Staff Profile
I am interested in how the brain perceives the world, in paricular how our existing models and impressions give rise to predictions, how these interact with information from the senses to influence what we perceive, and how these go wrong in common clinical disorders.
The majority of my work has been in the auditory system, focusing on mechanisms for phantom sound perception in tinnitus, as well as the related mechanisms for the perception of similar sounds in normal circumstances. My most recent contributions to the field of tinnitus research have been a framework by which tinnitus can be understood as the brain faililng to disregard spontaneous neuronal firing in the auditory pathway as irrelevant noise, but misinterpreting it as a real sound source. Once this occurs, it gives rise to a pervasive prediction of the tinnitus sound, meaning it generally will continue to be perceived indefinitely. My most recent and ongoing work supports this hypothesis, and suggests that we can detect this maladaptive tinnitus prediction through simple and well-established paradigms that present external sounds and record brain responses with EEG.
More recent and ongoing research endeavours include using similar approaches to understand other disorders of perception such as chronic pain and functional neurological disorder (FND).
- Hullfish J, Sedley W, Vanneste S. . Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews 2019, 102, 1-12.
- Kikuchi Y, Kumar S, Baumann S, Overath T, Gander PE, Sedley W, Patterson RD, Petkov CI, Griffiths TD. . Cortex 2019, 120, 340-352.
- Sedley W. . Neuroscience 2019, 407, 213-228.
- Kikuchi Y, Sedley W, Griffiths TD, Petkov CI. . Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences 2018, 21, 145-153.
- Cope TE, Sohoglu E, Sedley W, Patterson K, Jones PS, Wiggins J, Dawson C, Grube M, Carlyon RP, Griffiths TD, Davis MH, Rowe JB. . Nature Communications 2017, 8, 2154.
- Kumar S, Tansley-Hancock O, Sedley W, Winston JS, Callaghan MF, Allen M, Cope TE, Gander PE, Bamiou D-E, Griffiths TD. . Current Biology 2017, 27(4), 527-533.
- Sedley W, Friston KJ, Gander PE, Kumar S, Griffiths TD. . Trends in Neurosciences 2016, 39(12), 799-812.
- Sedley W, Gander PE, Kumar S, Kovach CK, Oya H, Kawasaki H, Howard MA, Griffiths TD. . eLife 2016, 5, e11476.
- Cope TE, Sedley W, Griffiths TD. . In: Brain Mapping: An Encyclopedic Reference. Elsevier Inc, 2015, pp.1095-1112.