Bühler Symposium: Measuring Minds in New Ways

Dr. Martin Bleichner (Oldenburg University)
Measuring the brain in everyday life: Can sound perception reveal a person’s internal state

Sleep staging provides a way of describing how the brain moves through different states over the course of a night. But what about the waking brain? Can we similarly characterize how neural state changes over hours of everyday life?

Addressing this question requires neural recordings that extend beyond short, highly controlled laboratory experiments and interfere as little as possible with normal behaviour. Mobile EEG has made it possible to record brain activity outside the laboratory, but recording duration, comfort, and naturalness remain important constraints. We therefore developed ear-centered EEG approaches and the nEEGlace platform for long-term recordings of EEG.

Long-term EEG alone, however, is difficult to interpret. Neural signals change with movement, behaviour, sensory input, and recording conditions, making it difficult to determine whether a change in the signal reflects a change in the person or merely due to data quality issues. In this talk, I will argue that sound may provide a useful probe of the waking brain. Sounds are continuously present in everyday life, can be measured or experimentally introduced with high temporal precision, and evoke neural responses that depend not only on the acoustic stimulus but also on the current state of the listener.

The aim is to use sounds as a reference for interpreting long-term EEG recordings and to test whether changes in sound-evoked responses can tell us something about changes in a person's state over the course of everyday life.

Prof. Dr. Miriam Schiele (TUD)
Biological signatures of treatment response in anxiety- and stress-related disorders: From epigenetic findings to VR-based research approaches

Psychotherapeutic interventions are highly effective in anxiety- and stress-related disorders. Nevertheless, there are marked interindividual differences in treatment response. A central challenge for psychotherapy research is therefore to identify markers associated with disorder risk, prognosis, and therapeutic change that may ultimately contribute to more personalized treatment approaches.

This talk focuses on epigenetics as a biomarker of mental disorders and psychotherapeutic change. It will center on DNA methylation findings in anxiety, obsessive-compulsive, and depressive disorders, both in selected candidate genes and at the epigenome-wide level. The talk will discuss the extent to which epigenetic signatures may be investigated as risk markers, predictors of treatment response, and dynamic correlates of psychotherapeutic change.

Finally, Virtual Reality (VR) will be discussed as a methodological tool in psychotherapy research. Beyond its genuine therapeutic value, VR makes it possible to present clinically relevant situations in a standardized, repeatable, and ecologically valid way. This allows psychotherapeutic processes to be linked more systematically to epigenetic, psychophysiological, and behavioral measures. VR-based paradigms may thus help to anchor biomarker research more closely in concrete therapeutic processes and to investigate mechanisms of treatment response with greater precision.