People

Golan Karvat

Visiting Scientist

Golan.Karvat@mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk
01223 766 166

How do thoughts look like? Can we use electrical brain activity to detect exactly when a thought appears? And can we differentiate an intended thought from an intrusive one?

The aim of my Walter Benjamin postdoctoral fellowship at the Memory Control Lab (http://memorycontrol.net/) is to link the emergence of thoughts to distinct electrophysiological responses with a clearly grounded neurobiological mechanism. A successful outcome of this research will bring us closer to understanding the stream-of-consciousness, one of the fundamentals of neuroscience. Beyond the implications for basic science, achieving this goal carries significant implications for enabling patients in locked-in conditions to communicate using brain-computer-interfaces, and targeting intrusive thoughts in psychiatric disorders, like obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and depression.

To answer these questions, I combine cognitive tasks in healthy humans, non-invasive electroyphysiology (M/EEG), signal processing, and machine-learning methods.

Publications

Refereed journal articles

Karvat, G., Ofir, N., and Landau, A. N. (2023). Sensory drive modifies brain dynamics and the temporal integration window. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, doi: 10.1162/jocn_a_02088.

Karvat, G. and Landau, A. N. (2023). A role for bottom-up alpha oscillations in temporal integration. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, doi: 10.1162/jocn_a_02056.

Re, D., Karvat, G., and Landau, A. N. (2023). Attentional Sampling between Eye Channels. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 35, 1350–1360.

Karvat, G., Alyahyay, M., and Diester, I. (2021). Spontaneous activity competes with externally evoked responses in sensory cortex. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118(25). doi: 10.1073/pnas.2023286118.

Sun, Z., Schneider, A., Alyahyay, M, Karvat, G., and Diester, I. (2021). Effects of optogenetic stimulation of primary somatosensory cortex and its projections to striatum on vibrotactile perception in freely moving rats. ENeuro; 10.1523/ENEURO.0453-20.2021.

Karvat,G., Schneider,A., Alyahyay,M., Steenbergen,F., Tangermann, M., and Diester ,I. (2020). Real-time detection of neural oscillation bursts allows behaviourally relevant neurofeedback. Communications Biology 3, 1–10.

Segal-Gavish, H.*, Karvat, G.*, Barak, N.*, Barzilay, R., Ganz, J., Edry, L., Aharony, I., Offen, D., and Kimchi, T. (2016). Mesenchymal Stem Cell Transplantation Promotes Neurogenesis and Ameliorates Autism Related Behaviors in BTBR Mice. Autism Research 9, pp. 17-32. *Equal contribution.

Karvat, G., and Kimchi, T. (2014). Acetylcholine elevation relieves cognitive rigidity and social deficiency in a mouse model of autism. Neuropsychopharmacology 39, pp 831-840.

Karvat, G., and Kimchi, T. (2012). Systematic autistic-like behavioral phenotyping of 4 mouse strains using a novel wheel-running assay. Behavioural Brain Research 233, pp. 405-414.

Archived preprints
Alyahyay, M., Kalweit, G., Kalweit, M., Karvat, G., Ammer, J., Schneider, A., Adzemovic, A., Vlachos, A., Boedecker, J., & Diester, I. (2023). Mechanisms of Premotor-Motor Cortex Interactions during Goal Directed Behavior. bioRxiv; doi: 10.1101/2023.01.20.524944.

Book chapters
Karvat, G., and Diester, I. (2018). Optophysiology and Behavior in Rodents and Nonhuman Primates. In Optogenetics: A Roadmap (pp. 199–217). Humana Press, New York, NY.

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