Matthew Banks
University of Wisconsin-Madison, WI·Neuroscience
What changes in the brain when we lose consciousness under anesthesia, fall into dreamless sleep, or become delirious? Finding reliable signatures of these states is central to understanding consciousness itself.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Medicine & Clinical Research
Psychology
- Topics
consciousness
general anesthesia
sleep
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Apr 2027
What they work on
- Identify intracranial EEG biomarkers that distinguish conscious and unconscious states while epilepsy patients go under and emerge from general anesthesia.
- Determine biomarkers that separate unconsciousness from waking, drowsiness, and dreaming across sleep stages, using cortical responses to unexpected sounds and speech and cortical connectivity patterns.
- Use these biomarkers, together with electrical stimulation and computational modeling of rapid network changes, to study delirium in neurosurgical patients after surgery and seizures.
More about the research
It would also help doctors monitor patients who cannot report their own awareness. This project starts from the idea that brain markers of altered arousal and awareness share common features, whatever condition causes them.
Why it matters
Reliable brain markers of consciousness could lead to better algorithms for monitoring the depth of anesthesia. They could also improve diagnosis, management, and prognosis for patients with central sleep disorders, delirium, vegetative or minimally conscious states, and coma.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Sharona Ben-Haim
University of California-San Diego, CA·Neuroscience·Early-career
Test whether self-reported post-surgical pain is linked to reduced beta-band activity in the prefrontal cortex, and whether opioid pain relief reverses it, using intracranial EEG in epilepsy-monitoring patients.
Nishant Sinha
University of Pennsylvania, PA·Biomedical Engineering·Early-career
Build scalable pipelines that automatically aggregate and jointly analyze structural MRI, intracranial EEG (IEEG) and clinical data from multiple epilepsy centers, so analyses generalize across sites.
Richard M Leahy
University of Southern California, CA·Neuroscience
Develop Brainstorm tools for experiments that use naturalistic, non-repeating stimuli, including machine- and human-readable labels for uncontrolled events and behavior, so these can be linked to recorded brain activity.
The school
University of Wisconsin-Madison: 91 labs on PI Pages, $1.9B a year on research, 854 research doctorates a year.
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