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My latest paper published in Biological Psychiatry: CNNi journal aimed to assess whether Mismatch Negativity (MMN) is reduced in early state psychosis.

Summary: MMN is an event-related potential that occurs when repetitive sounds are interrupted by an occasional sound that differs in frequency or duration. Many studies have shown that patients with schizophrenia are impaired in this process. Moreover, there is evidence that MMN-deficits may be present in early-stage psychosis.  To investigate this possibility, we employed Magnetoencephalography to establish whether MMN-responses are impaired in participants at Clinical High Risk for psychosis and First Episode Psychosis Patients. Contrary to our hypothesis, MMN-responses were intact, suggesting that MMN may not constitute a biomarker for early detection and diagnosis of psychosis.

In my paper, published in Nature Scientific Reports, I explored whether monkeys are a good model of human brain mechanisms underlying auditory segregation colloquially known as the cocktail party effect. I show that monkeys recruit similar regions of the auditory brain as humans to segregate overlapping sounds. So I propose that monkeys are a good model to understand how single neurons accomplish separation of sounds that overlap during auditory scene analysis.

Link: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-36903-1

In my new paper published in European Journal of Neuroscience, we investigated bird brain to confirm whether gamma oscillations exist in their hippocampus - a part of the brain that facilitates spatial memory which is known to be excellent in birds viz. seasonal migration, homing, food burial and retrieval etc.  We employed invitro electrophysiology (i.e. record electrical activity from brain slices which have been artificially kept alive for few hours) and neuropharmacology (selectively bathe the brain slices in specific neurochemicals to elicit an electrical response) to address this question. We found gamma oscillations in juvenile chicken hippocampus, which were elicited by chemicals that activate cholinergic receptors (agonists). This is unlike in adult mammals where both cholinergic and glutamatergic mechanisms are known to exist. The goal of this line of work is to identify any similarities and differences in the neural circuitry generating gamma rhythms in birds and mammals that can help us identify the evolutionarily conserved and divergent aspect of rhythm generation in the brain.

Link: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ejn.13773

In my new paper published in PLOS Biology, we investigated the brain mechanisms underlying auditory motion processing in the primate brain.  We address an important question: Is auditory motion perception deduced from processing individual static sounds, or are there mechanisms in the auditory domain dedicated to detecting motion? We find  specific auditory motion detectors located in the auditory cortex of primates located near visual motion detectors suggesting coordination between these areas to achieve limb and eye movement.

Link: http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.2001379