Voice of America
I am interviewed as part of international news coverage (~30 min) of the very first clinical trial involving focused ultrasound brain stimulation. Our trial explored the potential of Focused Ultrasound (FUS) stimulation applied to the ‘arousal-related’ central-thalamus as a new method for inducing recovery in patients with Disorders of Consciousness (DOC), such as coma, vegetative state, and similar conditions.
Associated Publications:
LA Times
Article on my work by Joanne Faryon
“Omar Salgado moved in slow motion as he turned toward the music. The radio on the nightstand was on a Spanish-language station. A Latin polka was playing. Salgado’s head shifted a mere three inches, with each quarter inch looking painfully difficult, as though his head were attached to his neck with corroded screws that might crack.“
Associated Publications Here :
Enhancing Meditation with Focused Ultrasound
Youtube documentary by Dr. Cody Rall covering my ongoing experiment using focused ultrasound to enhance meditation at the Institute for Advanced Consciousness Studies (IACS)
More Details Here (Publications Incoming Early 2024) :
The New Yorker
An article on the work of my graduate school Ph.D. Advisor Martin Monti, including that which I lead, by James Somers
“One night in October, 2009, a young man lay in an fMRI scanner in Liège, Belgium. Five years earlier, he’d suffered a head trauma in a motorcycle accident, and since then he hadn’t spoken. He was said to be in a “vegetative state.” A neuroscientist named Martin Monti sat in the next room, along with a few other researchers. For years, Monti and his postdoctoral adviser, Adrian Owen, had been studying vegetative patients, and they had developed two controversial hypotheses. First, they believed that someone could lose the ability to move or even blink while still being conscious; second, they thought that they had devised a method for communicating with such “locked-in” people by detecting their unspoken thoughts.“
Nautilus
Article on my early work that I authored as a graduate student
“A few years ago, at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, I escaped the noisy midday hustle and bustle, ducking into a room in the Intensive Care Unit. It was completely quiet, save the subtle hum of equipment. A patient, who I will call Christopher, was lying on a bed in the room. He had not shown behavioral signs of consciousness since he experienced a severe brain injury in a car accident two weeks prior. He was believed to be comatose, and thus fully unconscious. But that was left to me to determine through behavioral assessment.”
Associated Publications Here :
nature.com/articles/s41598-021-85504-y
link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12028-021-01281-6
journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0264101
Nature
An article on recent advancements in consciousness research that Features Work of Mine and Colleagues by Emily Sohn
“In the 1990s, neuroscientist Melvyn Goodale began to study people with a condition called visual form agnosia. Such individuals cannot consciously see the shape or orientation of objects, yet act as though they can. “If you hold up a pencil in front of them and ask them if it’s horizontal or vertical, they cannot tell you,” says Goodale, founding director of the Brain and Mind Institute at Western University in London, Canada. “But remarkably, they can reach out and grab that pencil, orienting their hand correctly as they reach out to make contact with it.”