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Kate Christison-Lagay is fascinated by what happens inside peoples’ heads. The �鶹��’s neuroscientist takes the literal form of studying neuronal activity in response to external stimuli. Our brains process and interpret countless electrical impulses triggered by the sensory inputs of the sights and sounds received through our eyes and ears, but what happens when sensory processing is disordered? 

Christison-Lagay’s approach to answering this incredibly complex question began in a place that fused the lyrical with the scientific. 

“My original interest was literature,” says Christison-Lagay, an assistant professor of biological sciences in the �鶹�� College of Life Sciences and Agriculture. “It shows how people perceive things and how they talk about perceiving things. Then I took a first-year seminar on the Biology of Consciousness—it was the first time I’d learned about the brain from a biological standpoint, and I loved it.” 

Christison-Lagay maintained her dual interest of human perception through her undergraduate studies as a cognitive science and comparative literature double major. Eventually her fascination with the biological mysteries of the brain won out, and she turned to electrophysiology — a technique used to record the electrical activity of neurons — to study how the brain processes sensory information. The combined interest in neuroscience and how humans perceive the outside world now fuels her research at �鶹��. 

The science of perception

A fascinating aspect of perception is that the exact same physical stimulus can be experienced differently by different people or even by the same person at different moments. Christison-Lagay’s previous work explored the point at which neural responses move beyond simply representing the physical stimulus and begin to reflect what a person actually perceives. Some recent viral memes showed a similar phenomenon in ways that captured wide attention. There are optical illusions that leave viewers debating which direction a ballerina is spinning; "the dress," and the intense debate about whether it was black and blue or white and gold in color; and the "Yanny" versus "Laurel" audio illusion.

How people perceive their worlds can affect many aspects of life, and it is the main subject of Christison-Lagay’s current research program. 

“For example, there’s the concept of mindfulness,” she says. “I developed insomnia during pregnancy, and, like a lot of people, I was willing to try almost anything to get back to sleep. I kept coming across mindfulness and meditation practices, many of which rely on auditory cues like music or white noise. As I scientist, I started wondering: What actually works? When I looked at the research, I was surprised to find that there was very little evidence comparing these different approaches.”

Christison-Lagay and her lab are investigating the issue directly. They have been working with novices to meditation and mindfulness concepts to assess the relationship between auditory inputs and mindfulness states. They began with self-reported questionnaire responses, and they will add electroencephalograms (EEGs), a non-invasive test that measures electrical activity in the brain, to display known indicators of mindfulness. By comparing participants' reported experiences with objective neural measures, the team hopes to better understand how different sounds influence both the experience and biology of mindfulness.

“There are countless apps telling people what they should listen to,” says Christison-Lagay. “But we know very little about whether one type of sound is more effective than another, or even whether sounds are more effective than silence. We’re trying to answer those questions scientifically.” 

Mixed signals

Her other projects are examining how different kinds of stressors—from exams to traumatic experiences and even environmental exposures to toxins—shape perception. This summer, three undergraduate researchers in Christison-Lagay’s research group investigated how musical training influences emotional responses to music and the physiological arousal that accompanies them.

Although Christison-Lagay’s research topics span stress, trauma, music, mindfulness, and multisensory perception, they all ask the same fundamental question: how do our past experiences, our current state, and the sensory world around us interact to shape perception?

“Everything we know about the outside world is filtered through our senses,” she says. “What fascinates me is that perception isn’t fixed. It’s shaped by our biology, our experiences, our environment, and the other information our brains are processing. We’re still just beginning to understand how all of these pieces fit together.”