Nelson Neurophysiology Lab

Our lab takes advantage of opportunities to perform in-vivo intracranial recordings in human patient volunteers in order to study the neural basis of a key component of what makes us uniquely human- language. Our lab’s approach makes the best use of a combination of superior technique and creative scientific interest to understand how the brains enacts the human language faculty.

We perform invasive experiments in patient volunteers recording local field potentials while patients perform language tasks, including using stimulation to causally study the human language network. We are interested in complementing this research with noninvasive techniques (TMS, MEG, EEG, lesion-symptom mapping). The Nelson Neurophysiology Lab is in the Neurosurgery Department in the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB). We collaborate closely with neurosurgeons and neurologists at UAB, making use of the rich patient resources UAB offers to study language in the brain.