This is just a short post to flag up a really fascinating, and I’m sure highly entertaining, event happening in the UK at the end of January and beginning of February. The London Science Museum is hosting a small festival about those intriguing, terrifying, yet strangely popular cultural icons, the zombies. But it being the …
Sep 04 2012
Official book launch today
My book, THE RAVENOUS BRAIN, officially comes out today (in the US at least – 13th Sep in the UK/Europe in hardback, but the Kindle edition is available everywhere now, I think). While I’m writing, I thought I’d take the opportunity to update you on some of the events surrounding the launch. The book has …
Aug 01 2012
What Jonah Lehrer reveals about popular science writing
Jonah Lehrer is one of the hottest science writers around. But this week, in a dramatic fall from grace, he resigned from his staff position at the New Yorker, and his publisher has removed his latest book, Imagine, from sale. The catalyst for these dramatic events is the fact that he fabricated quotes from Bob …
Jul 20 2012
The borders surrounding our conscious world (Notes from a Consciousness Conference Pt 3)
Go to the nearest window and stare for a moment at an object outside – maybe a car if one is nearby. Now that you’re back, it’s an easy task to recall the color of the car, isn’t it? But how much of the surrounding objects were you aware of? We all feel that …
Jul 17 2012
Notes from a consciousness conference – Part 2: The neural symphony of consciousness fading
This is the second part of my report on the recent consciousness science conference (ASSC) in Brighton, UK. After the first day, where I attended workshops on the science of hypnosis and magic, the four day conference began in earnest. Fascinating piecemeal new details about consciousness were revealed at regular intervals throughout the conference. For …
Jul 12 2012
Notes from a consciousness conference – Part 1: Hypnosis & Magic
Over the previous week I attended the annual conference for the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (ASSC), which last year was based at the exotic location of Kyoto in Japan, but this time was hosted by my own department in Brighton, in the UK. Academic conferences are an intense week that I always …
Apr 27 2012
Introduction to Consciousness
Consciousness is not magic! This is my first blog on the study of consciousness, as part of a series of posts planned. I feel very lucky, both to work as a research scientist at the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science, and to have been given the chance to publish a book on consciousness for a …
Mar 08 2012
The dilemma of weak neuroimaging papers
Over this week, there has been a striking debate in the blogosphere and on Twitter concerning the flaws in many published neuroimaging studies. This was sparked off on Monday by Dorothy Bishop’s brutal, insightful highlighting of the methodological holes in a paper published in the prominent journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in …
Mar 02 2012
Introduction to the site and blog
After a busy time of late with a baby daughter to help look after, some demanding academic tasks, and the final revisions of my first book to hand in, I now have a bit of spare time to start the kind of website I’ve been meaning to write for years. You’ll already be able to …