There will be two ynic seminars this week. First we have an extra seminar by Andy Ioannides from the Lab for Human Brain Dynamiocs, Nicosia. This seminar will be at noon on Wednesday the 15th in BO20 and the title is "Understanding sleep and its implications for specific health conditions" the abstract is below The second seminar is at the normal time of 4pm on Thursday also in BO20 That seminar will be given by Jody Culham from Western and the title is "The treachery of images":Why the brain responds differently to real objects than photos " Her seminar abstract is "Psychologists and neuroimagers commonly study perceptual and cognitive processes using images because of the convenience and ease of experimental control they provide. However, real objects differ from pictures in many ways, including the availability and consistency of depth cues and the potential for interaction. Across a series of neuroimaging experiments, we have shown that the brain responds differently to real objects than pictures, both in terms of the level of activation and the pattern. Now that these results have shown quantitative and qualitative differences in the way the brain processes real objects and images, the next step is to determine which aspects of real objects drive these differences. " ----------------------------- Andy Ioannides abstract is "Some 20 years ago, Michel Jouvet, motivated by the early PET scanning studies of the sleeping brain wrote in the concluding chapter of his book The paradox of sleep - the story of dreaming “… the majority of researchers are waiting with bated breath for the results of studies combining PET scanning, ‘functional’ magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), magnetoencephalography and tomographic electroencephalography.” The developments in the last two decades have fully vindicated this statement. The talk will first review published work obtained from real time tomographic analysis of the first whole night MEG recordings of sleep that focused on changes in regional brain activations and connectivity between areas related to eye movements and [1] and changes in regional spectral content in each sleep stage and especially during Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep [2]. The rest of the talk will present unpublished results from further and more detailed analysis of the same data. focusing on light sleep (NREM1 and NREM2) and discuss the new findings in the context of current ideas about the role of K-complexes and spindles in sleep maintenance and memory consolidation and how these may relate to pathology. " References: [1] Ioannides, A.A., Corsi-Cabrera, M., Fenwick, P.B.C., del Rio Portilla, Y., Laskaris, N.A., Khurshudyan, A., Theofilou, D., Shibata, T., Uchida, S., Nakabayashi, T., Kostopoulos, G.K., 2004. MEG tomography of human cortex and brainstem activity in waking and REM sleep saccades. Cereb. Cortex 14, 56–72. [2] Ioannides, A.A., Kostopoulos, G.K., Liu, L., Fenwick, P.B.C., 2009. MEG identifies dorsal medial brain activations during sleep. Neuroimage 44, 455–468. doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2008.09.030 -- --------------- Gary Green York Neuroimaging Centre & Centre for Hyperpolarisation in Magnetic Resonance The Biocentre York Science Park Innovation Way Heslington York YO10 5NY tel +44 (0) 1904 435349 fax +44 (0) 1904 435356 mobile +44 (0) 788 191 3004 http://www.ynic.york.ac.uk http://www.york.ac.uk/chym/ https://www.ynic.york.ac.uk/about-us/people/ggrg