My Research:
My early work involved
analysing high-dimensional EEG data with Matlab and
tools from the EEGLAB
toolbox. I studied short-term
memory using a modified Sternberg task, and emotional
imagery, among other topics.
My later work studying the EEG
characteristics of PTSD and mTBI led me to the study
of sleep
EEG using a single channel on the forehead. I
approached sleep in the same way that I did wake EEG,
by looking at patterns of frequency over time. This
led to the discovery that sleep can be neatly
visualized across the whole night as a single
spectrogram and that 5 frequency bands can
estimate the sleep stages revealed by the
spectrogram. Using this method, I showed that subjects
with PTSD (and using psychoactive medications) showed
less
of a novel stage of deep sleep that I coined Lo Deep.
This finding has led me to continue to investigate
sleep and the frequency components involved that might
tell us something about sleep or overall health.
My latest work has brought me back to whole-head EEG dynamics to investigate the neural activity associated with various types of meditation and breathwork.