Colloquia/Seminars
Time: 11:00am, Aug 26, 2024
Venue: Lecture Hall, Shanghai Brain Center
Speaker: Prof. Mingsha Zhang
Professor of State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning, IDG/McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Beijing Normal University
Biography:
Mingsha Zhang, Professor of State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning, IDG/McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Beijing Normal University.
I am interested on the understanding of neuronal basis of cognitive functions, such as visual awareness, visual spatial perception, spatial attention, working memory and temporal prediction. We employ visual, oculomotor and manual systems of primates as behavior model to assess how cognitive functions affect the visually guided behaviors as well as the process of sensorimotor transformation. In addition to the basic research, I have a keen interest to combine my experience of neuroscience and medicine for clinic research of neurodegenerative diseases, such as AD and PD. We have successfully made hemi-Parkinson model in monkeys by injection of MPTP (specifically damages dopaminergic neurons in substantial nigra) through one side of internal carotid. With the hemi-Parkinson monkeys, we are able to explore the neural mechanisms of motor and non-motor impairments in Parkinson disease, and evaluate the effect of various treatments including deep brain stimulation (DBS).
Abstract:
Human high-order thalamic nuclei have been known to closely correlate with conscious states. However, given the great difference of conscious states and contents (conscious perception), it is nearly unknown how those thalamic nuclei and thalamocortical interactions directly contribute to the transient process of human conscious perception. To address this question, we simultaneously recorded the local field potential (LFP) in the human intralaminar, medial and ventral thalamic nuclei as well as in the prefrontal cortex (PFC), while patients with implanted electrodes performed a visual consciousness task. Overall, compared to the ventral nuclei and PFC, intralaminar and medial nuclei showed earlier and stronger consciousness-related activity. Moreover, the transient thalamocortical neural synchrony and cross-frequency coupling were both driven by the theta phase of the intralaminar and medial nuclei during conscious perception. These results suggest that, contrary to common beliefs, the intralaminar and medial thalamic nuclei, rather than PFC, play a decisive ‘gate’ role in conscious perception.