Clas Weber is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Western Australia. He currently holds a 3-year fellowship for Early Career Researcher (DECRA) from the Australian Research Council. He works in the philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and metaphysics.
Artist and writer, Richard Bright, has addressed the relationship between art, science and consciousness for over 40 years. He studied Fine Art and Physics before founding The Interalia Centre in 1990. Since then, he has lectured extensively on art and science and written articles on James Turrell, Andy Goldsworthy and Susan Derges, among others. He has exhibited both nationally and internationally and was the recipient of the ‘Visions of Science’ Award, The Edge, Andrew Brownsward Gallery, University of Bath (Second Prize Winner). Co-author of ‘The Art of Science’ (Welbeck Publishers, 2021).
Laura Jade is a contemporary Australian artist exploring how BCI technologies can offer new forms of expression to interface with the mind aesthetically. She is the creator of Brainlight, an artwork that integrates biology, lighting design and BCI (brain-computer interface) technology into an interactive brain sculpture, lasercut from transparent perspex and engraved with neural networks. The installation is controlled with a wireless EMOTIV EPOC+ EEG headset which detects and outputs live neural activity, translating electrical signals from the user’s brain, into a vivid and dynamic light display within the brain sculpture. In real-time Brainlight visualises the brain frequencies of theta (3.5–7.5 Hz) as green light, alpha (7.5–13 Hz), as blue light and beta (16–32 Hz) as red light.
The proposal of this paper is that memory and dreams are forms of time reflection and result from a unique property of the brain, which acts as a natural metamaterial.
Luca M Damiani is an Artist, Author and University Fellow, focusing his ongoing creative practice and research on neuroscience/health, technology and nature. His work also crosses over with human rights and social design. Luca has a neurological disability and has had various visual art books and academic articles published, as well as being exhibited internationally.
“Focusing on my neurological-brain trauma (caused by an accident in 2018), my ongoing research-based practice looks at various areas of applied art and design, with the main focus on my own sensory disability as well as various branches of neuroscience, social design and technology.”
Nicholas J. Kelley is an Assistant Professor in Social Psychology, University of Southampton.
“I am a social psychologist who uses neuroscientific tools to investigate the nature of the self. Among the topics I study how the self is represented in the brain as well as what guides and drives the self.”
Stephanie Sheir is a Research Associate, Trustworthy Autonomous Systems Hub, University of Bristol. Stephanie takes a broad interest in emerging biotechnologies, particularly in neuroscience and genomics. Previously, she worked as a Research Associate as part of the Trustworthy Autonomous Systems (TAS) Hub at the University of Bristol, conducting research on how different individuals reason about trust in AI.
Timo Istace is a PhD researcher at the University of Antwerp, conducting research into the interplay between neurotechnology and the law, with a specific emphasis on human rights law and medical law. His areas of expertise encompass human rights law, medical law, philosophy of law, and bioethics. Timo specialises in exploring the implications of emerging technologies, with a particular focus on neurotechnology, within these domains.
Philip Goff is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Durham University. Goff’s main research focus is consciousness, but he is interested in many questions about the nature of reality. Goff is most known for defending panpsychism, the view that consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of the physical world.
Goff has authored an academic book with Oxford University Press – ‘Consciousness and Fundamental Reality’ – and a book aimed at a general audience – ‘Galileo’s Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness.’ His new book ‘Why? The Purpose of the Universe,’ argues that the universe has a purpose, and will be published by Oxford University Press in November 2023. Goff has published 48 academic articles as well as writing extensively for newspapers and magazines, including Scientific American, The Guardian, Aeon and the Times Literary Supplement. The interview with Goff by Pulitzer Prize winning author Gareth Cook was one of the most viewed of the most viewed articles in Scientific American of 2020. Goff has appeared on many high-profile podcasts, including the Joe Rogan Experience and Lex Fridman’s podcast.
James Pang is a Research Fellow, Turner Institute for Brain and Mental Health, Monash University. Visiting Scientist, QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute.
Alex Fornito is Professor of Psychology, Turner Institute for Brain & Mental Health, Monash University. Prof Fornito’s research concentrates on developing new imaging techniques for mapping human brain connectivity and applying these methods to shed light on brain function in health and disease. A major emphasis of his work concerns understanding foundational principles of brain organization and their genetic basis; characterizing brain connectivity disturbances in psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia; and mapping how brain networks dynamically reconfigure in response to changing task demands.
Robin Kramer is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Psychology, University of Lincoln.
“In recent years, my direction within psychology has led to the emergence of two related paths of research:
1. Face perception and social cognition – Utilising an evolutionary approach, I have been focusing on the signalling of personality and health information from the face, both in humans and chimpanzees, and have proposed the idea of a shared system across species. This investigation into social signals has also included own- and other-race faces, as well as information signalled through gait (using motion capture techniques).
2. Facial recognition and within-person variability – I have been using computational modelling in order to investigate the nature of within-person variability. I am trying to understand how we are able to recognise a familiar person from multiple (unstandardised) photographs, despite how varied these images often are. Through the use of principal components analysis and other techniques, I hope to model the variability of an individual and explore how idiosyncratic this variation might be.”
The Francis Crick Institute, London has opened a new exhibition about the brain – the most complex and least understood part of the body – and the journey to map its intricate connections.
Hello Brain! explores the brain’s ‘connectome’: how trillions of connections between billions of cells – more than there are stars in the sky – shape our thoughts, behaviours and experiences. Crick scientists are aiming to understand how these connections impact how different species, including humans, interact with each other and the world.