My major interests are how sensory stimuli are encoded and processed by neurons of the cerebral cortex, and how these physiological events relate to perception and behavior.
Sensory input is arguably the origin of all perception, behavior, and cognition.
An understanding of the neural basis of these phenomena will therefore require detailed spatio-temporal descriptions of the activity of ensembles of sensory neurons. I have chosen to study the auditory cortex, but fundamental strategies of stimulus coding and processing are likely to be similar for other sensory modalities as well. Although the electrophysiology of the auditory cortex has been studied in detail under anesthesia, relatively little is known about the activity of the awake auditory cortex. Study of the unanesthetized cortex affords two main advantages. First, the auditory-evoked firing patterns of neurons are free of the undoubted influence of anesthesia, so the recorded activity is presumably more normal.