Serdar Akkol, MD PhD

#neurojobs

That's lovely. Curious to hear how you say CPS and your style were different and merged. Thank you again! Wondering if you have a post rock playlist you listen?

Thank you for sharing your passion! It's thoughtful and really a joy to listen. It has been a while since hearing post rock in this way. Please continue CPS for us to feel deep and endless happiness of the world on days of darkness. 😌 Would love to hear your post rock playlist as well!

Recently discovered @kerrymuzzey.bsky.social's post-rock project Candlepark Stars and I'm loving it. Been a while since I heard something like this. Much like Mono (Japan), @hammockmusic.bsky.social's "Departure Songs" or @explosionsinthesky.bsky.social! Thank you! open.spotify.com/artist/2o532...

#neurojobs

Very interesting! #iEEG

Neural entrainment by speech in human auditory cortex revealed by intracranial recordings Humans live in an environment that contains rich auditory stimuli, which must be processed efficiently. The entrainment of neural oscillations to acou…

📢 Our paper published!! One of my PhD projects with @stephanbickel.bsky.social and Ashesh Mehta!
"Neural entrainment by speech in human auditory cortex revealed by intracranial recordings"
We tried to give a more nuanced picture of speech perception using #iEEG
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Learned a lot thanks to my wonderful co-authors, @akashmishra.bsky.social, Noah Markowitz, Elizabeth Espinal, Menoua Keshishian, Charles Schroeder, @nimail.bsky.social and my PhD advisors @stephanbickel.bsky.social and Ashesh Mehta. Happy to discuss more! Here's the free access link:

a blue background with a white light coming out of it ALT: a blue background with a white light coming out of it

We believe our findings support the neural entrainment of oscillations during speech perception by acoustic edges. This is just another drop in the bucket of the vast literature on the neural oscillations. There is more to look and much to debate.

This effect was localized to HG in theta and alpha bands and to STG in theta band only.

If the phase concentration happened just because of the evoked potential, the 2nd cycle would have gone back to baseline values. However, what we see is that the ITPC stayed higher than the phase concentration happened before the evoked potential.

Focusing on acoustic edges, we looked if the acoustic edge locked phase alignment (inter-trial phase coherence) lasts more than two cycles for events that are at least 800ms apart. We found ITPC lasts 2 cycles of theta band above the phase concentration that happens right before the acoustic edge.

Cerebro-acoustic coherence between neurophysiological signal and the acoustic signal shows coherence most strongly in theta range. Acoustic peak locked evoked potentials deviate from baseline, earlier than the acoustic peak locked evoked potentials in both HG and STG.

We initially replicated that both Heschl's gyrus and superior temporal gyrus have cerebro-acoustic coherence with speech in the theta range. But both HG and STG respond to the acoustic edge earlier than acoustic peak. As expected, since acoustic edges lead the acoustic peaks.

Example speech stimulus marking acoustic edge and peaks, density plot of intervals between acoustic edge and peaks, electrode localizalization on a common freesurfer-average brain

We tried to replicate these findings using intracranial EEG as there are several differences between MEEG and iEEG.
Our participants (I don't like calling them patients since they give their best effort and do this for science without return) listened to ~45min of speech stimuli.

Phase Alignment of Low-Frequency Neural Activity to the Amplitude Envelope of Speech Reflects Evoked Responses to Acoustic Edges, Not Oscillatory Entrainment The amplitude envelope of speech is crucial for accurate comprehension. Considered a key stage in speech processing, the phase of neural activity in the theta-delta bands (1-10 Hz) tracks the phase of...

One elegant way to answer the difference is by looking at the phase alignment after an evoked activity as elegantly proposed by @oganiany.bsky.social et al.
www.jneurosci.org/content/43/2...

a man in a suit and tie is standing in front of a handicapped men 's bathroom . ALT: a man in a suit and tie is standing in front of a handicapped men 's bathroom .

Two hypotheses emerged as potential mechanisms in understanding how we perceive speech:
Neural entrainment of oscillations has amassed much attention due to its flexibility and rich background.
Evoked response hypothesis explains what we see as a combination of ongoing responses to auditory stream.

Neural entrainment by speech in human auditory cortex revealed by intracranial recordings Humans live in an environment that contains rich auditory stimuli, which must be processed efficiently. The entrainment of neural oscillations to acou…

📢 Our paper published!! One of my PhD projects with @stephanbickel.bsky.social and Ashesh Mehta!
"Neural entrainment by speech in human auditory cortex revealed by intracranial recordings"
We tried to give a more nuanced picture of speech perception using #iEEG
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Thank you!

Neural entrainment by speech in human auditory cortex revealed by intracranial recordings Humans live in an environment that contains rich auditory stimuli, which must be processed efficiently. The entrainment of neural oscillations to acou…

"Neural entrainment by speech in human auditory cortex revealed by intracranial recordings"
Akkol and colleagues, Progress in Neurobiology 2025
#iEEG
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Neural entrainment by speech in human auditory cortex revealed by intracranial recordings Humans live in an environment that contains rich auditory stimuli, which must be processed efficiently. The entrainment of neural oscillations to acou…

Neural entrainment by speech in human auditory cortex revealed by intracranial recordings www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... 12 people had intracranial electrodes & listened to natural speech oscillatory -> speech edge induced activity persisted after evoked responses thus ...neural entrainment?

Timely review of the HFA based functional mapping of cortical functions. There some more stuff to do:
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10....

Well, good news, one paper got accepted! 🎉 More details soon...

New Method Simplifies Brain Evaluations for Planning Epilepsy Surgery - Research Horizons

Conversation Mapping in Action!

scienceblog.cincinnatichildrens.org/new-method-s...

#HGM #Epilepsy #Neurosurgery #iEEG #Neurophysiology

As it's hiring season again I'm resharing the NeuroJobs feed. Add #NeuroJobs to your post if you're recruiting or looking for an RA, PhD, Postdoc, or faculty position in Neuro or an adjacent field.

bsky.app/profile/did:...

Interested in doing a PhD with me and lacns.github.io? Or with any of the incredible fellows in the IMPRS School of Cognition www.maxplanckschools.org/cognition-en - apply before Dec 1st at cognition.maxplanckschools.org/en/application

It feels like the introductions of new papers became a long abstract. There is background. There is method and results in the last paragraph. I guess the scientific writing is evolving..

a man in a suit and tie says all i can do right now is put on a brave face . ALT: a man in a suit and tie says all i can do right now is put on a brave face .

Juggling 3 manuscript submissions/revisions, doing analyses and writing manuscript on another project, writing an abstract for a case report... All the while not missing the clinical duties. I feel welcomed to the #physician-scientist life 😮‍💨 Is this how it'll be the rest of my career? 🫣
I hope so 😁

Single-neuron datasets for linguistic and semantic processing in the human amygdala and hippocampus - Scientific Data Scientific Data - Single-neuron datasets for linguistic and semantic processing in the human amygdala and hippocampus

Amazing resource ⚡️ 🧠

Single-neuron datasets for linguistic and semantic processing in the human amygdala and hippocampus

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Aligned neural space for speech production allows for improved decoding in micro-ECOG patients for BCI

We’re happy to present @zspald.bsky.social 's work on shared neural representations of speech production across individuals! We find that patient-specific data can be aligned to a shared space that preserves speech information, enabling cross-patient speech BCIs.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Bounded Alignment: What (Not) To Expect from AGI Agents On July 2, I presented a paper entitled, “Position Paper: Bounded Alignment: What (Not) To Expect From AGI Agents” at the International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN’2025) in Rome. Though...

Quite thoughtful questions and answers on the way to AGI. For AGI to be "general", it needs to be grounded in physical systems and to interact with environment. And this will not always give results we want. Just like raising a child. @barbarikon.bsky.social
aliminai.substack.com/p/bounded-al...