International Journal of Emergency Mental Health and Human Resilience
Open Access

Dr. Simon Durrant

Biography

I graduated with a BA(Hons) in Music from the University of Durham, before moving to the University of Sheffield for an MA in the Psychology of Music (1997) and a PhD in Modelling the Perception of Musical Metre (2001) under the supervision of Eric Clarke. Following this, I was a Research Fellow in 2002-3 under David Huron in the Cognitive and Systematic Musicology Laboratory. A slight change of direction brought me back to the UK to study Evolutionary and Adaptive Systems for an MSc (2003) at the University of Sussex, where I remained to do a DPhil in Negative Correlation in Neural Systems under the supervision of Jian Feng (2008) while also doing some teaching. From 2006-8 I was a Research Fellow at the University of Plymouth where I managed to combine my previous subjects by researching the Neuroscience of Music.

Research Interest

My current work focuses on the role of sleep in memory consolidation and in particular how different memory systems may be differentially affected by sleep and offline consolidation. This research uses a combination of behavioural, EEG/PSG and fMRI techniques and at present focuses largely on memory related to timing tasks. By better understanding how sleep and offline consolidation affect memory, we hope to gain an insight into both the functional role of sleep and the way different memory systems operate in the brain. In addition, I remain actively engaged in research into a number of other topics, including statistical learning in the brain, neural tonality processing, neural genre classification for music and suprathreshold stochastic resonance.

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