Narayan Sankaran

I’m a cognitive neuroscientist and neuroethicist. Currently, I’m a postdoctoral fellow in the Kavli Center for Ethics, Science, and the Public at UC Berkeley. Previously, I was a postdoc in the Lab of Edward Chang within the Department of Neurological Surgery at UCSF.

As a cognitive neuroscientist, my research seeks a mechanistic account of how the human brain enables music perception - a hallmark of human culture. Such insight informs our understanding of the brain and has the power to drive music-based interventions for treating neurological disorders. To do this work, I combine computational modeling, machine learning, and human neural measurements at different spatial scales using ECoG, MEG, and EEG.

As a neuroethicist, I write about the ethical implications of an emerging class of brain-computer interfaces that decode speech from auditory, motor, or semantic representations in the cortex.