Bradley Voytek

Bradley Voytek
University of California, San Diego | UCSD · Cognitive Science, Neuroscience, and Data Science

PhD

About

122
Publications
27,981
Reads
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8,951
Citations
Additional affiliations
September 2011 - present
University of California, San Francisco
Position
  • PostDoc Position
June 2010 - May 2011
University of California, Berkeley
Position
  • PostDoc Position
Education
August 2004 - May 2010
University of California, Berkeley
Field of study
  • Neuroscience
August 1998 - May 2002
University of Southern California
Field of study
  • Psychology

Publications

Publications (122)
Preprint
While visual working memory (WM) is strongly associated with reductions in occipitoparietal 8-12 Hz alpha power, the role of 4-7 Hz frontal midline theta power is less clear, with both increases and decreases widely reported. Here, we test the hypothesis that this theta paradox can be explained by non-oscillatory, aperiodic neural activity dynamics...
Article
Full-text available
In March 2014, a team of cosmologists made headlines around the world when they reported possible evidence for cosmic inflation – an extremely short period during which the universe rapidly expanded immediately after the Big Bang (Ade et al., 2014). However, it later emerged that some of the signal this result was based on had been produced by some...
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Full-text available
Oral cannabidiol (CBD) treatment has been suggested to alleviate negative symptoms of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). While many CBD preparations have been studied in randomized clinical trials involving ASD, none have used purified CBD preparations or preparations approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, nor have they focused on low-func...
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Full-text available
Functional connectivity has attracted significant interest in the identification of specific circuits underlying brain (dys-)function. Classical analyses to estimate functional connectivity (i.e., filtering electrophysiological signals in canonical frequency bands and using connectivity metrics) assume that these reflect oscillatory networks. Howev...
Preprint
Neuro-electrophysiological recordings contain prominent aperiodic activity – meaning irregular activity, with no characteristic frequency – which has variously been referred to as 1/f (or 1/f-like activity), fractal, or ‘scale-free’ activity. Previous work has established that aperiodic features of neural activity is dynamic and variable, relating...
Article
Cognitive symptoms in Parkinson’s disease are common and can significantly affect patients’ quality of life. Therefore, there is an urgent clinical need to identify a signature derived from behavioral and/or neuroimaging indicators that could predict which patients are at increased risk for early and rapid cognitive decline. Recently, converging ev...
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Full-text available
On the centenary of the first human EEG recording, more than 500 experts reflect on the impact that this discovery has had on our understanding of the brain and behaviour. We document their priorities and call for collective action focusing on validity, democratization and responsibility to realize the potential of EEG in science and society over t...
Article
To support complex cognition, neuronal circuits must integrate information across multiple temporal scales, ranging from milliseconds to decades. Neuronal timescales describe the duration over which activity within a network persists, posing a putative explanatory mechanism for how information might be integrated over multiple temporal scales. Litt...
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Full-text available
Various theories in neuroscience maintain that brain oscillations have an important role in neuronal computation, but opposing views claim that these macroscale dynamics are “exhaust fumes” of more relevant processes. Here, we argue that the question of whether oscillations are epiphenomenal is ill-defined and cannot be productively resolved withou...
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Full-text available
The Brain Imaging Data Structure (BIDS) is a community-driven standard for the organization of data and metadata from a growing range of neuroscience modalities. This paper is meant as a history of how the standard has developed and grown over time. We outline the principles behind the project, the mechanisms by which it has been extended, and some...
Article
Background Sleep disorders are common in patients with Alzheimer’s Disease (AD). Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA), characterized by intermittent cessation of breathing and hypoxemia, has been associated with increased risk of AD and worse cognitive function. However, the interacting effects of neurocognitive function with sleep breathing patterns, ind...
Article
Full-text available
Major depressive disorder (MDD) is a leading cause of disability worldwide. One of the most efficacious treatments for treatment-resistant MDD is electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). Recently, magnetic seizure therapy (MST) was developed as an alternative to ECT due to its more favorable side effect profile. While these approaches have been very succes...
Article
Full-text available
Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) is one of the most efficacious interventions for treatment-resistant depression. Despite its efficacy, ECT’s neural mechanism of action remains unknown. Although ECT has been associated with “slowing” in the electroencephalogram (EEG), how this change relates to clinical improvement is unresolved. Until now, increase...
Preprint
Full-text available
In the human brain, the alpha rhythm in occipital cortex and the mu rhythm in sensorimotor cortex are among the most prominent rhythms, with both rhythms functionally implicated in gating modality-specific information. Separation of these rhythms is non-trivial due to the spatial mixing of these oscillations in sensor space. Using a computationally...
Preprint
Full-text available
Cognitive symptoms in Parkinson’s disease (PD) are common and can significantly affect patients’ quality of life. Therefore, there is an urgent clinical need to identify a signature derived from behavioral and/or neuroimaging indicators that could predict which patients are at increased risk for early and rapid cognitive decline. Recently, convergi...
Article
Full-text available
Systematic spatial variation in micro-architecture is observed across the cortex. These micro-architectural gradients are reflected in neural activity, which can be captured by neurophysiological time-series. How spontaneous neurophysiological dynamics are organized across the cortex and how they arise from heterogeneous cortical micro-architecture...
Article
Diagnosis and symptom severity in schizophrenia are associated with irregularities across neural oscillatory frequency bands, including theta, alpha, beta, and gamma. However, electroencephalographic signals consist of both periodic and aperiodic activity characterized by the (1/fX) shape in the power spectrum. In this paper, we investigated oscill...
Preprint
Full-text available
Systematic spatial variation in micro-architecture is observed across the cortex. These micro-architectural gradients are reflected in neural activity, which can be captured by neurophysiological time-series. How spontaneous neurophysiological dynamics are organized across the cortex and how they arise from heterogeneous cortical micro-architecture...
Preprint
Full-text available
Major depressive disorder (MDD) is a leading cause of disability worldwide. One of the most efficacious treatments for treatment-resistant MDD is electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). Recently, magnetic seizure therapy (MST) was developed as an alternative to ECT due to its more favorable side effect profile. While these approaches have been very succes...
Article
Full-text available
Brain function is a product of the balance between excitatory and inhibitory (E/I) brain activity. Variation in the regulation of this activity is thought to give rise to normal variation in human traits, and disruptions are thought to potentially underlie a spectrum of neuropsychiatric conditions (e.g., Autism, Schizophrenia, Downs’ Syndrome, inte...
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Full-text available
Electrical recordings of human brain activity via electroencephalography (EEG) show prominent, rhythmic voltage fluctuations. These periodic oscillations have been linked to nearly every cognitive and perceptual process, as well numerous disease states. Recent methodological and theoretical advances, however, have given rise to evidence for a funct...
Article
An approach for integrating the wealth of heterogeneous brain data — from gene expression and neurotransmitter receptor density to structure and function — allows neuroscientists to easily place their data within the broader neuroscientific context.
Article
Traditional frequency analyses assume that power at a given frequency reflects neuronal oscillations at that frequency. There is also the assumption that changes in power track modulations in oscillatory activity at that frequency. However, these assumptions may be incorrect because apparent changes in power at a frequency may be caused by any numb...
Article
Since the second-half of the twentieth century, intracranial electroencephalography (iEEG), including both electrocorticography (ECoG) and stereo-electroencephalography (sEEG), has provided an intimate view into the human brain. At the interface between fundamental research and the clinic, iEEG provides both high temporal resolution and high spatia...
Preprint
Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) is one of the most efficacious interventions for treatment-resistant depression. Despite its efficacy, ECT's neural mechanism of action remains unknown. Although ECT has been associated with "slowing" in the electroencephalogram (EEG), how this change relates to clinical improvement is unresolved. Until now, increase...
Article
Full-text available
Event-related potentials (ERPs) are a common approach for investigating the neural basis of cognition and disease. There exists a vast and growing literature of ERP-related articles, the scale of which motivates the need for efficient and systematic meta-analytic approaches for characterizing this research. Here we present an automated text-mining...
Article
Full-text available
A growing body of literature suggests that the explicit parameterization of neural power spectra is important for the appropriate physiological interpretation of periodic and aperiodic electroencephalogram (EEG) activity. In this paper, we discuss why parameterization is an imperative step for developmental cognitive neuroscientists interested in c...
Article
Full-text available
Beginning at early stages, human Alzheimer’s disease (AD) brains manifest hyperexcitability, contributing to subsequent extensive synapse loss, which has been linked to cognitive dysfunction. No current therapy for AD is disease-modifying. Part of the problem with AD drug discovery is that transgenic mouse models have been poor predictors of potent...
Article
Full-text available
A hallmark of electrophysiological brain activity is its 1/f-like spectrum - power decreases with increasing frequency. The steepness of this 'roll-off' is approximated by the spectral exponent, which in invasively recorded neural populations reflects the balance of excitatory to inhibitory neural activity (E:I balance). Here, we first establish th...
Article
Full-text available
Neuronal activity within the premotor region HVC is tightly synchronized to, and crucial for, the articulate production of learned song in birds. Characterizations of this neural activity detail patterns of sequential bursting in small, carefully identified subsets of neurons in the HVC population. The dynamics of HVC are well described by these ch...
Preprint
Event-related potentials (ERPs) are a common approach for investigating the neural basis of cognition and disease. There exists a vast and growing literature of ERP-related articles, the scale of which motivates the need for efficient and systematic meta-analytic approaches for characterizing this research. Here we present an automated text-mining...
Article
Full-text available
In invasive electrophysiological recordings, a variety of neural oscillations can be detected across the cortex, with overlap in space and time. This overlap complicates measurement of neural oscillations using standard referencing schemes, like common average or bipolar referencing. Here, we illustrate the effects of spatial mixing on measuring ne...
Preprint
Full-text available
Cortical dynamics obey a 1/f power law, exhibiting an exponential decay of spectral power with increasing frequency. The slope and offset of this 1/f decay reflect the timescale and magnitude of aperiodic neural activity, respectively. These properties are tightly linked to cellular and circuit mechanisms (e.g. excitation:inhibition balance, firing...
Article
Neural oscillations are ubiquitous across recording methodologies and species, broadly associated with cognitive tasks, and amenable to computational modelling that investigates neural circuit generating mechanisms and neural population dynamics. Because of this, neural oscillations offer an exciting potential opportunity for linking theory, physio...
Preprint
A growing body of literature points to the importance of the explicit parameterization of neural power spectra for the appropriate physiological interpretation of periodic and aperiodic electroencephalogram (EEG) activity. In this paper, we discuss why parameterization is an imperative step for developmental cognitive neuroscientists interested in...
Preprint
Full-text available
Neural oscillations are one of the most well-known macroscopic phenomena observed in the nervous system, and the benefits of oscillatory coding have been the topic of frequent analysis. Many of these studies focused on communication between populations which were already oscillating, and sought to understand how synchrony and communication interact...
Preprint
Neural oscillations are ubiquitous across recording methodologies and species, broadly associated with cognitive tasks, and amenable to computational modeling that investigates neural circuit generating mechanisms and mesoscale dynamics. Because of this, neural oscillations may offer an exciting potential opportunity for linking theory, physiology,...
Preprint
Full-text available
In invasive electrophysiological recordings, a variety of neuronal oscillations can be detected across the cortex, with overlap in space and time. This overlap complicates measurement of neuronal oscillations using standard referencing schemes, like common average or bipolar referencing. Here, we illustrate the effects of spatial mixing on measurin...
Article
Full-text available
Neuronal oscillations emerge in early human development. These periodic oscillations are thought to rapidly change in infancy and stabilize during maturity. Given their numerous connections to physiological and cognitive processes, understanding the trajectory of oscillatory development is important for understanding healthy human brain development...
Preprint
Full-text available
A hallmark of electrophysiological brain activity is its 1/f-like spectrum - power decreases with increasing frequency. The steepness of this roll-off is approximated by the spectral exponent, which in invasively recorded neural populations reflects the balance of excitatory to inhibitory neural activity (E:I balance). Here, we first demonstrate th...
Article
The sensory and cognitive abilities of the mammalian neocortex are underpinned by intricate columnar and laminar circuits formed from an array of diverse neuronal populations. One approach to determining how interactions between these circuit components give rise to complex behavior is to investigate the rules by which cortical circuits are formed...
Article
Full-text available
Nolan and Temple Lang’s Computing in the Statistics Curricula (2010) advocated for a shift in statistical education to broadly include computing. In the time since, individuals with training in both computing and statistics have become increasingly employable in the burgeoning data science field. In response, universities have developed new courses...
Article
Full-text available
Electrophysiological signals exhibit both periodic and aperiodic properties. Periodic oscillations have been linked to numerous physiological, cognitive, behavioral and disease states. Emerging evidence demonstrates that the aperiodic component has putative physiological interpretations and that it dynamically changes with age, task demands and cog...
Article
Full-text available
Complex cognitive functions such as working memory and decision-making require information maintenance over seconds to years, from transient sensory stimuli to long-term contextual cues. While theoretical accounts predict the emergence of a corresponding hierarchy of neuronal timescales, direct electrophysiological evidence across the human cortex...
Article
Full-text available
Band ratio measures, computed as the ratio of power between two frequency bands, are a common analysis measure in neuroelectrophysiological recordings. Band ratio measures are typically interpreted as reflecting quantitative measures of periodic, or oscillatory, activity. This assumes that the measure reflects relative powers of distinct periodic c...
Preprint
Full-text available
Neuronal oscillations emerge in early human development. These periodic oscillations are thought to rapidly change in infancy and stabilize during maturity. Given their numerous connections to physiological and cognitive processes, as well as their pathological divergence, understanding the trajectory of oscillatory development is important for und...
Preprint
Full-text available
Neuronal activity within the premotor region HVC is tightly synchronized to, and crucial for, the articulate production of learned song in birds. Characterizations of this neural activity typically focuses on patterns of sequential bursting in small carefully identified subsets of single neurons in the HVC population. Much less is known about popul...
Article
Neural oscillations are observed ubiquitously in the mammalian brain, but their stability is known to be rather variable. Some oscillations are tonic and last for seconds or even minutes. Other oscillations appear as unstable bursts. Likewise, some oscillations rely on excitatory AMPAergic synapses, but others are GABAergic and inhibitory. Why this...
Preprint
Full-text available
Complex cognitive functions such as working memory and decision-making require the maintenance of information over many timescales, from transient sensory stimuli to long-term contextual cues ¹ . However, while theoretical accounts predict that a corresponding hierarchy of neuronal timescales likely emerges as a result of graded variations in recur...
Article
Full-text available
Healthy aging is associated with a multitude of structural changes in the brain. These physical age-related changes are accompanied by increased variability in neural activity of all kinds, and this increased variability, collectively referred to as “neural noise,” is argued to contribute to age-related cognitive decline. In this study, we examine...
Article
Background Abnormalities in cortical excitation and inhibition (E/I) balance are thought to underlie sensory and information processing deficits in schizophrenia (SZ). Deficits in early auditory information processing (EAIP) mediate both neurocognitive and functional impairment, and appear to be normalized by acute treatment with the NMDA antagonis...
Preprint
Full-text available
A common analysis measure for neuro-electrophysiological recordings is to compute the power ratio between two frequency bands. Applications of band ratio measures include investigations of cognitive processes as well as biomarkers for conditions such as attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. Band ratio measures are typically interpreted as refle...
Article
Full-text available
The Brain Imaging Data Structure (BIDS) is a community-driven specification for organizing neuroscience data and metadata with the aim to make datasets more transparent, reusable, and reproducible. Intracranial electroencephalography (iEEG) data offer a unique combination of high spatial and temporal resolution measurements of the living human brai...
Preprint
Full-text available
Accumulating evidence across species indicates that brain oscillations are superimposed upon an aperiodic 1/f - like power spectrum. Maturational changes in neuronal oscillations have not been assessed in tandem with this underlying aperiodic spectrum. The current study uncovers co-maturation of the aperiodic component alongside the periodic compon...
Article
Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a common neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by hyperactivity/impulsivity and inattentiveness. Efforts towards the development of a biologically based diagnostic test have identified differences in the EEG power spectrum, most consistently reported is an increased ratio of theta to beta power...
Article
Structural and transcriptional changes during early brain maturation follow fixed developmental programs defined by genetics. However, whether this is true for functional network activity remains unknown, primarily due to experimental inaccessibility of the initial stages of the living human brain. Here, we developed human cortical organoids that d...
Article
Background: Subcallosal cingulate cortex deep brain stimulation (SCC-DBS) is an experimental therapy for treatment resistant depression (TRD). Refinement and optimization of SCC-DBS will benefit from increased study of SCC electrophysiology in context of ongoing high frequency SCC-DBS therapy. Objective: 7-month observation of frequency-domain 1...
Article
Neural oscillations are widely studied using methods based on the Fourier transform, which models data as sums of sinusoids. This has successfully uncovered numerous links between oscillations and cognition or disease. However, neural data are nonsinusoidal, and these nonsinusoidal features are increasingly linked to a variety of behavioral and cog...
Article
Full-text available
Neural activity in the β frequency range (13-30 Hz) is excessively synchronized in Parkinson's disease (PD). Previous work using invasive intracranial recordings and non-invasive scalp electroencephalography (EEG) has shown that correlations between β phase and broad-band γ (>50 Hz) amplitude [i.e., phase amplitude coupling (PAC)] are elevated in P...
Preprint
Full-text available
Neural oscillations are observed ubiquitously in the mammalian brain, but their stability is known to be rather variable. Some oscillations are tonic and last for seconds or even minutes. Other oscillations appear as unstable bursts . Likewise, some oscillations rely on excitatory AMPAergic synapses, but others are GABAergic and inhibitory. Why thi...
Preprint
Full-text available
Neural activity in the beta frequency range (13-30 Hz) is excessively synchronized in Parkinson's Disease (PD). Previous work using invasive intracranial recordings and non-invasive scalp electroencephalography (EEG) has shown that correlations between beta phase and broadband gamma amplitude (i.e., phase-amplitude coupling) are elevated in PD, per...
Article
Full-text available
SETD5, a gene linked to intellectual disability (ID) and autism spectrum disorder (ASD), is a member of the SET-domain family and encodes a putative histone methyltransferase (HMT). To date, the mechanism by which SETD5 haploinsufficiency causes ASD/ID remains an unanswered question. Setd5 is the highly conserved mouse homolog, and although the Set...
Preprint
Full-text available
Intracranial electroencephalography (iEEG) data offer a unique combination of high spatial and temporal resolution measures of the living human brain. However, data collection is limited to highly specialized clinical environments. To improve internal (re)use and external sharing of these unique data, we present a structure for storing and sharing...
Preprint
Full-text available
Brain rhythms are nearly always analyzed in the spectral domain in terms of their power, phase, and frequency. While this conventional approach has uncovered spike-field coupling, as well as correlations to normal behaviors and pathological states, emerging work has highlighted the physiological and behavioral importance of multiple novel oscillati...
Preprint
Full-text available
Background Neural oscillations are often quantified as average power relative to a cognitive, perceptual, and/or behavioral task. This is commonly done using Fourier-based techniques, such as Welch’s method for estimating the power spectral density, and/or by estimating narrowband oscillatory power across trials, conditions, and/or groups. The core...
Preprint
Full-text available
Structural and transcriptional changes during early brain maturation follow fixed developmental programs defined by genetics. However, whether this is true for functional network activity remains unknown, primarily due to experimental inaccessibility of the initial stages of the living human brain. Here, we developed cortical organoids that spontan...
Preprint
Full-text available
Schizophrenia has been associated with separate irregularities in several neural oscillatory frequency bands, including theta, alpha, and gamma. Our multivariate classification of human EEG suggests that instead of irregularities in many frequency bands, schizophrenia-related electrophysiological differences may better be explained by an overall sh...
Article
Full-text available
It is widely assumed that distributed neuronal networks are fundamental to the functioning of the brain. Consistent spike timing between neurons is thought to be one of the key principles for the formation of these networks. This can involve synchronous spiking or spiking with time delays, forming spike sequences when the order of spiking is consis...