Narayan Sankaran

Department of Neuroscience

University of San Francisco

I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Neuroscience at the University of San Francisco. My research seeks a mechanistic account of how the human brain enables music perception - a hallmark of human culture. Such insight informs our understanding of the brain and has the power to drive music-based interventions for treating neurological disorders. To do this work, I combine computational modeling, machine learning, and human neural measurements at different spatial scales using ECoG, MEG, and EEG.

news

Jan 15, 2016	A simple inline announcement with Markdown emoji!
Nov 07, 2015	A long announcement with details
Oct 22, 2015	A simple inline announcement.

latest posts

Apr 28, 2025	a post with marimo snippets
Mar 26, 2025	a post with plotly.js
Dec 04, 2024	a post with image galleries

selected publications

SciAdv

Encoding of melody in the human auditory cortex

Narayan Sankaran, Matthew K. Leonard, Frederic Theunissen, and 1 more author

Science Advances, 2024

DOI Bib HTML

@article{sankaran2024encoding,
  title = {Encoding of melody in the human auditory cortex},
  author = {Sankaran, Narayan and Leonard, Matthew K. and Theunissen, Frederic and Chang, Edward F.},
  journal = {Science Advances},
  volume = {10},
  number = {7},
  pages = {eadk0010},
  year = {2024},
  publisher = {American Association for the Advancement of Science},
  doi = {10.1126/sciadv.adk0010},
}

JNeurosci

The Rapid Emergence of Musical Pitch Structure in Human Cortex

Narayan Sankaran, Thomas A. Carlson, and William Forde Thompson

The Journal of Neuroscience, 2020

DOI Bib HTML

@article{sankaran2020rapid,
  title = {The Rapid Emergence of Musical Pitch Structure in Human Cortex},
  author = {Sankaran, Narayan and Carlson, Thomas A. and Thompson, William Forde},
  journal = {The Journal of Neuroscience},
  volume = {40},
  number = {10},
  pages = {2108--2118},
  year = {2020},
  publisher = {Society for Neuroscience},
  doi = {10.1523/jneurosci.1399-19.2020},
}