What Art can tell us about the Brain

Artists have been doing experiments on vision longer than neurobiologists. Some major works of art have provided insights as to how we see; some of these insights are so fundamental that they can be understood in terms of the underlying neurobiology.  For example, artists have long realized that color and luminance can play independent roles in visual perception.

Multisensory simulation of touch

Touch is at the boundary between the self, the body, and the environment. It is also a pivotal route for social interactions between individuals. Tactile interactions have been of particular interest in recent years and research suggests that touch can convey specific pro-social and affective signals, which cannot be communicated through any other sensory modality. However, our knowledge of what are the key parameters fostering the experience of touching and being touched during an interaction are limited, thus hindering our ability to simulate touch gestures with a virtual agent.

The Language of Life: exploring the origins of human communication

Language is the most powerful social tool any species has evolved - we can use it to share any idea we can think of with the minds of those around us: from poetry, Shakespeare, and physics, to internet memes it underpins what defines us as a species. But despite centuries of thought and study we still have very little idea of how and why language evolved. As a field primatologist at the University of St Andrews, I have spent 15 years living and working with wild apes in the rainforests and mountains of Uganda.

What is listening effort?

When speech is heard in the presence of background sound, or when hearing is impaired, the sensory information at the ear is often too ambiguous to support speech recognition by itself. In such circumstances, knowledge-guided processes that help to interpret and repair the degraded signal are required. Such recruitment of cognitive processes is probably why listening in noise “feels” effortful, even when intelligibility is high.

Musical representation across cultures

Discovering the universal features of human musicality is a prerequisite for explaining the biological and cultural evolution of music. What is universal about the psychological representation of music, and what varies? In this talk I will present analyses of the Natural History of Song Discography, which includes songs recorded in 86 mostly small-scale societies, and experiments using these songs. We find that acoustical forms of songs are predictive of their primary behavioral functions across cultures.

Genomic analysis of 1.5 million people reveals genes associated with substance use, antisocial behavior, and health

Behaviors and disorders related to problems in self-regulation, such as substance use disorders, childhood behavior problems, and adult antisocial behavior are collectively referred to as Externalizing. In this talk, I will describe research that pooled information on multiple forms of externalizing behavior in ~1.5 million people and identified more than 500 genetic loci associated with a general liability to Externalizing.

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