Center for Healthy Minds

Dates of Employment: October 2014 - June 2017

Daniela is a former Assistant Scientist at the Center for Healthy Minds. Daniela's research interests span the broad field of consciousness. Her approach to the study of cognitive and affective neuroscience rests on a neurophysiological background, acquired by investigating the interplay between the homeostatic regulation of REM sleep and body temperature at the level of the hypothalamus.

Her research focuses on the brain’s functional segregation and integration underlying the formation of mental images during sleep and waking. In particular, she is interested in studying how information integration in the brain can be enhanced by meditation training, while it can be reduced in pathological conditions such as schizophrenia.

Daniela's work involves multidisciplinary collaborations and the application of state-of-the art methods for assessing directionality of cortical signal flow, such as state-space Granger Causality and Dynamic Causal Modeling, to high density electroencephalography data.

Her next frontier is implementing measures of complexity to study brain non-linear dynamics underlying conscious processing and ultimately exploring how phenomenology can arise from causal and informational interactions in the brain.