Brain–peripheral couplings: functional role and future opportunities

Welcome to our ABC Seminars! This seminar series is open for everyone. The talk will take place in Ekonominaukio 1, Room R038/V001. . After the talks, coffee and pulla will be served.

The event will be also streamed via Zoom at: https://aalto.zoom.us/j/67444945844

Brain–peripheral couplings: functional role and future opportunities

Abstract: In many everyday-life situations, humans use their muscles to maintain parts of their body in a fixed position. Common examples are holding a glass in hand or standing upright. These conditions appear very static, but they require a highly dynamic regulation of muscle contractions based on somatosensory afferences to the cortex. In this talk, I will present recent data shedding light on couplings between brain activity recorded with EEG or MEG and muscle activity or fine-grained kinematics of implicated body parts. The available data suggests that sensorimotor beta oscillations play a role in controlling muscle activity and that cortical activity in a lower (<5 Hz) frequency channel plays a role in integrating proprioceptive afferences.

Bio: Mathieu Bourguignon is a physics engineer and holds a PhD from the Free University of Brussels (ULB; Belgium) in biomedical and pharmaceutical sciences. His research is organized along two lines, trying to better understand the brain mechanisms underlying 1) sensorimotor control and 2) speech processing. To that end, he uses non-invasive electrophysiological recording techniques such as electroencephalography (EEG) and magnetoencephalography (MEG) to record human brain activity in ecologically valid conditions.