Publications by authors named "H Blumenfeld"
Although recent work has made headway in understanding the neural temporospatial dynamics of conscious perception, much of that work has focused on visual paradigms. To determine whether there are shared mechanisms for perceptual consciousness across sensory modalities, here we test within the auditory domain. Participants completed an auditory threshold task while undergoing intracranial electroencephalography.
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- Patients with focal temporal lobe seizures often lose consciousness, showing brain activity similar to deep sleep.
- Previous studies in rats suggest that reduced arousal in the brain leads to decreased brain function during these seizures, but they didn't connect this to conscious behavior.
- In this study using awake mice, researchers found that seizures affect behavior, particularly responses to sounds, by altering acetylcholine levels in the brain, highlighting the link between reduced brain activity and loss of consciousness during these episodes.
Article Synopsis
- The study aimed to create a mobile platform called ARTiE Watch to objectively and consistently assess behavioral responsiveness in people with epilepsy during and after seizures, improving current subjective methods.
- Patients were recruited to wear the ARTiE Watch, which paired with a smartphone app to remotely initiate standardized tests evaluating motor, language, and memory responses upon seizure identification.
- Results showed that participants had significantly decreased behavioral responsiveness during seizures compared to their baseline, with marked differences noted in specific types of seizures like bilateral tonic-clonic seizures.
Subcortical arousal systems are known to play a key role in controlling sustained changes in attention and conscious awareness. Recent studies indicate that these systems have a major influence on short-term dynamic modulation of visual attention, but their role across sensory modalities is not fully understood. In this study, we investigated shared subcortical arousal systems across sensory modalities during transient changes in attention using block and event-related fMRI paradigms.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjectives: Absence seizures impair psychosocial function, yet their detailed neuronal basis remains unknown. Recent work in a rat model suggests that cortical arousal state changes prior to seizures and that single neurons show diverse firing patterns during seizures. Our aim was to extend these investigations to a mouse model with studies of neuronal activity and arousal state to facilitate future fundamental investigations of absence epilepsy.
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