Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MinnesotaDepartment of Neurologic Surgery
Brain State Laboratory
Brain states in humans, recorded from within and modelled in computation.
Graham W. Johnson, MD PhD
Principal InvestigatorNeurologic Surgery, Mayo Clinic
Wakefulness, REM sleep and three depths of non-REM: a night of human brain activity is conventionally summarised in five labels. They are useful, and they describe a person from the outside. They say little about what the brain is doing in the passage from one state to the next.
Two things have changed. When a patient’s care calls for it, fine electrodes placed within the brain record human activity from the inside, closely and over long periods. And computation can now treat a state as a region in a space of possible activity, so that a transition is a path through that space rather than a change of name.
The Brain State Laboratory works where those two meet — in the Department of Neurologic Surgery at Mayo Clinic, led by a neurosurgeon who trained first as an electrical engineer.