Abolfazl's personal WebsiteWelcome!
Abolfazl's personal WebsiteI am a double Ph.D. student in psychology and neuroscience at Indiana University Bloomington. Main questions that drive my research are:
- How does neuronal activity give rise to phenomenal experience?
- How do neurons represent information?- What is the connection between sensory processing and motor control?
- Is there a fundamental principle that govern all of these processes?
These questions are important not just because they seem "cool" but rather because they will enable us to build artificial systems that can be sentient. Accordingly, my professional goal is to find principles that we need to know for building sentient machines and transfer information from biological brains into those machines.I received my pharmacy doctorate from SUMS in Iran and I have been trying to address these questions through different methods such as psychophysics, Electrophysiology, animal behavior, and theoretical analysis. As a graduate student, I build neural networks (PAN Lab, IU Psychology) and test the predictions of these models through large-scale in vitro neural recording (Beggs Lab, IU Neuroscience). Specifically, I am building novel hierarchical echo state networks to predict spatiotemporal signals. These models are inspired by predictive coding theory and canonical microcircuits in the neocortex.
Click on the icon to go to my ResearchGate account.
Click on icon to download my résumé.
Click on icon to go to my LinkedIn profile.
Click on icon to go to my Github.
In this study, we showed that during bi-stable perception of the motion quartet, the cross frequency coupling in parietal EEG electrodes ted increase as two hemispheres communicate.
Our results suggested that during chess play, information flow between frontal and parietal sources in the brain increase. This is in line with the idea that frontoparietal network is activation during cognitive task performance.
Biophotons are weak photonic emissions from biological tissue (cells) that are cause by de-excitation of free radicals. Several studies showed that these emissions can cause cellular growth in other cells. In this paper, I tried to provide a simple molecular model to explain this phenomenon.
How is it possible to learn without having a nervous system? Paramecium caudatum is a unicellular organism that is able to learn. However, we do not know how it learns. In this paper, we have provided a molecular mechanism for learning in this organism.
Some scholars argued that microtubules can support higher functions such as learning and memory. We tested this idea by disrupting microtubular dynamics in paramecium to see if this effect the paramecium's ability to form memories. Our results suggested that microtubules are probably not involved in paramecium learning.
When you look at a flickering stimuli, a sinusoidal wave formed in your visual cortex that has the same frequency as the flickering source. This wave is called the steady state visual evoked potential and it can be used to find out if you are looking at that specific stimuli. We used this wave to build a BCI system for typing characters.
I typically reply to all email inquiries within 24 hours.