Emotional Experience and Expressions

Prof. C.R. Mukundan has been working in the area of Cognitive Neuroscience since 1964 and he set up the first cognitive electrophysiology laboratory at the National Institute of Mental Health & Neuro Sciences, Bangalore, India in 1975.  He conducted research in the area with a team of faculty and students from the Departments of Clinical Psychology, Psychiatry, Neurology, Neurophysiology, and Neurosurgery.  They worked on EEG with computerized analyses, Evoked and Event Related Potential paradigms in schizophrenic patients, patients with alcohol dependence and patients with traumatic brain injury, etc. for the next 3 decades.  His latest experimental work was in the area of testing the EEG and ERP activation pattern in remembrance of experiences, and he succeeded in developing a technology, which came to be called Brain Electrical Oscillations Signature (BEOS) profiling. The patented technology has been since used as an aid for forensic investigation. Other than the original normative study, several hundreds of cases have been examined by the test and it has successfully helped the investigators to identify real perpetrators and also helped exoneration of innocent individuals.  The technology that he started trying out, when he was in NIMHANS, got the software developed by Axxonet Technology Solutions in Bangalore.    The technique helps to test different possible formulations and different roles played by the individuals suspected or accused to be involved in an act. The important advantage of the test is that it does not expect any behavioural or oral response from the individuals when they are expected to listen to set of verbal probes during the test.  Further the system presents the probes only if the subject is attentive.  The system automatically conducts extensive signal analyses to determine presence of sensory registration, semantic processing, accessing source memory, attentional shift, presence of imageries, and emotional responses using frequency and time domain analyses of EEG after determining their statistical significances.

He has been working on understanding cognitive processing methods and was one of the first few who reported on the sequential and simultaneous nature of signal inputs into the brain and their differential effects on the development of processing methods in the brain.  The neuropsychological tests that he developed in the early 1970s had shown that encoding in both visual and verbal tasks could be impaired in left frontal lesions. Similarly he had developed tests of working memory and used it as a sensitive test in frontal lobe lesion patients. The Brain Function Therapy system that he developed for computerized cognitive retraining has been since then, extensively used for cognitive training of children with learning disorders, ADHD, and patients with addiction and traumatic brain injury.

He assembled EEG amplifiers for his laboratory in the 1980s, and published the first research papers using computed EEG analysis, EP and ERP measures from India.  His work supported the notion of automatic initiation or neurogenesis of actions, which helped the postulation that action is automatically initiated when emotional arousal reaches a Critical Level of Potentiation. He suggested strict social conditioning as the only neurodevelopmental method and remedy for training in the control of emotional arousal in individuals, which would beneficially help the society, as individuals would learn to control themselves by blocking asocial behaviour.  He has been working on the role of emotion for a decade, though could come out with an explicit theory only now, which is considered an alternative to consciousness.   

Since March 2013, he is working at Institute of Behavioural Science, Gujarat Forensic Sciences University, Gandhinagar, Gujarat as the Director and Emeritus Professor.  In this short duration he has established state of the art Neurocognitive Electrophysiology Laboratory at IBS. The lab consists of 32, 64 channels EEG and ERP systems, Neurofeedback systems, Polygraph and BEOS systems, and Brain Function Therapy for cognitive retraining programs. He started India’s first Neuropsychology and Forensic Psychology post graduate courses, which are flourishing under his guidance. He has organized various seminars, conferences and workshops in the area of Neuro and Forensic Psychology at IBS.  He is also conducting various training programs for Neuro/Forensic psychologists and police officers across the country at IBS. He has also established the Cognitive Neuroscience Society of India (CNSI) in 2014. He is the first President of the society. He has published more than 100 papers in peer reviewed journals. He has written three books in his areas of interest.