I focus my research on investigating how mental practices, such as meditation or mental imagery training, can affect cognition, the brain and the body. To do so I am using tools cognitive and computational neuroscience as well as trying to incorporate first-person perspective using micro-phenomenology. I worked in a project investigating EEG during mind wandering, showing the specific time-frquency content of the EEG during mind wandering episodes. I have also performed a comparative study of the EEG activity elicited by different types of meditation practiced by meditators each experts of a specific tradition and found that these different traditions when compared to mediation-naive controls shared similar EEG activity. In another project using fMRI I have shown that hypnotic procedure can not only affect the sensory processes, such as during hypnotic analgesia, but also higher-level socio-affectice mechanisms involved in the feeling of empathy. I also studied mental imagery and its relation to sensory perception.
