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Lab Research Directions
Lab Research Directions
Our work rests on an uncommon premise: that a physician's eye for the body, a physicist's comfort with dynamical systems, and a philosopher's patience with fundamental questions of experience belong in the same room as neuroimaging and machine learning. Below is an overview of our core research trajectories—for specific methodologies, ongoing studies, or deeper discussion over coffee, we always welcome direct conversation.
Our work rests on an uncommon premise: that a physician's eye for the body, a physicist's comfort with dynamical systems, and a philosopher's patience with fundamental questions of experience belong in the same room as neuroimaging and machine learning. Below is an overview of our core research trajectories—for specific methodologies, ongoing studies, or deeper discussion over coffee, we always welcome direct conversation.
Embodied Minds: Rethinking Mental Health Through the Body
Embodied Minds: Rethinking Mental Health Through the Body
The clinic has long listened to the mind and overlooked the body that carries it. Yet depression can slow a gait, mute a face, and gray a landscape long before it names itself in words; anxiety can announce itself as a held breath before it becomes a thought. We read the body as a text the brain writes in — through posture, movement, and the quiet architecture of bodily awareness — and ask whether its sentences might carry diagnostic weight the mind's alone do not. Immersive virtual environments let us bring the living, moving world into the scanner's reach, retaining experimental control while allowing people to move, perceive, and interact more naturally — richer terrain for studying how mood leaves its mark on the body, and the body quietly answers back.
The clinic has long listened to the mind and overlooked the body that carries it. Yet depression can slow a gait, mute a face, and gray a landscape long before it names itself in words; anxiety can announce itself as a held breath before it becomes a thought. We read the body as a text the brain writes in — through posture, movement, and the quiet architecture of bodily awareness — and ask whether its sentences might carry diagnostic weight the mind's alone do not. Immersive virtual environments let us bring the living, moving world into the scanner's reach, retaining experimental control while allowing people to move, perceive, and interact more naturally — richer terrain for studying how mood leaves its mark on the body, and the body quietly answers back.
Lead Researcher: Anika Rajvanshi & Janani Balaji, with Dipanjan Ray
The Predictive Brain: Perception, Action, and Their Unraveling
The Predictive Brain: Perception, Action, and Their Unraveling
The brain does not wait passively for the world to arrive — it anticipates it, holding a standing model of what should be out there and continuously checking incoming signal against that model, revising itself when the two disagree. This single computational habit, prediction meeting error meeting revision in a loop between higher and lower levels of cortex, turns out to organize conditions that look, on the surface, entirely unrelated. The same currency of top-down and bottom-up cortical exchange that shapes ordinary perception and action shows measurable, reproducible disturbance in chronic pain, in depression, in anxiety, and in states where reality-testing itself frays, as in schizophrenia. Alongside the empirical work, we are building the mathematics to formalize this — Bayesian and dynamical frameworks for how a hierarchical brain infers a world from noisy, ambiguous signal. Taken together, this line of inquiry asks a provocative question: whether a single computational grammar might quietly underlie disorders that psychiatry and neurology have long kept in separate rooms.
The brain does not wait passively for the world to arrive — it anticipates it, holding a standing model of what should be out there and continuously checking incoming signal against that model, revising itself when the two disagree. This single computational habit, prediction meeting error meeting revision in a loop between higher and lower levels of cortex, turns out to organize conditions that look, on the surface, entirely unrelated. The same currency of top-down and bottom-up cortical exchange that shapes ordinary perception and action shows measurable, reproducible disturbance in chronic pain, in depression, in anxiety, and in states where reality-testing itself frays, as in schizophrenia. Alongside the empirical work, we are building the mathematics to formalize this — Bayesian and dynamical frameworks for how a hierarchical brain infers a world from noisy, ambiguous signal. Taken together, this line of inquiry asks a provocative question: whether a single computational grammar might quietly underlie disorders that psychiatry and neurology have long kept in separate rooms.
Lead Researcher: Parmeshwar Dewangan, Soibam Shyamchand Singh & Aarushi Verma with Dipanjan Ray (External collaborators: The Spine Foundation, Kolkata)
The Feeling Brain: Music, Chemistry, and Emotion
The Feeling Brain: Music, Chemistry, and Emotion
Music offers no calorie, no mate, no shelter — and yet it can move a nervous system more reliably than almost anything that does. We are tracing what happens beneath the skull when sound becomes feeling: not only the flicker of electrical activity but the slower, quieter tides of brain chemistry that rise and fall as a melody unfolds, and how the mood we arrive with reshapes the one music leaves us with. It is an attempt to catch something notoriously elusive — the biology of being moved — in the act, and to ask what that biology might one day offer a mind in need of mending.
Music offers no calorie, no mate, no shelter — and yet it can move a nervous system more reliably than almost anything that does. We are tracing what happens beneath the skull when sound becomes feeling: not only the flicker of electrical activity but the slower, quieter tides of brain chemistry that rise and fall as a melody unfolds, and how the mood we arrive with reshapes the one music leaves us with. It is an attempt to catch something notoriously elusive — the biology of being moved — in the act, and to ask what that biology might one day offer a mind in need of mending.
Lead Researcher: Arijit Bhattacharya, Krutika Srivastava & Manya Bhatnagar, with Dipanjan Ray
Self, Other, and the Virtual: A Phenomenology of Presence
Self, Other, and the Virtual: A Phenomenology of Presence
What does it take for a system — biological or virtual — to experience itself as a self, distinct from an other, located here rather than everywhere at once? This project treats Virtual Reality not merely as a research tool but as a philosophical instrument: a controlled way of manipulating the very conditions of embodiment, agency, and boundary that make selfhood possible, and watching what bends and what holds. Drawing on predictive coding alongside currents within Indian philosophical traditions that have asked these questions long before neuroscience existed, the work approaches self-and-other, self-embodiment, and virtuality not as separate puzzles but as facets of one deeper question — what does a brain have to do to construct a "self" out of raw prediction and sensation?
What does it take for a system — biological or virtual — to experience itself as a self, distinct from an other, located here rather than everywhere at once? This project treats Virtual Reality not merely as a research tool but as a philosophical instrument: a controlled way of manipulating the very conditions of embodiment, agency, and boundary that make selfhood possible, and watching what bends and what holds. Drawing on predictive coding alongside currents within Indian philosophical traditions that have asked these questions long before neuroscience existed, the work approaches self-and-other, self-embodiment, and virtuality not as separate puzzles but as facets of one deeper question — what does a brain have to do to construct a "self" out of raw prediction and sensation?
Lead Researcher: Parmeshwar Dewangan, with Dipanjan Ray
Network Neuroscience: Structure, Function, and Beyond the Brain
Network Neuroscience: Structure, Function, and Beyond the Brain
This lab has thought in networks since its first study — treating the brain not as a collection of isolated regions but as a system whose parts matter chiefly for how they relate to one another, whether the question was group-level interaction between multiple brains or the connectivity signature of a single symptom. What has evolved is the ambition of that lens. Where the network was once cast separately over the brain's anatomical scaffolding or its functional traffic, it is increasingly cast over both together — asking how structure and function co-evolve, diverge, and constrain each other across a lifetime, work now revealing an early signature of what a healthily aging brain looks like, and how that might one day be told apart from its imitators. And where the network was once bounded by the skull, it is now being drawn wider still: into biopsychosocial territory, where mind, brain, body, and social context are treated as interacting parts of a single system, as in our recent mapping of the network of everyday eating behaviour across India. The wager, old and new alike, is the same — a system read only region by region, or level by level, will always miss the thing that only the network can show.
This lab has thought in networks since its first study — treating the brain not as a collection of isolated regions but as a system whose parts matter chiefly for how they relate to one another, whether the question was group-level interaction between multiple brains or the connectivity signature of a single symptom. What has evolved is the ambition of that lens. Where the network was once cast separately over the brain's anatomical scaffolding or its functional traffic, it is increasingly cast over both together — asking how structure and function co-evolve, diverge, and constrain each other across a lifetime, work now revealing an early signature of what a healthily aging brain looks like, and how that might one day be told apart from its imitators. And where the network was once bounded by the skull, it is now being drawn wider still: into biopsychosocial territory, where mind, brain, body, and social context are treated as interacting parts of a single system, as in our recent mapping of the network of everyday eating behaviour across India. The wager, old and new alike, is the same — a system read only region by region, or level by level, will always miss the thing that only the network can show.
Lead Researcher: Soibam Shyamchand Singh & Anushka Ravishankar, with Dipanjan Ray (External collaborators: MD Lab, IIM Udaipur)
Reading the Ring: Traumatic Brain Injury in Indian Boxers
Reading the Ring: Traumatic Brain Injury in Indian Boxers
Some injuries don't announce themselves in an ambulance ride — they accumulate quietly, round after round, in athletes whose careers reward exactly the impacts their brains would ask them to avoid. This project follows India's boxing community to ask what repeated head trauma leaves behind cognitively and clinically, over years rather than single bouts, and refuses to let the answer stay locked inside a scanner. The ambition here is to carry neuroscience out of the lab and onto the mat: building field-ready biosignal-based tools that let trainers themselves recognize the early signs of traumatic brain injury in real time, and follow protocols that protect an athlete's future as carefully as their sport currently protects only the present.
Some injuries don't announce themselves in an ambulance ride — they accumulate quietly, round after round, in athletes whose careers reward exactly the impacts their brains would ask them to avoid. This project follows India's boxing community to ask what repeated head trauma leaves behind cognitively and clinically, over years rather than single bouts, and refuses to let the answer stay locked inside a scanner. The ambition here is to carry neuroscience out of the lab and onto the mat: building field-ready biosignal-based tools that let trainers themselves recognize the early signs of traumatic brain injury in real time, and follow protocols that protect an athlete's future as carefully as their sport currently protects only the present.
Lead Researcher: Aditi Gudi, with Dipanjan Ray
Publications
Publications
(The names of the journals are not mentioned to discourage the use of journal impact factor as a proxy for research quality)
Published in peer-reviewed journals:
Published in peer-reviewed journals:
The functional anatomy of nociception: Effective Connectivity in Chronic Pain and Placebo Responders
S Nara, M Baliki, K Friston, D Ray, 2025
SS Singh, A Mukherjee, P Raghunathan, D Ray, A Banerjee, 2024
I Bouziane, M Das, KJ Friston, C Caballero-Gaudes, D Ray, 2022
D Ray, D Bezmaternykh, M Mel’nikov, KJ Friston, M Das, 2021
D Ray, N Hajare, D Roy, A Banerjee, 2020
M Das, D Ray, 2018
D Ray, D Roy, B Sindhu, P Sharan, A Banerjee, 2017
D Ray, S Hazra, DP Goswami, PW Macfarlane, A Sengupta, 2017
Uploaded in pre-print server
Uploaded in pre-print server
Dipanjan Ray, Anushka Ravishankar, Moumita Das, 2026
Debika Ghosh, Lucina Q Uddin, Dipanjan Ray, Moumita Das, 2026
Moumita Das, Dipanjan Ray, Sourabh Bhattacharya, 2026
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