Wait… flickering lights actually make you pay attention better?
Gamma sensory flicker has been studied for Alzheimer’s disease, but here we asked a different question:
Can it help healthy brains focus right now?
Apparently… yes. (We were surprised too.)
Paper here: doi.org/10.1162/IMAG...
White House lifts hold on NIH research spending www.science.org/content/arti...
Check out this podcast highlighting our research and BME research more broadly. Thanks @danzigerzachary.bsky.social and Erin Buckley for making this happen
I am honored to have been inducted into the @aimbe-official.bsky.social College of Fellows. I am grateful to my lab and collaborators for their hard work discovering how neural activity shapes memory and brain health and translating those insights into new therapies. bme.gatech.edu/news/bme-fac...
"...Add soccer practice and music lessons and doctors’ appointments, and so begins a tormented dance of the privileged, to-ing and fro-ing through rush hour as any zest for life disintegrates." This one sentence eloquently tells the story of a daily parenting struggle www.nytimes.com/2026/01/05/u...
Can flickering light and sound help in the fight against Alzheimer’s disease?
#ICYMI, BME's Holy Shift! podcast with @drannabellesinger.bsky.social explores how her early interest in theater lighting led to groundbreaking research on brain rhythms and memory.
🎧: holyshiftresearch.transistor.fm/5
Our new paper shows that 40 Hz audiovisual stimulation (“gamma flicker”) improved sustained attention: people responded faster and more accurately during a vigilance task. Unexpectedly, stimulation didn’t just increase 40 Hz brain activity...
This work was led by Matthew Attokaren and Lu Zhang @gmbcrazy.bsky.social
it also reduced delta activity and increased low-alpha functional connectivity.
This expands gamma sensory stimulation beyond neurodegenerative disease and suggests it may be a broader tool for modulating cognition.
Full paper is here: doi.org/10.1162/IMAG...
Annabelle Singer
Annabelle Singer
Annabelle Singer
Annabelle Singer
Annabelle Singer
Annabelle Singer
Institute for Neuroscience, Neurotechnology, and Society
Annabelle Singer
Annabelle Singer
Second preprint from the lab. Collab with @dkoveal.bsky.social, with many more to come! Effort led by @xshirleyz.bsky.social with help from Brittany Addison, @ezeyulu00.bsky.social, Claire Deng (on the grad school market, better act fast, Claire’s amazing!), @ajemanuel.bsky.social, and many others!
Jeff Markowitz
Can flickering light and sound help fight Alzheimer’s disease? On this episode of Holy Shift!, host Angela Gill Nelms chats with Dr. Annabelle Singer from Georgia Tech and Emory University, whose ...
