is it important for humans? How can feelings be defined and what is their relation to emotions and consciousness? What might be used in making a soft robot? Professor Antonio Damasio (University of Southern California, USA) discussed these and other questions in his honorary lecture, entitled 'Feeling, Knowing, and Artificial Intelligence'.The talk was delivered on April 16 at the at the XXII April International Academic Conference held by HSE University jointly with Sberbank.

Scientists at HSE University have learned that disagreeing with the opinion of other people leaves a ‘trace’ in brain activity, which allows the brain to later adjust its opinion in favour of the majority-held point of view. The article was published in Scientific Reports.

Researchers from the HSE Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience have proposed a new method to process magnetoencephalography (MEG) data, which helps find cortical activation areas with higher precision. The method can be used in both basic research and clinical practice to diagnose a wide range of neurological disorders and to prepare patients for brain surgery. The paper describing the algorithm was published in the journal NeuroImage.

Researchers at the HSE Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience have shown experimentally that economic activity can actively change the brain. Signals that predict regular financial losses evoke plastic changes in the cortex. Therefore, these signals are processed by the brain more meticulously, which helps to identify such situations more accurately. The article was published in Scientific Reports.

A ‘Mega-Grant’ Competition for ground-breaking research projects funded by the Russian Ministry of Science and Higher Education was held for the seventh time, and this year’s competition winners included two projects that will be based at HSE University campuses. One research group will study dynamic systems at HSE – Nizhny Novgorod, and a new social neurobiology laboratory will begin work at HSE University in Moscow.

The school will take place on the 29-30 of November. Registration is open till November 20. All talks will be held in English.