Scott Makeig

Scott Makeig is Research Scientist & Director of the Swartz Center at the Computational Neuroscience Institute for Neural Computation, University of California in San Diego, USA.

Scott Makeig was born in Boston, MA, USA in 1946 and completed an honors Bachelors degree, ‘Self in Experience,’ at the University of California Berkeley in 1972. He received a Ph.D., ‘Music Psychobiology,’ from the University of California San Diego (UCSD) in 1985. After spending a year in Ahmednagar, India as an American India Foundation research fellow, he became a psychobiologist at UCSD, and then a research psychologist at the Naval Health Research Center San Diego. In 1999, he became a staff scientist at the Salk Institute, La Jolla, then moved to UCSD as a research scientist in 2002 to develop the Swartz Center for Computational Neuroscience, which he now directs.

Recently, university teams he organized won large US Navy and Army research project grants to develop basic research principles for cognitive monitoring from mobile brain/body imaging (MoBI) data, an imaging modality he recently defined and is now working to develop.

Scott Makeig will present the following keynote lecture on Friday 27 August (9.00 - 10.00 am):

Measuring what the brain does, what it experiences, and what it controls: Mobile Brain/Body Imaging

Speaker

Scott Makeig
Director, Swartz Center for Computational Neuroscience
Institute for Neural Computation
University of California San Diego

Abstract

Cortical brain areas and dynamics evolved to organize motor behavior in our three-dimensional environment also support more general human cognitive processes. Yet traditional brain imaging paradigms typically allow and record only minimal participant behavior, then reduce the recorded data to single map features of averaged responses and compare the severely reduced behavioral and brain data measures. To more fully investigate the complex links between distributed brain dynamics and motivated natural behavior, we have proposed and are now pursuing development of wearable mobile brain/body imaging (MoBI) systems to continuously capture the wearer’s high-density electrical brain and muscle signals, three-dimensional body movements, audiovisual scene and point of regard, plus new data-driven analysis methods to model their interrelationships to each other and to cognitive context. The new imaging modality can give new insights into how spatially distributed brain dynamics support natural human cognition and agency.