[Music]
scientist and Arthur Lyle Watson once
said if the brain were so simple that we
could understand it
we were really so simple we couldn’t and
this quote nicely describes the enormous
scientific challenge that we face in
trying to understand the human brain and
how it functions how it relates to our
cognitive abilities and even though over
the last decades we have made enormous
progress in brain imaging methods find
new insights into how the brain
functions how the architecture of the
brain is laid out and how that relates
to complex cognitive abilities like
perception memory spatial orienting and
many many more I would argue that we
basically have no idea how the brain
actually works in our natural
environments and this is because brain
imaging methods investigate human brain
dynamics in participants that are
stretched out supine and a scanner that
are sitting in dark experimental rooms
not allowed to move at all there’s
because the sensors are either too heavy
to follow participants movements like in
an MRI scan or several tons or because
the movement induces movement related
artifacts that distort the feeble signal
of interest that originates in the brain
so my contention here is that if we
really want to understand the human
brain and how to naturally functions we
have to leave the standard lab set up we
have to go and measure brain activity
and actively behaving humans as for now
we’ve recorded millions of bits of
information regarding brain activity and
we compare that with one bit of behavior
a button press at the end of the trial
that seems to be like a fundamental
mismatch and does that reflect how our
brain works in our natural environment I
have serious doubts
the brain evolved and it’s a very highly
energy consuming organ and it evolved
basically to survive to increase the
probability of survival of the human
species it is not sufficient to develop
color vision to be able to sense the
health level or emotional states of
other people it is to select the
appropriate action plan if an
ill-tempered orange faced primate
concept it is not sufficient to remember
that a red fruit has higher sugar levels
than a green fruit or that the seriously
weird smelling food makes you sick it is
to remember where to find the sugar Lane
fruit again or to inhibit eating food
that is too old perception is for action
and memory is not retrospective but
prospective it did not evolve to
reminisce about the past it evolved to
be better prepared for action in the
future so let me give you two examples
why behavior or action is so important
for cognition and why it is important
for brain dynamics I’m going to show you
a video of a single cell recording in
red so in animal studies we can record
cell activity in actively moving animals
and that shows the tight relationship of
movement behavior and brain dynamics
what you’re going to see is a red
running around an elevated track and
what you are about to hear is the firing
of single cells deep in the red super
campus deep in the brain of that animal
that fire whenever the rat is in a
specific place that’s why these place
cells are called place cells so here you
can see the red and now the red is
moving and you hear the firing of
different place cells and certain cells
fire when the red is in a specific place
other cells will fire when the red is in
a different place with that kind of
information in other cells like rich
cells and heading sensitive cells the
rodent is able to compute a perfect
metric representation of our environment
we can do the same we have
cell and the same cell types in our
brain so the point here is that the
activity of these cells are obviously
influenced by active behavior by
movement through space the second
example that you’re going to see is
activity again single cell activity of
cells in the brain of a fruit fly and
the activity was measured in two
different conditions one condition was
the fruit fly was resting not moving at
all and the second condition the fruit
fly was airborne the trick here is that
the fruit fly is glued to a stick it
does not really move in space it flies
but doesn’t move in both conditions the
fruit fly perceives the exact identical
visual input and if you look at certain
region of the brain that you can see
here on the left hand side the activity
that’s the brain the upper part of that
animal and here you see activity of
certain cells in that brain in an area
that is not directly related to motor
output that’s not the area that controls
flying but there’s other computational
things and the moment the animal is
airborne you can see that the activity
changes dramatically basically
indicating that changes in behavioral
State even though you’re not moving you
see the same things completely lead to a
change in the brain dynamic State more
importantly the movement itself will
lead to sensory output that will be used
to reach an action goal sensors in your
muscle in in your vestibular system in
your in the ear that provides the basis
for balance for movement and orientation
changes in space and how you react to
that with your body and upright posture
basically provides you with all the
information that you need to compute
spatial relationships with out visual
input you can easily test it I’m sorry
but I’ve in the first talk I have to ask
you to please stand up seriously okay so
look around you try to fix it like one
of the windows look at one certain
objects that you see in this room and
now face me again please and close your
eyes keep your eyes closed until I tell
you to open them again and now slowly
turn on the spot to your right slowly
until I say stop turn turn around on
you’re on the spot turn around turn
around
body rotation turn turn turn turn turn
more and stop and now without opening
your eyes please turn back to face the
object that you just fixated before if
you’ve done so open your eyes and you
see that you should be more or less
accurately be able to face that spatial
location again thank you very much
so basically you were able to update a
position in space that you couldn’t see
during active rotation you changed your
position and orientation in space and
still you had a complete and find
accurate representation of where that
object location was without visual input
that is a demonstration of how important
our bodily senses are for cognition and
for other higher processes too so in
standard or established brain imaging
studies um we do not have the means to
investigate moving participants as I
said the scanners are too heavy or we
are afraid of movement related
distortions of the signal so how do we
measure activity in actively you moving
participants 10 years ago I started to
work with scupper cake from the
University of California in San Diego
and we developed a new mobile brain body
imaging we called it a mobile brain body
imaging or short movie then Ferriss are
joined us from the University of
Michigan now Florida to conduct a series
of experiments where we investigated
participants walking standing and
running in their environment interacting
with their environment to better
understand how the brain dynamics works
somos by brain body imaging basically
overcomes restrictions of established
brain imaging methods by using portable
mobile EEG systems 25 years ago this
wouldn’t have been possible this isn’t a
32 channel EEG system that is mobile
completely transferring data wirelessly
to your handi to whatever kind of mobile
device you think Bluetooth or whatever
kind of protocol this is technology that
developed lately and that allows us to
record eg electrical activity of the
brain originating in the brain in
actively behaving participants however
if you want to understand how move and
impacts brain activity then we have to
think
nice the eg with the movement so we have
to synchronize eg with motion capture in
addition we can synchronize other data
streams like head mounted virtual
reality peripheral physiology whatever
you would like to synchronize it took
some years to overcome the technical
challenges of synchronizing wireless
data streams megabyte with limited
bandwidth without delays and the
different data streams but now we have
two laps one in San Diego and one here
in Berlin
that is fantastic it’s the Berlin wall
by brain by the imaging up part here at
the table Berlin that is a dedicated
research facility two more by brain body
imaging experiments and what would that
look like so here you see a participant
in an experiment and she basically does
exactly the same what I just asked you
to do keeping up orientation while
turning on the spot and we interested in
trying to see which brain areas
represent that kind of vestibular and
proprioceptive information that is used
to reorient towards a certain heading
orientation and what you can see is a
160 channel cap of actively amplified
EEG on the neck and over the hat to
measure the electrical activity of the
brain and the neck muscles in addition
that’s synchronized to the motion
capture you can see the red LEDs that
allow us to track position orientation
changes of participants head torso
full-body motion capture and that is
synchronized to the Hat mounted virtual
reality system here that allows us to
control visual inputs and as Margaret
Wilson nicely stated it cognitive
processes are deeply rooted in the
body’s interaction with the world I’m
going to show you an example of an
experiment that clearly demonstrated
that brain dynamics are also deeply
influenced by active behavior and that
that changes cognition one more word to
the data because participants are moving
and they produce movement related
artifacts that heavily contaminate the
signal of interest so we need to use
data-driven analysis approaches to
dissociate brain for non brain activity
like neck muscle activity eye movements
or mechanical induced art effects due to
the movement cables way and electrode
movements so we need advanced
computational methods to dissociate all
these different contributions to
sensor level data that we record so I’m
going to show you an experiment and here
we basically exported a very established
experiment that we know in psychology
for decades now where participants have
to respond to a target that appears on
the screen and we compare two conditions
here we compared that participants in
one condition had to simply press a
button whenever a moving sphere changed
the color to the target color and in the
second condition we asked participants
to actively point and intercept the
trajectory of that moving sphere so here
you can see the setup and you can see a
participant basically showing motivated
action not simply sitting in front of a
screen and just pressing a button but
this is the active pointing condition
here what you can see is that the sphere
moves it changes its color and then
participants are asked to respond to
that by touching the moving sphere so
this kind of activity is a natural
activity that we observe in our daily
life nearly every every other minute if
you would like to drink some water using
a glass in front of you what you have to
do you have to grasp the glass before
that you have to encode the location of
a glass with respect to your body that
location of that object is encoded based
on an original topic coordinate system
that is a coordinate system that is
centered in your eyes however if you
want to grasp it you have to line that
retinotopic coordinate system with a
coordinate system of your hand because
you want to grasp that glass that is
connected to your arm that is centered
in your shoulder providing yet another
coordinate system that has to be aligned
with the visual coordinate system to
allow controlled movement this is heavy
computation we don’t notice that at all
it’s a simple task for us seemingly but
the computational demands underlying
that are quite great if you compare that
and make the glass moving like in this
experiment the object is moving the
computational load increases parietal
cortex an area in your brain somewhere
here is one of the cortex areas that
among other functions provides the basis
for the integration of different
coordinate systems
it is not involved in execution of motor
processes though it’s not a motor area
it’s a multi modal integration area here
you can see the activity of different
participants localized to the brain and
three different perspectives that you
can see here and this is a parietal
cortex and we were interested how this
brain region contributes to the sensor
level data that we record and what you
can see here in this picture is on the
left hand side the activity time locked
to the onset of the color change in the
condition on the left hand side the
participants simply had to press a
button and you can see that a target
that appears and that is response
relevant leads to significant activity
in the parietal cortex in the time range
that we would expect from traditional
brain imaging studies if you look at the
pointing condition however you see
importantly I significantly increased
activity even though that area is not
involved in executing the motor so this
shows that a continuous computation and
alignment of different coordinate system
in a dynamically changing world is
simply computationally more expensive
the data that we see in Mobe experiments
are not comparable to the data that we
know from established brain imaging
studies because we restrict all these
aspect of natural behavior of natural
interaction with a complex and
dynamically changing environment we are
far from understanding how the brain
actually functions where do we go from
here with movi if we are able to
understand how active behavior
influences cognition and brain dynamics
and how brain and AMEX during active
behavior changed motor aspects and
cognitive processes we will have a
better insight into one important aspect
of how our human brain works and
functions with that we can investigate
the impact of movement on perception why
and how does our perception of the
environment changes when we execute
certain motor programs what is the
relationship of movement to spatial
orienting abilities and the underlying
brain dynamics or memory in general
if we know better how the brain controls
motor behavior we can develop better
diagnostic and therapeutic approaches to
treat mood or motor mood or movement
disorders like Pakistan ISM stroke
patients rehabilitation approaches we
open up a new universe of new approaches
including central nervous system
activity to improve cognition and
movement and most important for me we do
gain a better understanding of how
naturally embedded brain functions in an
active human
interacting with anonymity changing
world thank you
[Applause]
scientist and Arthur Lyle Watson once
said if the brain were so simple that we
could understand it
we were really so simple we couldn’t and
this quote nicely describes the enormous
scientific challenge that we face in
trying to understand the human brain and
how it functions how it relates to our
cognitive abilities and even though over
the last decades we have made enormous
progress in brain imaging methods find
new insights into how the brain
functions how the architecture of the
brain is laid out and how that relates
to complex cognitive abilities like
perception memory spatial orienting and
many many more I would argue that we
basically have no idea how the brain
actually works in our natural
environments and this is because brain
imaging methods investigate human brain
dynamics in participants that are
stretched out supine and a scanner that
are sitting in dark experimental rooms
not allowed to move at all there’s
because the sensors are either too heavy
to follow participants movements like in
an MRI scan or several tons or because
the movement induces movement related
artifacts that distort the feeble signal
of interest that originates in the brain
so my contention here is that if we
really want to understand the human
brain and how to naturally functions we
have to leave the standard lab set up we
have to go and measure brain activity
and actively behaving humans as for now
we’ve recorded millions of bits of
information regarding brain activity and
we compare that with one bit of behavior
a button press at the end of the trial
that seems to be like a fundamental
mismatch and does that reflect how our
brain works in our natural environment I
have serious doubts
the brain evolved and it’s a very highly
energy consuming organ and it evolved
basically to survive to increase the
probability of survival of the human
species it is not sufficient to develop
color vision to be able to sense the
health level or emotional states of
other people it is to select the
appropriate action plan if an
ill-tempered orange faced primate
concept it is not sufficient to remember
that a red fruit has higher sugar levels
than a green fruit or that the seriously
weird smelling food makes you sick it is
to remember where to find the sugar Lane
fruit again or to inhibit eating food
that is too old perception is for action
and memory is not retrospective but
prospective it did not evolve to
reminisce about the past it evolved to
be better prepared for action in the
future so let me give you two examples
why behavior or action is so important
for cognition and why it is important
for brain dynamics I’m going to show you
a video of a single cell recording in
red so in animal studies we can record
cell activity in actively moving animals
and that shows the tight relationship of
movement behavior and brain dynamics
what you’re going to see is a red
running around an elevated track and
what you are about to hear is the firing
of single cells deep in the red super
campus deep in the brain of that animal
that fire whenever the rat is in a
specific place that’s why these place
cells are called place cells so here you
can see the red and now the red is
moving and you hear the firing of
different place cells and certain cells
fire when the red is in a specific place
other cells will fire when the red is in
a different place with that kind of
information in other cells like rich
cells and heading sensitive cells the
rodent is able to compute a perfect
metric representation of our environment
we can do the same we have
cell and the same cell types in our
brain so the point here is that the
activity of these cells are obviously
influenced by active behavior by
movement through space the second
example that you’re going to see is
activity again single cell activity of
cells in the brain of a fruit fly and
the activity was measured in two
different conditions one condition was
the fruit fly was resting not moving at
all and the second condition the fruit
fly was airborne the trick here is that
the fruit fly is glued to a stick it
does not really move in space it flies
but doesn’t move in both conditions the
fruit fly perceives the exact identical
visual input and if you look at certain
region of the brain that you can see
here on the left hand side the activity
that’s the brain the upper part of that
animal and here you see activity of
certain cells in that brain in an area
that is not directly related to motor
output that’s not the area that controls
flying but there’s other computational
things and the moment the animal is
airborne you can see that the activity
changes dramatically basically
indicating that changes in behavioral
State even though you’re not moving you
see the same things completely lead to a
change in the brain dynamic State more
importantly the movement itself will
lead to sensory output that will be used
to reach an action goal sensors in your
muscle in in your vestibular system in
your in the ear that provides the basis
for balance for movement and orientation
changes in space and how you react to
that with your body and upright posture
basically provides you with all the
information that you need to compute
spatial relationships with out visual
input you can easily test it I’m sorry
but I’ve in the first talk I have to ask
you to please stand up seriously okay so
look around you try to fix it like one
of the windows look at one certain
objects that you see in this room and
now face me again please and close your
eyes keep your eyes closed until I tell
you to open them again and now slowly
turn on the spot to your right slowly
until I say stop turn turn around on
you’re on the spot turn around turn
around
body rotation turn turn turn turn turn
more and stop and now without opening
your eyes please turn back to face the
object that you just fixated before if
you’ve done so open your eyes and you
see that you should be more or less
accurately be able to face that spatial
location again thank you very much
so basically you were able to update a
position in space that you couldn’t see
during active rotation you changed your
position and orientation in space and
still you had a complete and find
accurate representation of where that
object location was without visual input
that is a demonstration of how important
our bodily senses are for cognition and
for other higher processes too so in
standard or established brain imaging
studies um we do not have the means to
investigate moving participants as I
said the scanners are too heavy or we
are afraid of movement related
distortions of the signal so how do we
measure activity in actively you moving
participants 10 years ago I started to
work with scupper cake from the
University of California in San Diego
and we developed a new mobile brain body
imaging we called it a mobile brain body
imaging or short movie then Ferriss are
joined us from the University of
Michigan now Florida to conduct a series
of experiments where we investigated
participants walking standing and
running in their environment interacting
with their environment to better
understand how the brain dynamics works
somos by brain body imaging basically
overcomes restrictions of established
brain imaging methods by using portable
mobile EEG systems 25 years ago this
wouldn’t have been possible this isn’t a
32 channel EEG system that is mobile
completely transferring data wirelessly
to your handi to whatever kind of mobile
device you think Bluetooth or whatever
kind of protocol this is technology that
developed lately and that allows us to
record eg electrical activity of the
brain originating in the brain in
actively behaving participants however
if you want to understand how move and
impacts brain activity then we have to
think
nice the eg with the movement so we have
to synchronize eg with motion capture in
addition we can synchronize other data
streams like head mounted virtual
reality peripheral physiology whatever
you would like to synchronize it took
some years to overcome the technical
challenges of synchronizing wireless
data streams megabyte with limited
bandwidth without delays and the
different data streams but now we have
two laps one in San Diego and one here
in Berlin
that is fantastic it’s the Berlin wall
by brain by the imaging up part here at
the table Berlin that is a dedicated
research facility two more by brain body
imaging experiments and what would that
look like so here you see a participant
in an experiment and she basically does
exactly the same what I just asked you
to do keeping up orientation while
turning on the spot and we interested in
trying to see which brain areas
represent that kind of vestibular and
proprioceptive information that is used
to reorient towards a certain heading
orientation and what you can see is a
160 channel cap of actively amplified
EEG on the neck and over the hat to
measure the electrical activity of the
brain and the neck muscles in addition
that’s synchronized to the motion
capture you can see the red LEDs that
allow us to track position orientation
changes of participants head torso
full-body motion capture and that is
synchronized to the Hat mounted virtual
reality system here that allows us to
control visual inputs and as Margaret
Wilson nicely stated it cognitive
processes are deeply rooted in the
body’s interaction with the world I’m
going to show you an example of an
experiment that clearly demonstrated
that brain dynamics are also deeply
influenced by active behavior and that
that changes cognition one more word to
the data because participants are moving
and they produce movement related
artifacts that heavily contaminate the
signal of interest so we need to use
data-driven analysis approaches to
dissociate brain for non brain activity
like neck muscle activity eye movements
or mechanical induced art effects due to
the movement cables way and electrode
movements so we need advanced
computational methods to dissociate all
these different contributions to
sensor level data that we record so I’m
going to show you an experiment and here
we basically exported a very established
experiment that we know in psychology
for decades now where participants have
to respond to a target that appears on
the screen and we compare two conditions
here we compared that participants in
one condition had to simply press a
button whenever a moving sphere changed
the color to the target color and in the
second condition we asked participants
to actively point and intercept the
trajectory of that moving sphere so here
you can see the setup and you can see a
participant basically showing motivated
action not simply sitting in front of a
screen and just pressing a button but
this is the active pointing condition
here what you can see is that the sphere
moves it changes its color and then
participants are asked to respond to
that by touching the moving sphere so
this kind of activity is a natural
activity that we observe in our daily
life nearly every every other minute if
you would like to drink some water using
a glass in front of you what you have to
do you have to grasp the glass before
that you have to encode the location of
a glass with respect to your body that
location of that object is encoded based
on an original topic coordinate system
that is a coordinate system that is
centered in your eyes however if you
want to grasp it you have to line that
retinotopic coordinate system with a
coordinate system of your hand because
you want to grasp that glass that is
connected to your arm that is centered
in your shoulder providing yet another
coordinate system that has to be aligned
with the visual coordinate system to
allow controlled movement this is heavy
computation we don’t notice that at all
it’s a simple task for us seemingly but
the computational demands underlying
that are quite great if you compare that
and make the glass moving like in this
experiment the object is moving the
computational load increases parietal
cortex an area in your brain somewhere
here is one of the cortex areas that
among other functions provides the basis
for the integration of different
coordinate systems
it is not involved in execution of motor
processes though it’s not a motor area
it’s a multi modal integration area here
you can see the activity of different
participants localized to the brain and
three different perspectives that you
can see here and this is a parietal
cortex and we were interested how this
brain region contributes to the sensor
level data that we record and what you
can see here in this picture is on the
left hand side the activity time locked
to the onset of the color change in the
condition on the left hand side the
participants simply had to press a
button and you can see that a target
that appears and that is response
relevant leads to significant activity
in the parietal cortex in the time range
that we would expect from traditional
brain imaging studies if you look at the
pointing condition however you see
importantly I significantly increased
activity even though that area is not
involved in executing the motor so this
shows that a continuous computation and
alignment of different coordinate system
in a dynamically changing world is
simply computationally more expensive
the data that we see in Mobe experiments
are not comparable to the data that we
know from established brain imaging
studies because we restrict all these
aspect of natural behavior of natural
interaction with a complex and
dynamically changing environment we are
far from understanding how the brain
actually functions where do we go from
here with movi if we are able to
understand how active behavior
influences cognition and brain dynamics
and how brain and AMEX during active
behavior changed motor aspects and
cognitive processes we will have a
better insight into one important aspect
of how our human brain works and
functions with that we can investigate
the impact of movement on perception why
and how does our perception of the
environment changes when we execute
certain motor programs what is the
relationship of movement to spatial
orienting abilities and the underlying
brain dynamics or memory in general
if we know better how the brain controls
motor behavior we can develop better
diagnostic and therapeutic approaches to
treat mood or motor mood or movement
disorders like Pakistan ISM stroke
patients rehabilitation approaches we
open up a new universe of new approaches
including central nervous system
activity to improve cognition and
movement and most important for me we do
gain a better understanding of how
naturally embedded brain functions in an
active human
interacting with anonymity changing
world thank you
[Applause]
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