Selective Modulation of Connectivity in the Speech Network by Electric Brain Stimulation

In this Brainbox Initiative Webinar, Basil Preisig, postdoctoral scientist in Neurolinguistics at the University of Zurich, joins us as a guest speaker to explore his work on Selective Modulation of Connectivity in the Speech Network by Electric Brain Stimulation. Regional specialization is a hallmark of neural speech processing. Two of the most important specializations concern hemispheric lateralization and the intra-hemispheric differentiation between motor and sensory speech areas. One important questions concerns how information processed in different hemispheres or between sensory and motor speech areas is integrated. One increasingly dominant hypothesis is that the brain overcomes this “binding problem” by the synchronization of oscillatory activity across the relevant regions. Two temporal scales seem to be of particular relevance for speech processing: the theta frequency band corresponding roughly to the length of syllables (~100–300 ms), and in the gamma frequency band corresponding to the duration of phonemes (~20–50 ms). In this talk, Basil Preisig will introduce different experiments where he and his colleagues probed oscillatory synchronization as a mechanism for inter- and intrahemispheric communication in the speech network by manipulating oscillatory synchrony from the outside through the application of electric brain stimulation.