Wickenden Room 321 (Lunch provided)
Erkki Somersalo, PhD
Professor of Mathematics
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About Dr. Somersalo:
Erkki Somersalo earned his PhD in mathematics at the University of Helsinki, Finland in 1986. Before joining the faculty at ÐÇ¿Õ´«Ã½ in 2007, he worked at the University of Helsinki and Helsinki University of Technology (currently Aalto University). His areas of expertise include computational inverse problems with the emphasis on Bayesian methods, partial differential equations, and modeling of complex systems, with applications in particular biomedical sciences. Understanding the human brain is a recurrent topic of his research. He has co authored five books and published over 150 articles.
Abstract:
Meditation as a potential alternative for pharmaceutical intervention to mitigate conditions such as chronic pain or clinical depression continues to obtain significant attention. One of the problems is that often the positive effects of meditation that have been reported are anecdotal or are based on self-reporting. To quantify the effects of meditation, it is therefore important to develop methods based on medical imaging to identify brain regions that are involved in the meditation practice. In this talk, we review some recent results about this topic, addressed by using magnetoencephalography (MEG) to map brain activity during meditation. One of the difficulties here is that the data are less sensitive to activity taking place in the deep brain regions, including the limbic system that is believed to play an important role in meditation. The MEG inverse problem is addressed by using novel Bayesian methods combined with advanced numerical techniques, applied on data from professional Buddhist meditators. The reconstructed activity is then analyzed using data science techniques to distill the information about the activation changes during meditation.