Oscar Woolnough is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, working in the lab of Nitin Tandon. He completed his Master’s in Biomedical Engineering at Imperial College London and Ph.D. in Neuroscience at the University of Nottingham. His research uses human intracranial recording and stimulation in large patient cohorts to create spatiotemporal maps of cognitive function relating to reading and, more broadly, the interfaces between visual cortex and the language and memory networks.
Reading is a rapid, distributed process that engages multiple components of the brain’s visual and language networks. To understand the neural substrates and their dynamic interactions that allow us to identify written words, we perform direct intracranial recordings in large cohorts of humans. This allows us to isolate the spatiotemporal dynamics of neural word processing during word viewing, reading aloud and sentence reading. By combining these recordings with direct cortical stimulation, we can also temporarily disrupt these processes to probe causal links between the neural computations and behaviour.
