Other Interdiciplinary Incentives
Keywords
Clinical Conditions
Equipment & Techniques
How do thoughts look like? Can we use electrical brain activity to detect exactly when a thought appears? And can we differentiate an intended thought from an intrusive one? The aim of my Walter Benjamin postdoctoral fellowship at the Memory Control Lab (http://memorycontrol.net/) is to link the emergence of thoughts to distinct electrophysiological responses with a clearly grounded neurobiological mechanism. A successful outcome of this research will bring us closer to understanding the stream-of-consciousness, one of the fundamentals of neuroscience. Beyond the implications for basic science, achieving this goal carries significant implications for enabling patients in locked-in conditions to communicate using brain-computer-interfaces, and targeting intrusive thoughts in psychiatric disorders, like obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and depression. To answer these questions, I combine cognitive tasks in healthy humans, non-invasive electroyphysiology (M/EEG), signal processing, and machine-learning methods.
