United Kingdom

A team at the University of Essex in the UK found that scalp EEG shows a consistent drop in low-beta power when people work out a concept from a spoken definition. In an auditory guessing game, subjects heard a spoken definition and named the concept, such as a body part, food or musical instrument; phonologically similar pseudo-word sentences with almost no meaning served as the control. Across 64-channel EEG from 13 healthy subjects, all 3 categories showed reduced low-beta power, peaking near 15 Hz, during retrieval before the response, in the same direction for all 13. The researchers suggest that separating meaningful from meaningless states may be a better cross-person target than identifying specific concepts, informing future BCIs that decode meaning directly.

Researchers in Germany and the UK have used extrusion-based 3D printing of silicone rubber to build a soft implant that cools the surface of the rodent cortex while recording its electrical activity, and showed that the local cooling suppressed epileptiform activity. The work asks whether cooling the seizure zone could control focal epilepsy that drugs fail to manage. The implant packs temperature-control components and recording electrodes into a soft device that sits on the cortical surface. Connected to an autonomous external driver unit, it rapidly establishes stable, localized cooling while recording electrocorticography (ECoG), signals taken directly from the brain's surface. In a rodent model with seizures induced by 4-aminopyridine, local cooling suppressed epileptiform activity. The researchers say the approach could help move focal cooling therapy toward the clinic, but results so far come only from animal experiments.

A PRISMA-guided review evaluates closed-loop EEG-based BCI and neurofeedback interventions for mental health, screening 1,101 records and including 25 studies.

Researchers demonstrated synchronized EEG, ECG, GSR and eye tracking during a flight-simulation experiment at a workshop held with Professor Tom Carlson at University College London. A g.Nautilus 28-channel wireless EEG headset, ECG and GSR sensors and Tobii Pro Glasses 3 captured the signals in real time, tracking mental workload, engagement and heart rate variability (HRV) across two complete flight cycles of take-off, free flight and landing. The rig can be set up in 30 minutes and leaves participants free to move throughout.