Geoffrey Karl Aguirre
University of Pennsylvania, PA·Neuroscience
Bright or flickering light is painfully uncomfortable for many people with migraine, a symptom called photophobia. Why light hurts remains poorly understood, and there is no framework that connects the discomfort to what the eye actually receives, what a person perceives, and how the brain responds.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Psychology
Medicine & Clinical Research
- Topics
photophobia
migraine
visual discomfort
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Mar 2028
What they work on
- Test whether people with migraine and photophobia encounter a systematically different pattern of everyday light than headache-free controls, using wearable personal light-logging devices to record the visual environment.
- Measure how the properties of flickering light shape both perception and reported discomfort, using psychophysical methods, and test for differences between people with migraine and headache-free controls.
- Examine whether distributed brain responses to visual flicker, measured with functional MRI, carry the signature predicted by efficient coding models of sensory representation.
- Apply the efficient coding framework, which holds that sensory systems match the statistics of the environment, to unite flicker exposure, perception and neural response into one account of photophobia.
More about the research
This project tests a specific idea: that discomfort arises when the brain's visual system is handling information inefficiently.
Why it matters
Disabling discomfort from flickering light affects people with migraine and other neurological conditions, and clinicians currently have little mechanistic basis for treating or preventing it. By testing whether the discomfort reflects a mismatch between what the brain expects from the visual environment and what it receives, this work could point toward interventions based on altering light exposure, and toward objective measures of photophobia derived from perception and brain response.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
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The school
University of Pennsylvania: 90 labs on PI Pages, $2.2B a year on research, 750 research doctorates a year.
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