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.