We are very pleased to welcome back Jose Valenzuela, PhD, to our Brainlab team. Jose used to work early in his career as laboratory engineer with us (2008-2011). He is an electronic and automatics engineer, with a Master’s in Biomedical Engineering, and MBA, a Master’s in Literacy Creation and a PhD degree in Humanities from the Pompeu Fabra University. His research interests are at the intersection between Humanities and Sciences (a modern Leonardo da Vinci), with a focus on perception, imagination, virtual reality and cognitive neuroscience.
He is now re-joining the Brainlab to have his second PhD, this time in the cognitive neurosciences, as the key person to launch our involvement in the ERC Advance project ARTSOUNDSCAPES – The sound of special places: exploring rock art soundscapes and the sacred (awarded to Prof. Margarita Díaz-Andreu, panel SH6). In this fascinating role, we aimed at demonstrating that soundscapes recorded from archeological rock-art sites have particular acoustics, one capable to induce emotional states and specific patterns of brain activity comparable to those elicit during trance and meditation. His role within the project will be to set up a psychoacoustics lab and to conduct the experimental work to test whether art-rock soundscapes induce special emotions.
