M irror neuron-driven embodied simulation, based on the neural exploitation hypothesis has been proposed as a physiological basis of social cognitive abilities in humans (1). Experimental evidence points to a relationship between social cognition and putative mirror neuron activity in neuropsychiatric disorders like schizophrenia (2) and autism (3). Experiments to explore strategies to modulate...

Do neural systems for planning motor actions play a functional role in understanding action language? Across multiple neuroimaging studies, processing action verbs correlates with somatotopic activity in premotor cortex (PMC). Yet, only one neurostimulation study supports a functional role for PMC in action verb understanding: paradoxically, inhibiting PMC made people respond faster to action v...

Within the primate visual system, areas at lower levels of the cortical hierarchy process basic visual features, whereas those at higher levels, such as the frontal eye fields (FEF), are thought to modulate sensory processes via feedback connections. Despite these functional exchanges during perception, there is little shared activity between early and late visual regions at rest. How interacti...

In the neural engineering field, physiological dysfunctions are approached by identifying the target nerves and providing artificial stimulation to restore the function. Neural stimulation and recording technologies play a central role in this approach, and various engineering devices and stimulation techniques have become available to the medical community. For bladder control problems, electr...

Neuroimaging studies have suggested differences in cortical activation in human vocalization and musical tasks. However, functional neurophysiological evidence on cortical excitability changes is lacking. We utilized transcranial magnetic stimulation to demonstrate changes in cortical excitability during overt humming and singing tasks. The findings complement those from neuroimaging and suppor...

Functional neurosurgery is nowadays a recognized treatment for advanced Parkinson’s disease with pharmacologically uncontrolled symptoms. This procedure brings us the unique opportunity to deepen in the knowledge of PD’s physiopathology by recording patients’ neural activity, and possibly in the future it will let us select the appropriate target and the optimal chronic stimulation pattern.

Brain machine interfaces (BMIs) have attracted intense attention as a promising technology for directly interfacing computers or prostheses with the brain's motor and sensory areas, thereby bypassing the body. The availability of multiscale neural recordings including spike trains and local field potentials (LFPs) brings potential opportunities to enhance computational modeling by enriching the...

Intracortical microstimulation (ICMS) is a powerful tool to investigate the functional role of neural circuits and may provide a means to restore sensation for patients for whom peripheral stimulation is not an option. In a series of psychophysical experiments with nonhuman primates, we investigate how stimulation parameters affect behavioral sensitivity to ICMS. Specifically, we deliver ICMS t...

As yet, no cure exists for upper-limb paralysis resulting from the damage to motor pathways after spinal cord injury or stroke. Recently, neural activity from the motor cortex of paralyzed individuals has been used to control the movements of a robot arm but restoring function to patients' actual limbs remains a considerable challenge. Previously we have shown that electrical stimulation of the...

the role of microbiota in health and disease is the subject of rigorous investigation. several studies have demonstrated that microbiota and the pattern-recognition receptors contribute to intestinal tumourigenesis; the exact mechanism of which is still obscure. myd88 is the downstream effector of all toll-like receptors (tlrs) except tlr3. however, the alternative myd88-independent pathway is ...