Building on Dr. John Wittig Jr.'s foundational research in single-unit recordings from the living human brain, we teamed up with Dr. Kareem Zaghloul and NINDS colleagues to demonstrate that neurons in the anterior temporal lobe encode semantic information across a representational hierarchy through neuronal sequences in population spiking bursts. This neural code, based on relative spike timing, is non-redundant with and complementary to the traditional spike rate-based code, suggesting that the human brain leverages multiple neural codes to achieve remarkable computational efficiency. Now in Nature!
What we do
We study the human brain and behavior to understand memory and cognition. We are curious about what constitutes the mind, how it is implemented in the brain, and how it relates to one's health. Our research is focused on memory, as it captures both the content (what we remember) and process (how we remember) of the mind, providing a solid foundation for us to understand more complex mental phenomena, such as affect, decision-making, social interaction, and mental health. As an outgrowth of this research and because discussions of this research raised interesting data-analytic questions, we also work to develop and promote methods to interpret large-scale behavioral and neural data. See our recent progress.
Credit: UMD neuroscience undergraduate program
Study Human Cognition and Neuroscience at the University of Maryland
Undergrad. major in Psychology or Neuroscience
Ph.D. in Neuroscience & Cognitive Science
Ph.D. in Cognitive and Neural Systems