Plasticity
Research team
Our research seeks to define the boundaries of brain plasticity. We study individuals with congenital and acquired hand loss, investigating what happens to the cortical territories of the hand following arm amputation. We want to know why amputees experience vivid, even painful, sensations of their missing hand decades after amputation. We are also interested in how the brain best supports the acquisition of new skills such as prosthetic limb usage. We combine experimental models performed on healthy participants and experimental manipulations. For example, we use robotic motor augmentation as a model for plasticity in body representation, or local anaesthetics as a model for sensory input loss. Our research builds on an array of neuroimaging techniques: functional MRI and multivariate brain decoding, 7T neuroimaging, MR spectroscopy, DTI and more.
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