Floating Brains

Please find our guests for this series by alphabetic order by surname

Matthew Brookes

Matthew has a particular interest in a brain imaging modality called magnetoencephalography (MEG). MEG involves measurement of magnetic fields at the scalp surface that are generated by current flow through neuronal assemblies in the brain. Measurement and subsequent reconstruction of these magnetic fields allows generation of images showing current density in the brain, and how that current density changes when our brains undertake tasks. My most recent research has pioneered novel ways to measure brain connectivity (communication between spatially separate brain regions) via the measurement of neural oscillations (“Brain Waves”). These techniques are having significant impact in multiple clinical fields including schizophrenia and epilepsy.

Emery Brown

Dr Brown is a anaesthesiologist at Massachuessets general hospital and professor at MIT who works to understand how our brains respond to anaesthesia and what difference states our brain go into when we are under different forms of anaesthesia and pain medications. His full work and titles can be found at: http://imes.mit.edu/people/faculty/brown-emery/

Nick Buttrick

Nick is a Socioecological and Cultural Psychologist with a big focus on Self-Knowledge (or the lack thereof). He previously studied monkeys and what we understand about their thought processes but now works on Implicit Cognition, Inequality and Why People Own Guns.

https://www.nickbuttrick.com/

Joseph Galea

Personal website: www.josephgalea.weebly.com

Dr Galea is broadly interested in motor control. This ranges from the neural correlates of motor learning to stroke rehabilitation. At present, he is particularly interested in how reward/punishment influences our actions and can be used to alter the speed at which our motor system learns or retains new movements.

Antje Ihlefeld

Antje Ihlefeld is a neural engineer with a primary interest in central auditory processing. She received her PhD in 2007 from Boston University on psychophysical and computational models of auditory perception. Her research includes studies of auditory perception in cochlear implants users and hearing aid users. More recently, she has widened this research focus to address how auditory deprivation affects central nervous system function as assessed with chronic electrode recordings in auditory cortex. She is an assistant professor at the Department for Biomedical Engineering at New Jersey Institute of Technology. The National Institute of Health currently funds part of her research. Antje is the director of the lab for Neural Engineering of Speech and Hearing (NESH lab).

Mehraveh Salehi

I am interested in the intersection of artificial and natural intelligence. My research is on developing analytical methods that model the human brain’s functional connectivity (using fMRI) and are predictive of individual differences in behaviour and clinical traits.

Katrien Seagaert

My research focuses on sentence level language processing, mostly syntactic and semantic processing. I am especially interested in how these core language processes work, how the workings change throughout the lifespan, and how they are instantiated in the brain.

www.katriensegaert.com

Adrian Ward

I use methods from cognitive and social psychology, as well as insights gleaned from behavioural economics, machine learning, empirical modelling, and whatever else I can get my hands on to investigate consumer behaviour and decision-making. My work is primarily focused on: (1) how “new” technology affects the outputs of “old” cognitive systems, (2) consumer financial decision-making, and (3) flexible morality and mind-perception. In each of these areas, my goal is to understand human behaviour “in the wild.” I want to understand why people do the things they do, as they actually do them–and, perhaps, to help them do these things just a little bit better.

http://www.adrianfward.com/