Benjamin Morillon

I am a cognitive neuroscientist interested in human auditory neurophysiology and how information is sequentially encoded in the human brain. After a PhD at Ecole Normale Supérieure de Paris (France), I worked as a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia (USA) and McGill (Canada) universities. Since 2016, I held a tenured position at the Institut de Neurosciences des Systèmes in Marseille (France).

I believe in a synergetic cross talk between computational modelling, cognitive psychology and multimodal functional neuroimaging to understand how humans process sensory information. My work mainly focuses on two research questions. First, I investigate auditory hemispheric asymmetry, to understand from a physiological and functional viewpoint the similarities and differences between the two auditory cortices. This line of research aims at highlighting the fundamental relationship between acoustic properties and specific neural networks to reveal how it enables efficient auditory neural coding. Second, I explore the interrelation between auditory and motor neural systems. To this end, I analyse how overt motor routines and covert motor cortical activity modulate auditory processing and behavioural performance. I also investigate which auditory stimuli automatically trigger a motor neural response. Overall, this work highlights the role of motor areas in sensory perception, notably implicated in the analysis of contextual temporal information.