Dr Alexandra Woolgar’s work was the first to demonstrate that many human brain regions are adaptive. Once thought of as a fixed input/output system, the brain turns out to be far more dynamic, interactive and flexible than previously imagined.
Dr Woolgar has been instrumental in developing new methods for neuroimaging that allow probing of brain activation in new ways. These methods go much further than simply asking which regions of the brain are active but also what information is represented by those active regions. This research has changed the way that human brain function is understood and leads into deeper questions regarding what information is coded into difference brain regions.
Non-invasive imaging such as MEG provides millisecond-level information about the temporal sequence of activity in different brain areas. Not only does this facilitate the identification of what information is coded where, but also the precise moment when coding occurs in the brain. This provided fundamental insights into how information is processed through time across different regions in the brain.