The Brainlab, led by Carles Escera, belongs to the Institute of Neurosciences of the University of Barcelona and the Institut de Recerca Sant Joan de Déu. We are located at the Faculty of Psychology, Department of Clinical Psychology and Psychobiology.
We are a small, multinational, interdisciplinary group, including psychologists, biologists, engineers, and physicists. We seek to unravel the brain mechanisms of cognitive functions, including attention, auditory and speech perception, motor-sensory interactions, and executive control. Also, we are interested in emotional and musical processing, and in cognitive dysfunction in a broad spectrum of neurological, neurodevelopment and mental disorders.
To achieve our goals, we combine the recording of the human electroencephalogram (EEG) to analyze evoked and event-related brain potentials (such as the Frequency-Following Response – FFR, the Middle Latency Response –MLR, or the Mismatch Negativity –MMN) and oscillatory brain activity, with magnetoencephalography (MEG), functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and neurogenetic analysis. Part of our research is conducted in collaboration with labs located worldwide, such as the University of Helsinki and University of Jyväskylä (Finland), the Fukushima Medical University (Japan), the University of Leipzig (Germany) and the University of Salamanca (Spain). We are committed to higher-education training, at Master (Neuroscience and Behavior and Cognition programs) and PhD (Biomedicine/Neurosciences) levels.