Projects

Our lab’s mission is to understand how seizures spread through the brain, disrupt normal function, and impair consciousness - and how we can best stop seizures using electrical stimulation.

Across several NIH-supported projects, we work with epilepsy patients who have intracranial electrodes placed as part of their clinical surgical evaluation. These studies let us examine how seizures use structures like the thalamus (brain’s switchboard) to spread, and how seizure activity moving through the brain interferes with different brain functions, including human awareness itself.

Along the way, this clinically focused work also gives us a rare opportunity into how the human brain normally operates. We tackle questions neuroscientists and philosophers have been thinking about for a long time: how the brain generates a sense of self and subjective experience, how the brain can judge a face as trustworthy within a hundred milliseconds, or how it so effortlessly knows that 2 + 2 = 4 and how does it know that 5 is a wrong answer.

These are questions that can best be studied in humans, using tools that can track the activity of the brain with millisecond resolution while still telling us exactly where in the brain things are happening. We all know that these functions are not the job of one brain region alone or a handful of neurons, but emerge from interactions among population of neurons (and their supporting glial cells) spread across distant areas of the brain.

That’s why we use direct recordings from hundreds of brain regions, paired with brain imaging and detailed brain mapping with intracranial electrical stimulation in patients with epilepsy.