Lab Director
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Professor |
To be honest, I really don’t give a damn about the brain. I care about the human soul. However, I happen to believe that the soul is in the mind, and that the mind is a functional process instantiated by the brain with its interactions with the body and the environment. Hence, I study the human brain. I have always been interested in how we put together perception and action. Why? Because we do it all the time, because I can’t think of a functioning life without the ability to integrate our percepts with our actions. Even when we are engaged in activities in which the integration of perception and action is almost an afterthought (for instance what I am doing now, typing on my computer this little blurb), we need to integrate perception and action to function properly.
My interest in perception-action coupling led me to the study, among other things, of mirror neurons. In science, as in life, one thing leads to another, and from mirror neurons I went to study human imitation, empathy, and more generally what is called social cognition. As a neurologist, however, I also have a strong interest in the neurobiological mechanisms of neuropsychiatric conditions and how to intervene on those mechanisms.
Faculty
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Assistant Professor
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I am a neurologist who specializes in movement disorders. In many of the neurologic syndromes I see, patients are affected by a disruption of the normal precise and well-timed sequence of muscle contractions that are necessary in order to produce accurate, intentional, and appropriate movements used for daily activities (like reaching, grasping, playing ball, or walking). At times, this disruption can be surprisingly specific. For example, in task-specific focal dystonia, patients may experience this disruption of movement control only when playing a certain musical instrument or during writing while other activities (playing other instruments, using chopsticks, or typing) are unaffected. This observation suggests that the “program” for controlling some movements is not functioning properly; while other “programs” run appropriately. In my research, we observe, study, and modulate movement symptoms and signs in patients affected by movement disorders with the goal of developing novel ideas and interventions for clinical benefit. One idea is that functional changes occur within the brain in patients with movement disorders and that these changes can be either adaptive or maladaptive in nature. When these changes are adaptive, they may compensate for symptoms; when these changes are maladaptive, they may cause abnormal movement control (or symptoms) to persist or worsen. In our studies, we combine modern brain mapping tools (transcranial magnetic stimulation [TMS] and fMRI) with current neuroscience principles to develop and design novel noninvasive methods for neuromodulation such as repetitive TMS (rTMS), trigeminal nerve stimulation (TNS), or action-observation to improve abnormal neural control of movement and lead to novel movement disorder treatments.
Staff Research Associates
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Staff Research Associate |
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Staff Research Associate |
Born in Australia and raised in Chicago by first-generation Chinese immigrants, my life abounds with a diversity of personalities. My immersion in both Eastern and Western cultures has made me particularly cognizant of people’s varying perspectives and behaviors. Thus, I chose to spend my four years at UCLA as a Psychobiology major and Political Science minor. On one end, Psychobiology cultivated my understanding of the relationship between brain and behavior; and on the other end, Political Science allowed me to tackle abstract questions such as how people grow in character and why they rely on communities to survive. The next step in my life journey is medical school. I am enthusiastic to become an academic physician so that I can implement change in the world—both individually with patients and on a large scale with research. I am thankful that my current work in clinical research is providing me with cognitive and technical skills to help me better achieve my future goals
Residents
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Resident Physician |
My general interest is understanding how people find meaning in their lives. I am being intentionally broad because I am interested in a lot of things. One of the primary ways we lead meaningful lives is through our social relationships. It is often through such relations with others that we define ourselves and gain a sense of self efficacy.
As a psychiatrist, I am confronted daily with states of mind in which meaningful social relations have become dysfunctional and a person's sense of self disrupted. In depression, one’s ability to fufill social roles is significantly diminished often with detrimental effects on one’s relationships. Interestingly, treatments that focus on modifying relationships, such as interpersonal psychotherapy, have been proven efficacious for depression. In schizophrenia patients have significant deficits in social cognition that are detrimental to their ability to form meaninful relationships and are correlated with functional disability. In addition, certain personality disorders are characterized by unstable relationships, a lack of interest in socialization, or an inability to empathize.
I am interested in mirror neurons because they are thought to play a key role in social cognition. As such, this system may be dysfunctional in many psychiatric patients and be a target for behavioral and pharmacological interventions.
Graduate Students
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Graduate Student |
In general, I am interested in how experience influences neural processes underlying social behavior. Because one powerful mediator of a person’s experience is their culture, I am particularly interested in combining my training in anthropology and neuroscience to explore how culture shapes the brain and how brain acquires and shapes culture. In my dissertation research I am using functional MRI to study how the human brain acquires culture through imitation.
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Graduate Student |
I am interested very broadly in cognitive neuroscience, and am especially intrigued by cognitive deficits that arise after brain damage. I think that as much can be learned from understanding the intricacies of failed cognitive processes, as can be learned from studying normal cognition. As a physician scientist I hope to unite the two in studies of sensorimotor integration and cognitive control.
We tend to think that most of our actions are intentional and entirely under our own conscious control. In fact, the environment has a huge influence on how we behave. While this is relatively obvious at the level of social influence--"peer pressure" is a well-known phenomenon--the environment influences our behavior at much lower levels as well. These influences are perhaps most easily appreciated when they become pathological, as in rare patients with "utilization behavior" who can't help but reach out and use any object placed before them; or in patients with echopraxia and echolalia, where intentions are often trumped by the uncontrollable mimicry of actions and speech. In these cases, actions are almost entirely driven by perceptual stimuli in the environment, suggesting the loss of some active control mechanism that normally controls such automatic sensorimotor behavior. When this control is intact, the direct influences of perception on action are so subtle as to only be detectible by carefully designed laboratory paradigms. I am interested in the neural basis of automatic sensorimotor phenomena such as these, as well as in the control processes that ensure they do not dictate our behavior all the time. Currently, I am studying these issues in the context of imitation, examining neural mechanisms for controlling automatic imitative tendencies using fMRI and TMS in healthy adults.
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Graduate Student |
I grew up in the great state of Texas as one of three Malaysian Chinese American kids in my city. No one else ate the same foods, had the same traditions, or even looked quite like me, so I thought I must just be unique. While in college, however, I spent a semester abroad in China and quickly realized that some of my habits weren’t special to me, but actually a partial product of the Chinese culture, which had been ingrained into my family and passed on to me. The more I traveled, the more I began to realize the respective influences of my Malaysian, 'Texan,' and other cultures on my very definition of 'self.'
All this led me to wonder just how much our experiences shape our perceptions of the world around us. For instance, how much did my prior experiences, living in Texas or China, shape how I interacted with people from those places, or people from different places? Did our experiences actually affect the neural networks in our brain that allowed us to interact with each other, and if so, how? My research, under the primary mentorship of Dr. Lisa Aziz-Zadeh at the Brain and Creativity Institute (USC), uses brain imaging (e.g., fMRI, DWI) to answer these questions, examining how experience induces changes in functional and structural properties of the brain during social interactions. My current collaboration with Dr. Iacoboni’s lab is exploring at how our prior experiences shape what we pay attention to during a social interaction, in hopes of uncovering ways to promote better understanding between individuals.
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Graduate Student |
I am interested in perception, social cognition, and group dynamics. I am currently learning how to use the tools of cognitive neuroscience to understand higher order sensorimotor integration in the brain, specifically the way our brain processes the mental and bodily states of our own being and that of others. I think it is interesting how, under certain conditions, we are capable of not only losing our notion of time and proportion, but even our sense of self and self-direction. Essentially, I think the brain is only dedicated to processing our own body, and presents a fairly constant picture of time and space, because it is constantly being given updating information to that effect. Our sphere of influence has, for nearly our entire evolution, consisted of one torso, a few orifices, and four limbs. And our perspective has been limited to one sensory perspective centered roughly on our head. However, I think that our minds/brains have the capacity for much more. Not only do we form part of ever more integrated "hive minds" - societies and groups are evolving like higher order organisms due to increasingly fast and synchronized information transfer between their members, but I think the prospect of additional limbs and sources of information may open the door to new concepts of self and agency. The image that always comes to mind is that of an individual reading a book in Seattle simultaneously controlling a multiarmed crane somewhere in China. The state of mind this implies is barely imaginable, but no less possible for that reason.
On a smaller time-scale, my personal research deals with the neural bases for prosocial behavior. Essentially, there are brain networks that seem devoted to both processing our own emotions, bodily states and actions, and that of others, in a process that could be described as internal simulation. My belief is that we automatically, reflexively, simulate the states of others the way we do our own, and that this process is very selectively inhibited as we grow and form our sense of self and other. However, this capacity always remains in the form of empathy, that is, the ability to vicariously experience the states of others. When taken to extremes, this implies a form of self-other merging, which can lead us to equate the welfare of others with our own, leading to other-regarding or altruistic behavior. Thus, it is not that humans aren't innately selfish, it is just "self" often includes "other". Thus, the degree to which we internally simulate the states of others, and the degree to which we inhibit this ability should influence the degree to which we reflect concern for others in our behavior, be it through generosity, cooperation, etc... By the same token, perhaps by engaging in tasks which encourage self-other merging, we can enhance our capacity for empathy.
Currently, I am studying how neural biomarkers of empathy can predict people's generosity in economic games.
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Graduate Student
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After years and years of viewing learning as centered around language--taking verbal notes in class, reading textbooks, writing essays--I found myself one afternoon transfixed by a friend's gestures as he talked about earthquakes. Not a single person in the room, including himself, seemed to be paying much attention to the "arm-waving." But with his hands and body, he orchestrated a simulation in open space, partly drawing outlines, partly smashing his hands together as if they were tectonic plates, and partly gesturing metaphors of high energy. How do these rich motor simulations structure our thinking about science concepts? What cultural motor memories or motor activities do we draw on to make sense of abstract concepts? And how in social interactions around learning science do participants incorporate gestures as meaning-making resources? With these questions in mind, our research team has started to investigate how learning strongly involves the body. We attempt to correlate embodied resources that manifest in fMRI patterns of motor system activation with those that manifest in behavioral displays as gestures--resources that we think simultaneously construct and reveal our understanding of complex, abstract concepts.
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Graduate Student
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My work in the musicology department broadly involves approaching cultural-historical issues of polarized musical reception—particularly in relation to jazz and popular music—from the perspective of embodied music cognition and psychoacoustics.
Before arriving at UCLA in 2009, I was a professional jazz bassist obsessed with a gnawing question: How does musical taste operate? As a performer of more “out” improvised music, polarized responses from audiences were the norm—where one listener heard ecstatic, liberating expression, another heard meaningless and repulsive noise. Why do certain musical sounds signify as “noise” to certain listeners, and what does this breakdown of empathy with music—an audible manifestation of patterns of intentional human motor activity—say about the auditor’s relative level of empathy with the (raced/gendered/classed) musicians performing it? The mirror neuron system might play a significant role in such polarization of taste. Music can bind people together, but it is just as easily a force of division, articulating difference and signaling social distinctions. The urbanite with a contemptuous aversion to country/western, the parent who hears a child’s heavy metal as “noise,” the elderly couple covering their ears at the sound of hip-hop from a passing car—all of these illustrate the ethical stakes of how we listen to the music of others. By combining insights from cultural musicology with empirical experimentation in the cognitive neurosciences (using fMRI), we seek to better understand these stakes.
Research Assistants
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Research Assistant |
Imagine you're a lonely virus floating through a blood stream looking for a home. You happen across a red blood cell with just the right protein protruding from its skin, a lock for your key. Your key works, and you wriggle through a small door just large enough for you. It would seem this cell was made just for you, nutrient rich and protected from the outside world, a perfect place to raise kids. You began to multiply, and your children multiply, and their children... until your once spacious luxurious home is packed floor to ceiling. Your home is too crowded and bursts, your children float away seeking their own home. Learning abstract complex concepts is not simply about memorizing "if then" statements. It involves rich mental simulations that exist in a spatiotemporal environment involving various agentes, goals, and resources. We can identify with a virus or red blood cell by taking on their roles, not only through our imagination but our gestures as well. Because of this, we think these concepts can be embodied and will recrute the motor system during exploration of them. In a multidisciplinary project we are investigating how body movement through gesture influences embodied concepts. Using fMRI, we attempt to correlate patterns of motor system activation with behavioral data, including gesture; a resource that we think allows us to build and express our understanding of complex concepts.
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Research Assistant |
I am a voracious consumer of media. I have spent much of my life in movie theaters, in front of TV, computer, and any other screens that can tell a good story. I am interested in media perception, creativity, and the psychology of performance. I hold a BS in Biopsychology from UBC and am planning on continuing my studies in the near future. I'm currently completing my first study on blink synchrony during TV viewing.
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Research Assistant |
Born in Northern California I studied psychology at UCLA as an undergraduate and then went on to get my Masters degree in psychology at Pepperdine University. At the beginning of my year and half at Pepperdine I began volunteering as a research assistant at UCLA in the psychology department. I gradually worked my way around through different labs and in this lab have found neuroscience to be my calling. I am waiting on admissions decisions for PhD programs in neuroscience to begin in Fall 2012 and continue to work in the lab as a research assistant for Katy Cross. I am interested in studying the neural underpinnings of religious and political beliefs. My future goal is to continue my research at a University.
Alumni
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Assistant Professor |
Clinical Psychologist & Medical Scientist |
Senior Research Associate |
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Assistant Professor |
| Assistant Professor |
Assistant Professor of Political Science, U.C. San Diego |
Senior Lecturer |
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Research Assistant Professor |
Instructor |
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Visual Display |
Post-doctoral fellow |
Post-Doctoral Fellow |
Post-Doctoral Fellow |
Clinical Research Coordinator |