苹果淫院

Note: This talk will take place at 2:00 PM instead of the usual 4:00 PM time-slot.

Cory Inman,听Postdoctoral Fellow, David Geffen School of Medicine, UCLA

础产蝉迟谤补肠迟:听The experience of emotion shapes how our memories are formed. A key structure involved in both the experience of emotion and the prioritization of emotional experiences into memory is the amygdala. In this talk, I鈥檒l describe recent work that demonstrates the effects of direct electrical stimulation to the human amygdala on emotional experience and long鈥恡erm declarative memory. First, we tested the basic effects of direct amygdala stimulation on emotional physiology and experience. This study showed that amygdala stimulation modulates autonomic nervous system activity in a dose-dependent manner and rarely causes subjective responses, even at high doses of stimulation. Next, we tested whether brief electrical stimulation to the amygdala could enhance declarative memory for specific images of neutral objects without eliciting a subjective emotional response. Epilepsy patients undergoing monitoring of seizures via intracranial depth electrodes viewed a series of neutral object images, half of which were paired with brief, low amplitude electrical stimulation to the amygdala. Amygdala stimulation elicited no subjective emotional response yet led to reliably improved memory. Neuronal oscillations in the amygdala, hippocampus, and perirhinal cortex during this next鈥恉ay memory test indicated that a neural correlate of the memory enhancement was increased theta and gamma oscillatory interactions between these regions. These results show that the amygdala can initiate endogenous memory prioritization processes in the absence of emotional input, addressing a fundamental question and opening a path to future therapies.听

Bio: After receiving his BA in Psychology at Georgia State University, Cory completed his PhD and initial postdoc at Emory University under the supervision of Dr. Stephan Hamann, studying the dynamic functional networks that underlie autobiographical memory retrieval. He then transitioned to studying emotion modulation and memory enhancement via direct brain stimulation in neurosurgical patients with Drs. Helen Mayberg, Bob Gross, and Jon Willie. In his second postdoc, Cory is now working to translate these direct brain stimulation techniques to enhance memory for real-world, episodic experiences.