Tag Archives: Psychology

The tongue: how one of the body’s most sensitive organs is helping blind people ‘see’

Mike Richardson is a Research Associate in Psychology, University of Bath.
“I’ve had somewhat of a zigzag path through academia. I left sixth form intent on being a ‘professional’ kayaker (this meant living out the back of a van somewhere near a river). Then I studied Sport and Exercise Science at the University of Portsmouth, where I discovered that science was awesome and I wanted to do that instead. Specifically, I found that the brain is pretty crazy and I wanted to know more! I then proceeded to complete a Master’s in Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Sussex and recently finished my PhD in Psychology at the University of Bath, where I studied visual impairment and exercise. I currently work as a Research Associated at the University of Bath, where I study audience experiences in live performance and immersive technology (which isn’t really anything to do with visual impairment or kayaking).
I currently produce content for the science communication platform: ‘SENSE(LESS) Psychology).”

The Unsettled Sense

The eye is a sense organ and an affective organ. It receives and is moved. We see and we cry. This essay focuses primarily on the eye which sees and, in particular, on seeing as a presence to our experience of the world and others. It considers how there is an inherent unsettledness and instability in the phenomenology of seeing. Drawing on the phenomenological investigations of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, it explores how the phenomenal richness of seeing is, by its nature, in flux and susceptible to disequilibrium; how seeing is therefore also a steadying and bound up with our experience of spatiality and openness.

To what extent are we ruled by unconscious forces?

Magda Osman is a Reader in Experimental Psychology, Queen Mary University of London. She is the author of Future-Minded: The Psychology of Agency and Control, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
“The ethos of my work has been to take a critical eye to well accepted views and challenge the status quo. As a result, my research interests cover a range of areas that include decision-making, learning, problem-solving, biases, risk and uncertainty, agency and control, and the unconscious. My research helps answer questions like: How do we make decisions in uncertain situation? Does our unconscious rule our behaviour?”

Talking about the Mind

Jack Symes is a public philosopher and writer. He is currently a teacher and researcher at the University of Liverpool and is best known as the producer of ‘The Panpsycast Philosophy Podcast’. The podcast, in which Jack discusses philosophy with the world’s leading thinkers, has over 75,000 regular listeners. He is also the editor of ‘Talking about Philosophy’, a series of introductory philosophy books for the general public. Jack’s first book, ‘Philosophers on Consciousness: Talking about the Mind’, was published by Bloomsbury in February 2022.

Hanna Lemmik: Engrammatica / Bodies in trouble

Rumination takes place within the body and is therefore constrained by the body’s material reality, particularly the material reality of memory. We do not know exactly how memory is contained in the body but there are indications that memories are constantly remodelled on the molecular level. That is, they do not stay static. Kierkegaard’s ideas on despair are in line with this idea of constant change. Kierkegaard’s self strives for a consistency which it cannot achieve and therefore it must despair, but it is also transformed through this process, suggesting that unwelcome mental loops are tentative and changeable.

Everything we see is a mash-up of the brain’s last 15 seconds of visual information

Mauro Manassi is Assistant Professor in Psychology, University of Aberdeen.
“I joined the Psychophysics laboratory at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (Lausanne, Switzerland) for a PhD in Neuroscience (2009-2014). My PhD focused on how our visual system organizes the cluttered environment around us in a coherent manner (go to https://www.mauromanassi.com/crowding for more info about my work on visual organization).

At the end of my PhD, I was awarded of the Early Postdoc.Mobility fellowship by the Swiss National Science Foundation, for an 18 months postdoc in the laboratory of Perception and Action at UC Berkeley (California, USA). Here, I have become interested in how our visual system stabilizes our visual interpretations of the world, turning discontinuous and chaotic retinal images into coherent visual percepts.”

David Whitney is Professor of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley.

“My lab and I are broadly interested in perception science. I am broadly interested in a variety of topics in perception, including visual and visuomotor localization, motion perception, object recognition, perceptual and motor crowding, and visual impairments. In my lab, we use a variety of techniques, including psychophysics, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS).”

On ‘Being You’

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.

Visual illusion that may help explain consciousness – new study

Henry Taylor is Birmingham Fellow in Philosophy, University of Birmingham. “I am interested in the intersection of philosophy of cognitive science, philosophy of mind and metaphysics. Currently, I work on colour, and in bringing insights from both the metaphysics of properties, and from empirical work on colour together to develop a robust view of the nature of colour.”

Bilge Sayim is Research Scientist in Psychology, Université de Lille. He studies peripheral vision, crowding, intersections of vision science and art, contextual modulation, visual appearance and appearance-based methods.

People-Identities

Alexa Wright is London-based artist working across a range of media including photography, video, interactive installation and book works. She has worked at the intersection of art and medical science since the late-1990s and often works with people with mental and physical differences to make works that address questions of human identity and otherness through qualities like vulnerability and empathy. She has been involved in several long term inter-disciplinary collaborations, for example with Alf Linney, Professor of Medical Physics and computer scientists at UCL (1999-2010) and Hybrid Bodies, a unique international, interdisciplinary project based in Toronto, Canada that brought together medics, visual artists, a philosopher and social scientists to explore the emotional and psychological effects of heart transplantation (2007-19).