ProfessorMac Shine

My research sits at the intersection of cognitive neuroscience, complex systems theory, and neuroimaging, with the overarching goal of understanding how the brain generates flexible, adaptive behaviour. I am particularly interested in how large-scale brain dynamics - the ever-shifting patterns of functional connectivity between regions - give rise to the full repertoire of human cognition, from focused attention to creative thought. A central commitment in my work is to move beyond static descriptions of brain activity toward mechanistic accounts that can explain why the brain is organised the way it is, and how that organisation breaks down in disease.

Complexity theory provides a core conceptual scaffold for this program. The brain is not a linear input-output device but a high-dimensional dynamical system operating near the boundary between order and disorder - a regime that appears to maximise both the stability and the flexibility needed for adaptive cognition. My group uses tools from dynamical systems mathematics, including Koopman operator theory, to decompose these high-dimensional neural trajectories into interpretable geometric structures, bridging the gap between biophysical mechanism and cognitive function.

A longer-horizon thread in my work concerns the evolutionary pressures that shaped these neural architectures. I am interested in why the human brain (and those of other cognitively sophisticated animals) converged on particular solutions to the problem of flexible, context-sensitive behaviour, and what that tells us about the fundamental computational principles underlying intelligence. This evolutionary lens connects naturally to translational questions: understanding which features of brain organisation are phylogenetically conserved versus uniquely human informs both basic neuroscience and the development of better models of neuropsychiatric disease.

Neuroimaging, particularly functional MRI, remains the primary empirical vehicle for this work, complemented by computational modelling, pharmacological perturbation, and cross-species approaches. Together, these tools allow my group to ask questions that span from the dynamics of individual neural circuits to the principles governing whole-brain organisation - and to do so in ways that are directly relevant to conditions such as Parkinson's disease, dementia, and disorders of consciousness.