John Westbrook
Rutgers University-New Brunswick, NJ·Neuroscience·Early-career
Thinking hard feels costly. That sense of cost can lead people to skip careful planning or abandon worthwhile goals, and it is especially strong in depression and schizophrenia.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Psychology
- Topics
cognitive effort
subjective effort
criticality
- Grants
- 1 known grant, last ended Aug 2026
What they work on
- Test whether the balance of excitatory and inhibitory cortical signaling sets how close the brain operates to a critical state, by combining scalp EEG recordings with transcranial magnetic stimulation in human participants.
- Test whether brains that diverge further from criticality make people more sensitive to effort costs, by linking EEG measures of critical dynamics to how effortful participants rate working memory tasks.
- Re-assess what common TMS protocols do to cortical excitability and plasticity, by measuring whether they shift brain dynamics toward critical, sub-critical or super-critical regimes.
More about the research
To help people who are overly sensitive to effort, researchers first need to know what the brain actually treats as costly. Standard brain measures track task difficulty only up to a point, then level off or drop even as people report feeling more effort.
Why it matters
Avoiding mental effort can undermine planning and decision-making, and low motivation is a core problem in schizophrenia and depression. Identifying what the brain treats as costly could point to mechanisms that future treatments might target to support healthy cognitive effort. Rechecking how standard TMS protocols affect brain dynamics could also refine how this widely used stimulation tool is understood.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Charles Lewis
University of Minnesota, MN·Neuroscience·Early-career
Test whether dysregulated cortical inhibition, the damping of circuit activity by cortical interneurons, is associated with negative urgency, the tendency to act rashly under negative emotion, in depressed adolescents.
Alexandria Zakrzewski
Kansas State University, KS·Psychology
Establish a transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and repetitive TMS suite combined with EEG, enabling virtual-lesion and neuromodulation experiments that causally test cognitive and neural plasticity.
Jessica Cassidy
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC·Neuroscience
Test whether beta-burst repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS), magnetic pulses timed to the brain's 13–30 Hz movement rhythm, increases corticomuscular coherence more at a site inside the brain-muscle circuit than at a decoy site, in adults with chronic stroke.
The school
Rutgers University-New Brunswick: 57 labs on PI Pages, $837M a year on research, 713 research doctorates a year.
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