Research Background
Reading, brains and the scripts we learn them in
Two decades of laboratory work on learning, emotion processing, music and neurodiversity — and on the tools that carry those findings out of the lab. For work now in progress, see current research.
Reading two writing systems
Alphabetic scripts such as English and alphasyllabic scripts such as Devanagari place different demands on the reader. Our work delineated the reading pathways recruited for each, and showed that the brain's reading network is not fixed but reorganises according to the transparency of the writing system being read.
For a biliterate child — the norm rather than the exception across much of India — this means two partially distinct routes coexisting in one brain. That has consequences for how reading difficulty presents, and for why assessments imported from monolingual English contexts routinely miss it.
Dyslexia Assessment for Languages of India
DALI is a package of screening and assessment tools in Indian languages, created, designed and standardised to let school teachers — not only clinical specialists — identify children with reading difficulty. It was the first multilingual dyslexia assessment tool of its kind in India.
The design constraint was practical rather than theoretical: a tool that requires a psychologist and an hour per child does not scale to a country where neurodevelopmental disorder prevalence runs into the millions. DALI was built to be administered in the classroom, in the child's own language.
Communication in autism spectrum disorder
Ours was the first laboratory in India to study communication in children with autism spectrum disorder. We found that spoken and sung speech are processed differently by the brains of autistic children — a dissociation that turned out to be clinically usable.
The finding was translated into an intervention for children between two and three years of age, which produced measurable improvements in social communicative skills.
Emotion in Hindustani ragas
North Indian classical music is organised around ragas — specific combinations of tonic intervals long held to elicit distinct emotions. That claim had never been tested empirically. Our laboratory studies provided the first evidence that different ragas do elicit distinct emotional responses, identified the particular tonic intervals that robustly predict those responses, and revealed cross-cultural differences in the mechanisms underlying them.
Where the work has gone since
The music work continues, and the assessment work has moved towards technology-based instruments that can be deployed at scale. A third line, on the mechanisms underlying human flourishing in higher education, has opened since the move to Ashoka.
Supervision and courses
Designed and taught Masters and PhD courses in cognitive and computational neuroscience, and supervised multiple doctoral theses. Editorial roles at Scientific Reports and Frontiers in Human Neuroscience.