Tag Archives: Brain

Human vision: what we actually see – and don’t see – tells us a lot about consciousness

Henry Taylor is an associate professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Birmingham.
“I’m interested in philosophy of cognitive science, philosophy of mind, metaphysics, and robotics. I have worked on perception, consciousness, attention, peripheral vision, the development of scientific concepts, scientific taxonomy, and robotics. Most of my research involves drawing together work from natural science and philosophy”.

Major theories of consciousness may have been focusing on the wrong part of the brain

Peter Coppola is a Visiting Researcher, Cambridge Neuroscience, University of Cambridge.
“Most of my work focuses on network dynamics, graph theory and consciousness. I am very interested in neurological and neuropsychological cases and what these can tell us regarding consciousness. I intend to investigate how the neuroscience of consciousness can be integrated in clinical psychological practice and ethics.”

How conversation works – and why people with hearing loss rely more on their powers of prediction

Ruth Corps is an Early Career Research Fellow in Psychology, School of Psychology, University of Sheffield.
“I specialise in the cognitive mechanisms supporting conversation and the broader impacts of conversational breakdown and difficulty. My work has predominantly focused on student populations, but I am increasingly interested in populations that struggle with communication (such as those with hearing loss or ADHD) and how these difficulties develop across the lifespan.
I completed both my MA (Hons) in Psychology and my MSc in Psychology of Language at the University of Dundee and my PhD in the Psychology of Language at the University of Edinburgh. My PhD investigated the predictive mechanisms that support rapid turn-taking during conversation, focusing on how predicting what another person is likely to say help us determine what we should say and when we should say it.
After graduating, I stayed at Edinburgh for a further two years as a postdoctoral researcher, investigating how another person’s perspective may help us predict what they are likely to say. I then spent four years at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, investigating the mechanisms supporting conversation in real-world interactions.”

Reflections on the Evolution of Consciousness

Primarily a visual artist, Paul Forte also writes essays and poetry. Forte’s career as an artist began in the San Francisco Bay Area in the early 1970’s. Influenced early on by Conceptual art, Forte has employed a variety of media over the years to realize ideas, including making and self-publishing artist’s books and related objects.
“An experimental approach to art making coupled with an abiding sense of the poetic are the hallmarks of my art. It is an art that has explored this approach and sensibility through a variety of media and artforms over the years: Word works and poetry, artist’s books and book works, performance art, drawings, collage, montage, and assemblage. Central to much of this work is the use of found or appropriated material.”

Can you be aware of nothing? The rare sleep experience scientists are trying to understand

Adriana Alcaraz-Sanchez is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH), University of Edinburgh.
“I completed my PhD in Philosophy at the University of Glasgow. I’m interested in the study of consciousness, in particular in altered states of consciousness across wakefulness and sleep. To date, my research has focused on the examination of unusual forms of awareness during sleep, including witnessing-sleep, minimal forms of dreaming, and the hypnagogic state. At present, I’m investigating the links between dreaming and daydreaming. I take an interdisciplinary approach, and most of my work combines methods from analytic philosophy, phenomenology, and qualitative research.”

Colors are objective, according to two philosophers − even though the blue you see doesn’t match what I see

Elay Shech is Professor of Philosophy, Auburn University.
Elay Shech is interested in philosophy of physics, philosophy of science, philosophy of mathematics, and history of philosophy, as well as issues in biomedical and environmental ethics. His work primarily concerns the nature and role of idealizations and representations in the sciences and, more specifically, in condensed matter physics.

Michael Watkins is Professor of Philosophy, Auburn University.
Michael Watkins earned his PhD from The Ohio State University. He has taught at Auburn for the past 20 years, during which time he has also held adjunct and visiting appointments at Dalhousie University in Canada, the University of Rijeka in Croatia, and Cornell. He publishes in metaphysics, philosophy of mind, aesthetics and ethics, with special interests in philosophical problems related to color, perception, and objectivity. He is a past Lanier Professor.

How higher states of consciousness can forever change your perception of reality

Steve Taylor is a Senior Lecturer in Psychology, Leeds Beckett University.
Steve Taylor PhD is the author of several best-selling books on psychology and spirituality, including his new book DisConnected: The Roots of Human Cruelty and How Connection Can Heal the World. He was past chair of the Transpersonal Section of the British Psychological Society.
Dr Taylor teaches Consciousness Studies, Transpersonal Psychology and Positive Psychology. His research interests are spirituality, transformational experiences, parapsychology and altered states of consciousness.
Steve’s background is in Transpersonal Psychology and Positive Psychology. He has published 14 books, and his journal articles have been published in many academic journals, magazines and newspapers, including The Journal of Humanistic Psychology, The Journal of Consciousness Studies and The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology. His work has been featured widely in the media in the UK.

On ‘The Creative Brain’

Anna Abraham is the E. Paul Torrance Professor and Director of the Torrance Center for Creativity and Talent Development at the University of Georgia. She is the author of ‘The Neuroscience of Creativity’ and the editor of the multidisciplinary volume ‘The Cambridge Handbook of the Imagination’. In this interview she discusses her latest book, ‘The Creative Brain: Myths and Truths’, which draws on theoretical and empirical work in cognitive psychology and neuroscience, and offers an examination of human creativity that reveals the true complexity underlying our conventional beliefs about the brain.

Why do humans deteriorate with age? It’s a biological puzzle

Owen Jones is an Associate Professor at the University of Southern Denmark.
“My primary interests are explaining and describing demographic patterns across the ‘tree of life’. However, my research interests are varied and range from climate change, macroevolution and macroecology, to senescence and population dynamics.
Before my appointment at the University of Southern Denmark I spent a couple of years working on similar things as a research scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, Germany. In addition, I spent some time working with Dr Jinliang Wang at the Institute of Zoology (London) on population genetics.
My first post-doc, based at Imperial College London, was on the LITS project, a database of UK-based long-term individual-based time series data sets.”