Cheers!

Hey everyone!
My name is Mishi Bhushan and I am currently a junior at Emory University. For those of you who do not know me, I am a Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology (NBB) major and Spanish minor. I have the opportunity of a lifetime to travel abroad this semester to the wonderful University of Oxford in Oxford, UK.

For the past two years, I have been working in Professor Sathian's multisensory lab researching the intricacies of how metaphors such as "she pulled his leg" are processed by the brain in order to gain new insights into the basis of metaphorical thought. Exploring conceptual metaphor theory combined my interests in language and brain behavior, which fit into perfectly with my studies here at Emory.

This year, I have switched roles and am exploring multisensory perception. Through a very complex experimental set-up, we are analyzing the haptic activation of the visual cortex during shape processing. It has been shown that there are common imagery preferences between vision and touch, which are shared properties, and we are applying these to auditition, a nonshared properties.

This summer, I will be working in the Crossmodal Research Laboratory to further analyze cross-modal associations and the role they play in the decision-making process. Specifically, we will be exploring the role of attention in multisensory perception and the integration of information across the sense modalities (haptic, olfactory, audition, tactile, and gustatory). We will explore shared and non-shared properties between vision and audition (how a high pitch corresponds to a bright object and how a low pitch corresponds to a dull object.) I am very excited to not only start a collaboration between the two labs, but also to explore Oxford and travel around to London and perhaps even visit some of the other IRES members.

Cheers to what will be an amazing summer!
Until next time,
Mishi