Florian Coulmas is Professor emeritus of Japanese Society and Sociolinguistics at the IN-EAST Institute of East Asian Studies at Duisburg-Essen University. He has published numerous books, including one about Hiroshima, where he once lived. In 2016, he was awarded the Meyer-Struckmann-Prize for Research in Arts and Social Sciences.
“Eyes on the road is a travelogue which isn’t really a travelogue because it is about a journey fifty years back.”
Renzo Lanfranco is a Principal Researcher in cognitive neuroscience and experimental psychology based in the Department of Clinical Neuroscience and the Department of Neuroscience at Karolinska Institutet.
“My research explores the function of conscious awareness in visual perception and bodily self-perception, using behavioural, psychophysical, computational modelling, and neuroimaging techniques, to understand the perceptual principles and neural mechanisms of these processes.”
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.”
Emmanuel A Stamatakis is Lead, Cognition and Consciousness Imaging Group, Division of Anaesthesia, University of Cambridge.
“My work focuses on understanding the neural mechanisms underlying a broad spectrum of altered states of consciousness in healthy volunteers (induced by anaesthetics or psychedelics), and patients who have sustained brain injuries that result in disorders of consciousness (DoC e.g. minimally conscious state, coma). This work is underpinned by fundamental neuroscience questions as well as broader cognitive architecture questions. In addition to my work on severe brain injury and DoC, I am interested in concussion focusing on the potential of fMRI to predict long-term cognitive/affective post-concussive symptoms. I also employ pharmacological fMRI to investigate therapeutic interventions in patients with traumatic brain injury.”
We Go Way Back, an exhibition exploring how ancient DNA is revealing new insights into human evolution, migration, culture and disease, will open at the Francis Crick Institute on 16 July 2026.
Ancient DNA is the genetic material from our ancestors long gone. These fragments of DNA are extracted from bones and teeth, before being processed in an ultra-clean laboratory and sequenced to reveal the underlying genetic code.
Sabahat Fida’s work sits at the crossroads of science, religion, and metaphysics, often integrating theology with reflections from nature. This article explores justice as a divine and ontological principle—rooted in Shia theology, classical philosophy, and natural analogies—culminating in the lived example of Imam Ali (ʿa).
AI uses expansive memory to make accurate predictions of the next word in a series of words. Memory and talking are fundamental to being human, and we fear that AI will replace them. But because memory and talking have built-in limits, human life extends beyond them to a part of ourselves that AI cannot replace. We have called this our “higher” or “true” self, but it is simply the part of ourselves outside of memory. AI challenges us to fully embrace this part of ourselves, since we’re in the process of turning over our talking- and memory-selves to the machines.
The modern human is a cordless Theseus. We are neither male nor female, and we are within the labyrinth, armed not with weapons or determination, but with cell phones…………We are all within the labyrinth, which is now a crowded place full of humans taking selfies.
Florian Coulmas is Professor of Japanese Society and Sociolinguistics at the IN-EAST Institute of East Asian Studies at Duisburg-Essen University. He has published numerous books, including ‘An Introduction to Multilingualism’ (OUP, 2017) and ‘Writing and Society: A Introduction’ (Cambridge University Press, 2013). In 2016, he was awarded the Meyer-Struckmann-Prize for Research in Arts and Social Sciences. For the past three decades he has served as Associate Editor of the ‘International Journal of the Sociology of Languages’, during which time he has observed the steadily increasing use of the concept of identity in both general and scholarly publications. His book, ‘Identity: A Very Short Introduction’, was published in February 2019.
Matej Peljhan is a clinical psychologist by profession and works as a psychotherapist. He holds the title ‘Master of Photography’, which is the highest title you can obtain in Slovene photography. He has presented his work at 20 independent exhibitions in Slovenia and abroad, and has received over a hundred prizes.
In his photographic series, COVID-19: THINKING WITH ART, he closely monitored the changes and consequences that occur in the mental and social life of people during a pandemic.
Anil Seth is Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex, where he is also Co-Director of the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science. He is also Co-Director of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) Program on Brain, Mind, and Consciousness, and of the Leverhulme Doctoral Scholarship Programme: From Sensation and Perception to Awareness. Editor-in-Chief of Neuroscience of Consciousness (Oxford University Press) and a Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher (2019, 2020, 2021), which recognizes the top 1% of researchers by field with sustained impact over a period of a decade.
His new book ‘Being You: A New Science of Consciousness’ is a Sunday Times Top 10 Bestseller, a New Statesman Book of the Year, a Guardian Book of the Week and a Guardian and Financial Times Science Book of the Year. His 2017 main-stage TED talk has more than 12 million views and is one of TED’s most popular science talks.