Joel I Berger
Neuroscientist at University of Iowa Neurosurgery, researching into the neural bases of auditory perception. Also a musician.
- Reposted by Joel I BergerOur new preprint is out! We show that deviance detection in auditory cortex conveys the theorised comparison of internal prediction to sensory input. Our data confirm this key assumtion that links theoretical models of sensory processing to experimental data. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
- Reposted by Joel I BergerPlease repost: we're hiring! Apply now! 👉 can-acn.org/professor-re...
- Reposted by Joel I BergerAre you curious about electrogastrography, but keep getting chicken-related results when googling "EGG"? We have the preprint for you! In this tutorial, we describe how to acquire and analyse gastric data from human participants. Plus FREE software! Read it here: arxiv.org/abs/2509.17260
- Reposted by Joel I BergerfMRI signals “up,” but neural metabolism might be going “down.” In our @natneuro.nature.com paper, we demonstrate that about 40% of voxels with robust BOLD responses exhibit opposite oxygen metabolism, revealing two distinct hemodynamic modes. rdcu.be/eUPO8 funds @erc.europa.eu #neuroskyence 🧵:
- Our paper is out now in J Neuroscience (currently in "accepted paper" form). We directly record single neurons in human insula, as well as primary auditory cortex, while participants passively listen to simple sounds. @sfnjournals.bsky.social www.jneurosci.org/content/earl... (1/5) 🧠📈🧵👇
- We find that the activity of ~30% of posterior insula neurons and up to ~15% of anterior insula neurons is significantly modulated in response to these basic sounds. The latencies of these responses are very similar to primary auditory cortex, though the responses are much more transient. (2/5)
- Many of these neurons also showed clear preferred tuning to particular tone frequencies - completely unsurprising for auditory cortex, but an interesting finding for insula. An important aspect is that there was no task required, so there was no behavioral context for these stimuli. (3/5)
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View full threadThese results also constitute some of the only - if not the only (to my knowledge!) - reports of single neurons from human anterior insula. Reports from auditory cortex and posterior insula are also surprisingly scarce. Thanks as always to our amazing patients and my co-authors. (5/5)
- Reposted by Joel I BergerNew paper just published with @evelinaleivada.bsky.social @garymarcus.bsky.social, Vittoria Dentella, Raquel Montero and Fritz Günther Fundamental Principles of Linguistic Structure Are Not Represented by ChatGPT bioling.psychopen.eu/index.php/bi...
- My wonderful co-authors (including @alexjbillig.bsky.social) & I have just published a case report of acquired misophonia & amusia following right temporal resection (including posterior insula). This represents the first case of acquired misophonia. Please find the paper freely accessible below🧠📈
- With excellent colleagues at U Iowa including first authors Emily Dappen and @joelberger.bsky.social : a very rare case of acquired misophonia and amusia following right temporal resection: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... (and free til mid-Jan here: authors.elsevier.com/c/1mAun1M5IZ...)
- Reposted by Joel I BergerAs it's hiring season again I'm resharing the NeuroJobs feed. Add #NeuroJobs to your post if you're recruiting or looking for an RA, PhD, Postdoc, or faculty position in Neuro or an adjacent field. bsky.app/profile/did:...
- @suthanalab.bsky.social outstanding talks at HSN and SfN. Really amazing work!
- I rarely come on here or any social media, but wanted to share our latest preprint of large-scale human single neuron recordings during an auditory working memory task: doi.org/10.1101/2025... I'm very grateful to our patients, my co-authors and the funders. And to anyone who reads it :-) 🧠📈🧵👇(1/5)
- We recorded single neurons while participants performed a task that involved keeping a simple tone in mind and then adjusting ongoing tones to match following a maintenance period of 3 seconds. We recorded a wide variety of regions, including hippocampus, cingulate, insula. (2/5)
- Neurons in all the aforementioned regions (and others) showed modulation during the maintenance and adjustment phases of the task, with the highest proportion modulated in posterior hippocampus in the maintenance period. Strikingly, suppression was the dominant pattern of activity. (3/5)
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View full threadOverall, these results show that even low-level auditory working memory (i.e. not involving semantic features or high-level representations) engages a distributed network of brain regions, which includes strong involvement of the hippocampus. (5/5)
- Reposted by Joel I BergerI am incredibly proud to share my first, first-author paper as a postdoc with @benhayden.bsky.social . How does the human hippocampus, known for encoding concepts, represent the meanings of words while listening to narrative speech? www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
- Reposted by Joel I BergerOut now in Nature Comms. To learn a new word, we need to remember it. We track factors driving memory of novel words, showing which words we remember or forget is predictable across people, and isolate a distinct region of fusiform cortex sensitive to this memorability. 🧠📈 #VisionScience 🧠💬 🧵👇
- Our new preprint is up now, wherein we directly record from a relatively large population of single neurons in human insula, as well as primary auditory cortex, while intracranial participants passively listen to simple sounds (tones/clicks). doi.org/10.1101/2025... (1/5) 🧠📈🧵👇
- We find that the activity of ~30% of posterior insula neurons and up to ~15% of anterior insula neurons is significantly modulated in response to these basic sounds. The latencies of these responses are very similar to primary auditory cortex, though the responses are much more transient. (2/5)
- Many of these neurons also showed clear preferred tuning to particular tone frequencies - completely unsurprising for auditory cortex, but an interesting finding for insula. An important aspect is that there was no task required, so there was no behavioral context for these stimuli. (3/5)
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View full threadThese results also constitute some of the only - if not the only (to my knowledge!) - reports of single neurons from human anterior insula. Reports from auditory cortex and posterior insula are also surprisingly scarce. Thanks as always to our amazing patients and my awesome co-authors. (5/5)
- Reposted by Joel I BergerNew results! Despite their varied molecular actions, anesthetics alter brain wave alignment in the same way. Convergent effects of different anesthetics are due to changes in phase alignment of cortical oscillations www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... #neuroscience
- Our new paper on tinnitus and the hippocampus is out now in Human Brain Mapping: doi.org/10.1002/hbm.... The TL;DR is that we are highlighting a role for the hippocampus that focuses on sustaining the memory of a phantom percept, based on current literature. 1/4 🧠📈 #PsychSciSky
- The idea is to re-focus the specific role of this brain structure in tinnitus. In most other literature outside of tinnitus, the hippocampus being involved in maintaining memories is pretty uncontroversial, while in tinnitus it's most often referred to in an "emotional" role. 2/4
- Ultimately, we hope that by clarifying the specific roles of various brain regions in tinnitus, we can start to work towards considering novel treatment approaches that might better account for differences in symptoms and treatment response across individuals. 3/4
- Thanks as always to my co-authors, and you for reading this! 4/4
- Our study examining intracranial responses to vocoded speech, relevant to cochlear implants, is out now ( www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.... ), led by Kirill Nourski & Mitch Steinschneider. Some very interesting dorsal/ventral stream differences dependent on task performance.
- I'll be presenting the poster below at APAN this afternoon and SfN on Tuesday afternoon, based on the intracranial local field potential and unit data we collect at Iowa. Come and say hi! Thank you to my lovely colleagues and our patients 🧠🟦
- Reposted by Joel I BergerOur work on decoding speech using high-density micro-scale recordings was published today in Nature Communications! We demonstrate the potential of high-spatial sampling technology for future neural speech prostheses. nature.com/articles/s4146… The thread below outlines our main findings.
- Reposted by Joel I BergerHave you heard that PLOS Mental Health is now open for submissions? Learn more about this new global, multidisciplinary #OpenAccess journal: plos.io/MHOpen
- Reposted by Joel I BergerWe publish today with @alexwiesman.bsky.social in Progress in Neurobiology another advance in the fight against Parkinson’s disease. Slowing of 🧠 activity is not systematically an adverse effect of pathology: it can also be a sign of compensatory activity that preserves cognitive functions.
- Reposted by Joel I BergerAre you a neuroscientist who recently joined Blue Sky? Don't forget to like and pin #neuroskyence, the largest channel for all things brain-science related! You can post with #neuroskyence or 🧠🟦 ! #psychscisky 🧪 #academicsky bsky.app/profile/did:...
- Two new misophonia papers from our group. First (bit.ly/mismi), led by Paris Ash and Sukhbinder Kumar examines the incidence of mimicry in misophonia. The second (bit.ly/SocMi, preprint) presents misophonia within a social cognitive framework (1/6)🧵in comments #Psychology #PsychSci 🧠🟦
- Thanks as always to my co-authors, Sukhbinder Kunar, Paris Ash, Ester Benzaquén and Phil Gander, as well as everyone who took part in the large online misophonia study. And you, for getting to the end of this thread! (6/6)
- Reposted by Joel I BergerCome join the lab! I'll be at SfN if you want to chat about the cool things we're up to or about the position.
