Neuroscience
Cognitive neuroscience attempts to understand the great mystery of the way mind is created by brain. The field is relatively young, yet is among the fastest-growing of all intellectual disciplines, in large part due to enormous technological advances in data acquisition. Together with colleagues from the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition (CNBC), faculty and students have developed analytical techniques for neuroimaging, including functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and magnetic encephalography (MEG), which produce high-dimensional spatial time series data with complex structure, and diffusion imaging, which produces diffusion maps that can be used to form networks representing anatomical connectivity. Another major thrust of our research is concerned with individual and multiple neuron firing patterns recorded from the brains of animals while they perform some task. One of the applications is to brain-machine interfaces, where neural signals are used to guide a prosthetic robot arm.
