Carles Escera graduated in Psychology at the University of Barcelona (UB) in 1987, and after his PhD in 1993, he gained postdoctoral experience at the University of Helsinki (Finland) scattered over several stays in 1993, 1994, 1996, 1999. He became Associate Professor in 1997 and since 2010 he is Full Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience. He was visiting professor at the University of Bremen (Germany) and Fellow of the Hanse Wissenschaftskolleg in Delmenhorst (Germany) in 2004 and 2005. He has published over 100 papers in major journals in Psychology and Neurosciences (over 4100 citations, h=35), and he coordinated recently the ERANET-NEURON project “Probing the Auditory Novelty System” (2010-2103) and the “Spanish Network in Cognitive Neuroscience” (2009-2011). Currently, he is the director of the Institute of Neurosciences of the University of Barcelona, and the principal investigator of the Brainlab-Cognitive Neuroscience Research Group.

Research interests

His research group, the Brainlab at UB is interested in understanding the mysteries of the mind by deciphering the mechanisms of brain function, including those of attention, auditory perception, musical processing, and emotion, and how these mechanisms are disrupted in disorders such as autism, dyslexia, schizophrenia or attention deficit disorder. The approach in Brainlab is based on the recording of the human electroencephalogram (EEG) to analyze event-related brain potentials and oscillatory activity. This approach is complemented with magnetoencephalography (MEG), functional magnetic resonance (fMRI) and genetic analysis. At present, the Brainlab research is driven by the idea that even deep structures within the brain, such as the auditory brainstem, play a critical role in auditory cognition, contributing to speech, music and rhythm perception.

Keywords

Psychology, cognitive neuroscience, attention, auditory perception