Joel I Berger

I am incredibly proud to share my first, first-author paper as a postdoc with @benhayden.bsky.social . How does the human hippocampus, known for encoding concepts, represent the meanings of words while listening to narrative speech?
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Memorability of novel words correlates with anterior fusiform activity during reading - Nature Communications To learn new written words, we need to be able to remember their associated letters. Here, the authors show the factors that predict how memorable or forgettable new words are and show a region of hum...

Out now in Nature Comms. To learn a new word, we need to remember it. We track factors driving memory of novel words, showing which words we remember or forget is predictable across people, and isolate a distinct region of fusiform cortex sensitive to this memorability.

🧠📈 #VisionScience 🧠💬

🧵👇

These results also constitute some of the only - if not the only (to my knowledge!) - reports of single neurons from human anterior insula. Reports from auditory cortex and posterior insula are also surprisingly scarce. Thanks as always to our amazing patients and my awesome co-authors. (5/5)

Overall, these results are consistent with what others have shown in LFPs, though usually those are examined in behaviorally-relevant contexts. These findings highlight that insula cares about fundamental sound attributes, which is important to know when considering responses to other stimuli. (4/5)

Many of these neurons also showed clear preferred tuning to particular tone frequencies - completely unsurprising for auditory cortex, but an interesting finding for insula. An important aspect is that there was no task required, so there was no behavioral context for these stimuli. (3/5)

We find that the activity of ~30% of posterior insula neurons and up to ~15% of anterior insula neurons is significantly modulated in response to these basic sounds. The latencies of these responses are very similar to primary auditory cortex, though the responses are much more transient. (2/5)

Human insula neurons respond to simple sounds during passive listening The insula is critical for integrating sensory information from the body with that arising from the environment. Although previous studies suggest that posterior insula is sensitive to sounds, auditor...

Our new preprint is up now, wherein we directly record from a relatively large population of single neurons in human insula, as well as primary auditory cortex, while intracranial participants passively listen to simple sounds (tones/clicks). doi.org/10.1101/2025... (1/5) 🧠📈🧵👇

Thank you very much, Liberty! Your awesome work was particularly an inspiration for putting this together, though it's hard to fully convey that in a paper.

New results!

Despite their varied molecular actions, anesthetics alter brain wave alignment in the same way.

Convergent effects of different anesthetics are due to changes in phase alignment of cortical oscillations
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
#neuroscience

Thanks as always to my co-authors, and you for reading this! 4/4

Ultimately, we hope that by clarifying the specific roles of various brain regions in tinnitus, we can start to work towards considering novel treatment approaches that might better account for differences in symptoms and treatment response across individuals. 3/4

The idea is to re-focus the specific role of this brain structure in tinnitus. In most other literature outside of tinnitus, the hippocampus being involved in maintaining memories is pretty uncontroversial, while in tinnitus it's most often referred to in an "emotional" role. 2/4

Our new paper on tinnitus and the hippocampus is out now in Human Brain Mapping: doi.org/10.1002/hbm.... The TL;DR is that we are highlighting a role for the hippocampus that focuses on sustaining the memory of a phantom percept, based on current literature. 1/4
🧠📈 #PsychSciSky

Intracranial electrophysiology of spectrally degraded speech in the human cortex Cochlear implants (CIs) are the treatment choice for severe to profound hearing loss. Variability in CI outcomes remains despite advances in technology and is attributed in part to differences in cort...

Our study examining intracranial responses to vocoded speech, relevant to cochlear implants, is out now ( www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.... ), led by Kirill Nourski & Mitch Steinschneider. Some very interesting dorsal/ventral stream differences dependent on task performance.

A poster on auditory working memory local field potential and single neuron data collected intracranially in humans.

I'll be presenting the poster below at APAN this afternoon and SfN on Tuesday afternoon, based on the intracranial local field potential and unit data we collect at Iowa. Come and say hi! Thank you to my lovely colleagues and our patients 🧠🟦

Our work on decoding speech using high-density micro-scale recordings was published today in Nature Communications! We demonstrate the potential of high-spatial sampling technology for future neural speech prostheses.
nature.com/articles/s4146…
The thread below outlines our main findings.

Have you heard that PLOS Mental Health is now open for submissions? Learn more about this new global, multidisciplinary #OpenAccess journal: plos.io/MHOpen

Adverse and compensatory neurophysiological slowing in Parkinson’s disease Patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD) exhibit multifaceted changes in neurophysiological brain activity, hypothesized to represent a global cortical …

We publish today with @alexwiesman.bsky.social in Progress in Neurobiology another advance in the fight against Parkinson’s disease.

Slowing of 🧠 activity is not systematically an adverse effect of pathology: it can also be a sign of compensatory activity that preserves cognitive functions.

Are you a neuroscientist who recently joined Blue Sky? Don't forget to like and pin #neuroskyence, the largest channel for all things brain-science related! You can post with #neuroskyence or 🧠🟦 ! #psychscisky 🧪 #academicsky bsky.app/profile/did:...

I will do - he was speaking highly of you the other day, in fact!

Thanks as always to my co-authors, Sukhbinder Kunar, Paris Ash, Ester Benzaquén and Phil Gander, as well as everyone who took part in the large online misophonia study. And you, for getting to the end of this thread! (6/6)

Ultimately, all of this works towards reframing misophonia in a way that we can properly understand the mechanisms behind the disorder and lead towards developing effective treatments for individuals with misophonia. (5/6)

In the second paper, Sukhbinder, Phil & I frame misophonia within a social cognitive framework, highlighting that a sound-based model of misophonia misses key components, such as importance of social context, involvement of motor cortex & insula, and high mimicry prevalence. (4/6)

Mimicry is elicited most frequently during orofacial trigger sounds and can often provide some degree of relief. These results and previous imaging literature highlight the importance of the perception of the actions of others in triggering misophonia. Hence the next paper... (3/6)

The first paper was based on hypotheses created by some of Sukhbinder's and others' earlier fMRI findings, which implicated the motor cortex in misophonia, as well as anecdotal and small case reports. In a large cohort, we find a high prevalence of mimicry in misophonia (2/6)

Two new misophonia papers from our group. First (bit.ly/mismi), led by Paris Ash and Sukhbinder Kumar examines the incidence of mimicry in misophonia. The second (bit.ly/SocMi, preprint) presents misophonia within a social cognitive framework (1/6)🧵in comments #Psychology #PsychSci 🧠🟦

Come join the lab! I'll be at SfN if you want to chat about the cool things we're up to or about the position.

ReadCube link here: rdcu.be/dokvD

Immediate neural impact and incomplete compensation after semantic hub disconnection - Nature Commun... The human brain is a distributed system composed of highly interconnected hubs. Here, patients undergoing a rare operation reveal the immediate impact and compensatory brain network changes that occur...

Our new paper is out now in Nature Communications, highlighting what happens in the brain during a semantic context task when you disconnect the anterior temporal lobe: www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🧠📈

My colleague Phil Gander and I are looking to hire a postdoc for collaborative misophonia research in Iowa. We're keen for people who are interested and experienced in fMRI/EEG analyses, with the opportunity to learn analyses of human intracranial data: jobs.uiowa.edu/postdoc/view... #neuroskyence