Research

The brain is never in one condition for long. Across a day and a night it passes through wakefulness, REM sleep and the deepening stages of non-REM sleep, and it does so in a rhythm of its own.

We ask what a state is, how the brain holds one, and what happens in the passage from one state to the next.

Stereo-electroencephalography, or SEEG, places fine electrodes within the brain when a patient’s care calls for it. Recordings of this kind observe human brain activity from the inside, closely and over long periods.

We study what such recordings can tell us about brain state, with the care that human data deserve.

A brain state is more than a label. It can be thought of as a region in a space of possible activity, and the passage between states as a path through that space.

We develop computational approaches that describe activity in these terms, so that states, and the transitions between them, can be characterised precisely.