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This is episode #31 of the podcast and it’s Thursday, the 27th of April, 2023.
My invited guest this month is Tony Chemero, a Distinguished Research Professor of Philosophy and Psychology at the University of Cincinnati (UC), and a primary member of both the Center for Cognition, Action, and Perception and the Strange Tools Research Lab. In his research, both philosophical and empirical, he addresses questions related to nonlinear dynamical modeling, ecological psychology, complex systems, phenomenology, and social cognition. He is the author of more than 100 articles and the books Radical Embodied Cognitive Science (2009, MIT Press) and, with Stephan Käufer, Phenomenology (2015, Polity Press; second edition, 2021).
In this episode, I asked Tony to introduce the field of econogical psychology and share his views on its potential importance to artificial intelligence (details are provided in the interview notes).
Here is the show.
Show Notes:
- Ecological psychology (definition and importance) vs. traditional cognitive science
- The replication crisis in psychology
- Is ecological psychology a science?
- The concept of affordances: definition matters
- Interpersonal synergies and alignment systems (especially online) and their implication for interface design and AI
- Can AI help us understand one another? Can ecological psychology help us design platforms that support social connections online?
- Ecological psychology and the Metaverse
Tony’s books:
Radical Embodied Cognitive Science:
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262516471/radical-embodied-cognitive-science/
Phenomenology: An Introduction, 2nd Edition:
https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Phenomenology:+An+Introduction,+2nd+Edition-p-9781509540655 -
This is episode #30 of the podcast and it’s Thursday, the 23rd of March, 2023.
A couple of month ago, I had the pleasure of interviewing Dr. Stephen Fleming, Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience and Royal Society at the Department of Experimental Psychology, University College London, where he leads the Metacognition Group. He is also a Group Leader at the Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Principal Investigator at the Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging. The group’s research focuses on understanding the relationship between objective measures (behaviour and brain activity) and subjective experience and metacognition. Steve’s research on metacognition has been recognised by several early career awards including the British Academy Wiley Prize in Psychology (2016), a Philip Leverhulme Prize in Psychology (2018), and the British Psychological Society Spearman Medal (2019). He was a previous Executive Director of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (2014-2020), and is an editor at the journals PNAS Nexus and Mind and Language. He writes widely for a general audience, including articles for Aeon, New Scientist and Scientific American, and is the author of Know Thyself, a trade book on the science of metacognition.
In the interview, we touched on various aspects of metacognition as well as on its connection to artificial intelligence (details are provided in the notes from the interview).
Here is the show.
Show Notes:
- Metacognition (definition and objective measures)
- Metacognition vs. intelligence
- Strategies to improve our metacognitive awareness and abilities: self-assessment vs. external feedback
- Explainable AI (can metacognition help us design AI that can explain how it reached its decision?)
- Current large language models (GPT-3, chatGPT) and some of their problems
- Social media: how would knowledge of meta-cognition can help us design spaces that support social connections (and how to reduce misinformation online)
- The promise of artificial therapy
- The objective and the subjective (How should / can objective science make room for the subjective in its own right?)
Steve’s books and lab:Know Thyself https://www.amazon.com/Know-Thyself-Self-Awareness-Stephen-Fleming/dp/1541672844
The MetaLab http://metacoglab.org/ -
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This is episode #29 of the podcast and it’s Thursday, the 16th of February, 2023.
A couple of month ago, I had the pleasure to interview Dr. Bernardo Kastrup, a scientist with a Ph.D. in philosophy (ontology, philosophy of mind) and another Ph.D. in computer engineering (reconfigurable computing, artificial intelligence). Bernardo is particularly known for his work at the forefront of the modern renaissance of metaphysical idealism, the notion that reality is essentially mental. Covered in detail in many academic papers and books, his ideas have been featured on 'Scientific American,' the 'Institute of Art and Ideas,' the 'Blog of the American Philosophical Association' and 'Big Think,' among others. Bernardo is also the executive director of Essentia Foundation, an information hub that identifies and helps to promote scientific and philosophical work relevant to metaphysical idealism or nondualism. In the interview, we touched on various aspects of these topics as well as on their connection to artificial intelligence (details are provided in the notes from the interview).
Here is the show.
Show Notes:
- Theories of (perception of) reality: what is reality and how we make sense of it
- Content representations explained
- How to make room for the subjective (value, meaning, intention, purpose, etc.) in the physical world
- The false mind-matter dichotomy and its connection to language
- AI, its representation(s) of the world, and its illusions
- Augmented reality
- Approaches to AI
- The tension between science and experience
- How to best investigate experience and the first-person perspective
- How (and even should) we bring the subjective in science?
- The isolation of AI: Consequences of losing the ‘Renaissance Man’
Essentia Foundation: https://www.essentiafoundation.org
Media info here: https://www.bernardokastrup.com/p/media.html -
This is episode #28 of the podcast and it’s Thursday, the 26th of December, 2022.
My invited speaker is Dr. Erik Myin, professor of philosophy at the University of Antwerp. He has published extensively on philosophy of mind and cognition, sometimes alone, sometimes with scientists or other philosophers. With Dan Hutto he wrote "Radicalizing Enactivism" and "Evolving Enactivism", both published with MIT Press. In these books, they defend the point that cognition is embodied interaction rather than being necessarily computational or representational. Currently, Erik has just finished writing a co-authored book in Dutch on embodiment and technology, and has started a solo work titled "Of a Different Mind".
The focus of our discussion is REC, the Radical Enactive or Embodied view of Cognition, and the ways in which it departs from traditional intellectual positions. Specifically, Erik debates the idea of contextual mental representations and the fact that one can explain cognition in terms of mental representations inside the brain. Instead, all these ways of representing are embodied, the result of socio-cultural practices.
The second part of the interview covered the future of digital technologies (including immersive technologies like mixed reality and artificial intelligence) — and if/how they can be (re)shaped by embodied cognitive science.
Here is the show.
Show Notes:
- What is REC (the Radical Enactive or Embodied view of Cognition)
- Contentful mental representations and traditional views on cognition
- The normatively of memory and the Information Processing Theory
- The role of REC in the future of technology
Erik Myin’s website:
https://www.uantwerpen.be/en/staff/erik-myin/ -
This is episode #27 of the podcast and it’s Thursday, the 17th of November, 2022.
My invited speaker today is Dr. Mark James, a philosopher and theoretical cognitive scientist who adopts an embodied approach to questions about the development of habits in both individuals and collectives. Specifically, he is interested in how the designed world shapes such habits, and how we can leverage this understanding to address questions of well-being. More recently, Mark has begun researching how psychological flexibility, our ability to switch between habits, is scaffolded by our bodies and environments. Mark hosts the Connectomics podcast, wherein he speaks with theorists and practitioners about the intersection of embodied cognitive science, culture, technology and design. Mark is also a meditator, musician and martial artist, and a lover of good stories.
We started the show talking about his journey in this field and then delved deeper into aspects of Embodied Cognitive Science and its methodologies. We also looked into ways of studying subjective experience scientifically, and debated if subjective experience can be intersubjectively verified. Mark also elaborated Tom Froese’s proposal for an Irruption Theory of Consciousness, a new theory of consciousness that integrates an embodied-enactive account of basic mind with radical formulations of the freedom and efficacy of intentional agency.
The second part of the interview covered the future of digital technologies (including immersive technologies like mixed reality and artificial intelligence) — and if/how they can be (re)shaped by embodied cognitive science.
Here is the show.
Show Notes:
- Embodied Cognitive Science - definition and methodologies
- The scientific study of subjective experience
- Can subjective experience be intersubjectively verified?
- Tom Froese’s proposal for an Irruption Theory of Consciousness
- The future of digital technologies (including immersive technologies like MR and AI)The Connectomics podcast - https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/connectomics/id1606319926
www.markmjames.com
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This is episode #26 of the podcast and it’s Thursday, the 29th of September, 2022.
Today I sat down with Dr. Andrea Macrae, a researcher in the fields of cognitive narratology and stylistics at Oxford Brookes University, in Oxford, England. She works on literature and on non-literary discourse - most recently the discourse of charity fundraising. In her research she studies the relationships between text, readers' interpretations, and broader socio-cultural narratives and ways of thinking.
Our discussion theme was the discourse of charity fundraising — a timely topic, as we live in a hyperconnected world where everybody fights for our attention. Specifically, we talked about the role of charity fundraising letters and touched on how research within the sector has only recently begun to connect with theories of narrative. This was important to address given some disconnect between the strategies employed by academic philanthropic researchers and charities on how to measure the engagement with the beneficiary’s story that would eventually drive donation.
The second part of the interview covered the the future of digital technologies as contributing to storytelling for non-profit fundraising. Although virtual reality (VR) has already started to play an important role in charity fundraising, Andrea believes that traditional fundraising letters are here to stay.Here is the show.
Show Notes:
- the discourse of charity fundraising and fundraising letters
- some disconnect between the strategies employed by academic philanthropic researchers and charities on how to measure the engagement
- the role of empathy in the context of charity fundraising letters; the shift from individual to ‘universal compassion’
- the future of digital technologies as contributing to storytelling for non-profit fundraising (next 10-20 years)
- engagement with the donors in immersive environments (AR/VR)
- ethical implications of individual’s story as representative of others
Relevant papers:Andrea Macrae; Small Stories in Charity Fundraising Letters and the Ethics of Interwoven Individualism. Poetics Today 1 June 2022; 43 (2): 219–241.
Link to Dr. Macrae’s professional webpage: https://www.brookes.ac.uk/profiles/staff/andrea-macrae -
This is episode #25 of the podcast and it’s Thursday, the 22nd of September, 2022.
My invited speaker today is Dr. Aleš Oblak, who identifies himself as a cognitive scientist more than any other field relating to the sciences of the mind. He likes to describe himself as someone who holds somewhat incompatible views about the nature of the human mind: on the one hand, he believes human beings are irreducibly complex and require a qualitative approach; on the other hand, he argues that our behavior can be productively understood by complex machine learning analyses. Currently his work revolves primarily around psychopathology, as a researcher at a psychiatric clinic.
We started the discussion with how he got into this field, then we tried to tackle one of the most important questions: the lack of explicit validation procedures in the phenomenological literature. Aleš described his own method of “consensual validation” and argued for the solution of establishing a shared vocabulary that captures specific aspects of experience — i.e., to describe the experienced (rather than outside) world.
Aleš is also a proponent of a “naturalistic cognitive science”, highlighting the need for methodological pluralism in naturalistic approaches to first-person research. In fact, he calls for more ecological research designs in psychology.
The second part of the interview covered the role of AI in allowing us to collect data, investigate lived experience, simulate different aspects of it, and through it, perhaps come to some universal structures of consciousness.
Here is the show.
Show Notes:- the lack of explicit validation procedures in the phenomenological literature
- a method of “consensual validation”
- establishing a shared vocabulary that captures specific aspects of experience
- toward a “naturalistic cognitive science” (methodological pluralism in naturalistic approaches to first-person research)
- a call for more ecological research designs in psychology
- the future of AI in allowing us to collect data, investigate lived experience, simulate different aspects of it, and through it, some universal structures of consciousness
Relevant papers:A Oblak, A Boyadzhieva, J Bon. Phenomenological properties of perceptual presence: A constructivist grounded theory approach. Constructivist Foundations, 2021
A Oblak. Accusatives, Deixis, and Pointing Fingers. Constructivist Foundations, 2021
Link to Dr. Oblak’s Google Scholar page:
https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=p-HJoNYAAAAJ&view_op=list_works -
This is episode #24 of the podcast and it’s Thursday, the 25th of August, 2022.
My invited speaker today is Dr. Anna Harris, an anthropologist and Associate Professor in the Department of Society Studies at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. Previously, she worked as a doctor in Australia and the UK. For the past 10 years she has been doing ethnographic studies of medicine.
Her approach to the social study of medicine is grounded in ethnographic studies of contemporary medical practices, to which she adds her clinical experience working in hospitals, as well as collaborations with historians, doctors, artists, museum specialists and craftspeople. Her research is focused on the anthropology and history of technological medical practices, especially concerning questions of sensorality, embodiment and learning. Dr. Harris also writes about hospital infrastructures in her blog and her twitterfeed. Currently, she is a member of the Maastricht Young Academy and the Global Young Academy, as well as a member of the Inner City Research Ethics Committee.
We started the discussion with the definition of health humanities (as compared with medical humanities), and its role in health professions education. Despite its increasing popularity, the field’s contribution to desired learning outcomes is still to be assessed and proven.
We then somewhat turned the dialogue toward diagnosis practices of care (within and outside clinics), where ‘sensory work’ seems to be very important. One problem for caregivers, like parents, for instances, is how to assign diagnostic meaning to potential childhood disease. Some important questions here are ‘How do caregivers know what warrants (usually immediate) medical care?’ and ‘How do they judge the severity of their child’s illness?’The second part of the interview covered the future of digital technologies (including immersive technologies like mixed reality and artificial intelligence) as contributing to teaching sensory awareness in diagnosis and practices of care.
Here is the show.
Show Notes:
- health humanities (vs. medical humanities)
- diagnosis and practices of care (with their ‘sensory work’)
- caregivers making sense of symptoms and signs of possible disease
- Western medical practice (objective evidence-based judgments of health) vs. patient’s or caregiver’s experience
- the future of digital technologies (like MR and AI) for teaching sensory awarenessRelevant papers:
1) SE Carr, F Noya, B Phillips, A Harris, et al. Health Humanities curriculum and evaluation in health professions education: a scoping review. BMC medical Education 21 (1), 2021.
2) S Maslen, A Harris. Becoming a diagnostic agent: A collated ethnography of digital-sensory work in caregiving intra-actions. Social Science & Medicine 277, 2021.Dr. Harris’ new books:
A Sensory Education (just out in paperback): https://www.routledge.com/A-Sensory-Education/Harris/p/book/9781350061651
Stethoscope: https://press.uchicago
Making Sense of Medicine: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed
Links to Dr. Harris’ website: www.makingclinicalsense.com -
This is episode #23 of the podcast and it’s Thursday, the 11th of August, 2022.
Today, I talked with Dr. Camila Valenzuela-Moguillansky. She graduated with a PhD in cognitive sciences from the Université Pièrre et Marie Curie (Paris), a Master in cognitive sciences from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris) and a degree in biology from the University of Chile. In parallel to her academic training, Camila has a background in bodywork: she has been a dancer and yoga practitioner for more than twenty years, and currently works with touch therapy that brings together elements of the somatic experiencing method and craniosacral therapy. Her research has focused, on the one hand, on the relationship between body awareness and pain, studying the experience of people with fibromyalgia. On the other hand, she works on addressing the methodological, theoretical and epistemological challenges involved in the study of experience from an enactive perspective. She led the EASE network project, an international network of researchers around the development of the enactive approach to the study of human experience and is currently developing the project Multidimensional approach to presence: somatic practices and the study of experience (MAPS). Camila is the director of the Laboratorio de fenomenología Corporal in Chile and of the school A MATHA, escola de tecnologías do corpo in Brazil.
Today’s discussion has focused on the scientific study of experience - which has been (re)considered in cognitive psychology and some other fields somewhat more recently. Western science has focused primarily on a mind-independent, objectivist, third-person perspective, thus, neglecting, for the most part, the importance of first-person experience. However, last few decades have seen a new critical vision of science emerging, one recognizing the role of observer and her embodied experience in the generation of knowledge. Today, Camila gives us a nice incursion into the challenges of first-person research and offers some suggestions for the future.
The second part of the interview covered technology where we focused in particular on its (potential) role in (re)shaping our sensory awareness and reviving our sensorium of lived experience. Here is the show.
Show Notes:
- Lived experience; scientific study of experience (and consciousness)
- Experience from a third-person-, first-person-, or second-person perspective
- Toward a coherent framework of first-person research (Francisco Varela’s proposal)
- Main challenges of fist-person research
- Understanding memory (from a first-person perspective)
- Descriptions of lived, first-person experience (through language)
- The intersubjectivity issue of first-person experience
- The role of technology in the next 10-20 years in reviving the ‘felt experience’Links to Dr. Valenzuela-Mogullansky’s websites:
www.fenomenologiacorporal.org
www.amatha.org -
This is episode #22 of the podcast and it’s Thursday, the 28th of July, 2022.
My guest today is Dr. Carlos Velasco, associate professor in the Department of Marketing, BI Norwegian Business School (Norway), and the co-founded of the Centre for Multisensory Marketing. Carlos received his D.Phil. in Experimental Psychology from Oxford University, after which he worked in a number of postdoctoral and consulting projects in Europe, Asia, and North and South America. His work is situated at the intersection of Psychology, Marketing, and Human–Computer Interaction, and focuses on understanding, and capitalizing on our multisensory experiences and their guiding principles. He wrote the book "Multisensory experiences: Where the senses meet technology" (2020, Oxford University Press). Carlos has worked with a number of companies from around the world on topics such as multisensory experiences, food and drink, branding, and consumer research.
We started the interview with the broad topic of digital sensory-enabling technologies — and elaborated on the belief that, in the future, digital environments will most likely engage more of the senses and become more interconnected with the real world. But this a very challenging problem, and this most likely will involve a wide range of collaborative efforts across many disciplines.We then moved to the reality-virtuality continuum - a framework for classifying the wide range of immersive technologies available today — and discussed the main factors that drive the degree of immersion and presence in digital spaces.
The second part of the interview covered technology where we focused in particular on how to improve eating experiences in rather specific places, like space. Of course, besides a short debate on the impact technology will have on society in the next 10-20 years, we concluded the show with a dialogue on the ethical implications of such technologies.
Here is the show.
Show Notes:- Digital sensory-enabling technologies
- Are we satisfied with the current immersive digital sensory experiences?
- A wide inter-disciplinary approach to the integration of the different senses that need to be stimulated during digital consumer experiences? And challenges for researchers working at the intersection of these areas
- The reality-virtuality continuum model offers a framework for classifying the wide range of immersive technologies available today
- Individual differences in perception in sensory marketing
- The role does language play in transducing between/ among the various senses
- Eating experiences in space
- The role of technology in the next 10-20 years in reviving the ‘felt consumer experience’
- Ethical implications of digital sensory-enabling technologiesRelevant book:
Velasco, Carlos, and Marianna Obrist. Multisensory experiences: Where the senses meet technology. Oxford University Press, 2020.
Link to Dr. Velasco’s website:https://carlosvelasco.info/
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This is episode #21 of the podcast and it’s Thursday, the 7th of July, 2022.
My guest today is Dr. Matthias Michel, a philosopher working at the Center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness at the New York University. Although most of his research focuses on the scientific study of consciousness, he is also interested in non-human / animal consciousness. Matthias has also worked in the domain of 'philosophy of measurement' as it applies to the measurement of mental properties, especially in psychiatric research (for instance, in the measurement of fear and anxiety).
We started the show by defining consciousness — discussing the ways in which we can assess our own conscious experience. Since the subjective aspect of consciousness makes its scientific study very challenging, I asked Matthias to summarize for us the current assessment methods used in the field. One such method (the use of subjective reports), although somewhat controversial, proves to be particularly important in applications like mental disorders (specifically, fear and anxiety). Matthias believes that cognitive neuroscience research on consciousness could give us a deeper understanding of mental disorders and their treatments.
The second part of the interview covered technology where we focused in particular on the questions ‘can AI systems be conscious? And, if yes, how?’ Matthias kindly shares with us his field’s perspective as well as his own opinion on the topic.
Here is the show.
Show Notes:
- Defining consciousness; Is human experience always conscious?
- Does being conscious presuppose being aware? (And what kind of awareness is needed here?)
- What makes the scientific study of consciousness challenging?
- Applications: mental disorders (like fear and anxiety): how can the scientific field of consciousness help?
- Subjective reports in the assessment of conscious experience
- Technology: Can AI be conscious? How?Note:
Relevant papers:
Michel, Matthias. "The Mismeasure of Consciousness: A problem of coordination for the Perceptual Awareness Scale." Philosophy of Science 86.5 (2019): 1239-1249.
Taschereau-Dumouchel, Vincent, et al. "Putting the “mental” back in “mental disorders”: a perspective from research on fear and anxiety." Molecular Psychiatry 27.3 (2022): 1322-1330.
Lau, Hakwan. In Consciousness we Trust: The Cognitive Neuroscience of Subjective Experience. Oxford University Press. 2022.
Link to Dr. Michel’s website:
https://matthias-michel.wixsite.com/michel -
This is episode #20 of the podcast and it’s Thursday, the 23rd of June, 2022.
Today I sat down, virtually, of course, with Dr. Michael Mopas, Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario. He is cross-appointed to the Institute of Criminology and Criminal Justice and the Department of Law and Legal Studies, and serves as a member of the Duncombe Studio for Social and Cultural Research. Most of Michael’s work is in the area of science, technology, and law with a focus on 'sound'. In his spare time, he plays upright bass in several jazz bands in the city and participates in long-distance triathlons. He has completed two Ironman races (Lake Placid and Mont-Tremblant) and several other events.
In our discussion, we turned to wearable fitness-trackers and mobile apps that allow athletes to measure, monitor, visualize, and record a variety of training metrics. Dr. Mopas and his collaborators have looked into the deeply embodied and sensory dimensions of self-tracking. The overall insight seems to be that the data generated by self-trackers are not only cognitively processed, but also sensed and felt by users. While we do have some understanding of what exactly self-tracking devices measure and quantify, we know less about how/when do their users know these quantitative metrics work for them. How do we mitigate the potential dissonance between these quantitative metrics and the athletes’ lived experiences?
The second part of the discussion moved toward technology. We talked about the future of wearable self-tracking devices and debated if AI can be employed to better understand the emotional needs of the user. Here is the show.
Show Notes:
- Do wearable tracking devices take too much of our ability of ‘being in the moment’?
- Should we value quantitative metrics over other ways of knowing and making sense?
- Moments of dissonance: self-tracking device’s quantitative metrics vs. the athletes’ lived experience
- Sharing data (e.g., Strava): potential benefits and limitations
- Technology: Can we develop AI that learns qualitative data that people input into such devices?Note:
Relevant papers:
Mopas, Michael S., and Ekaterina Huybregts. "Training by feel: wearable fitness-trackers, endurance athletes, and the sensing of data." The Senses and Society 15.1 (2020): 25-40.
Lupton, Deborah, and Sarah Maslen. "The more-than-human sensorium: sensory engagements with digital self-tracking technologies." The Senses and Society 13.2 (2018): 190-202.
Link to Dr. Mopas’ web page:
https://carleton.ca/socanth/people/mopas-michael/
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This is episode #19 of the podcast and it’s Thursday, the 9th of June, 2022.
I interviewed Dr. Elaine Auyoung, Donald V. Hawkins Professor and Associate Professor of English at the University of Minnesota, and Affiliate Faculty of the Center for Cognitive Sciences. She is the author of “When Fiction Feels Real: Representation and the Reading Mind”, recently released in paperback from Oxford University Press. In addition to the project on “Unselfing” described on her faculty webpage, Elaine is also working on a book project on “Becoming Sensitive”, which uses cognitive research on expertise and perceptual learning to show how training in the arts and humanities prepares learners to notice and respond to information in ways that are important for future problem solving but have been difficult to assess.
We had a fascinating discussion on many important topics covered in Elaine’s book, but the episode went over the usual podcast duration, so I’ve decided to split it into two parts. This is Part II.
We continued our discussion from Part I on how to bridge the gap between readers’ experience and the experience of firsthand perception — i.e., how well can we know what we don’t experience directly? We then moved to the vocabulary of 'bereavement' addressing the question ‘What happens when novels end?” As always, we concluded with a discussion on technology covering e-books, multimedia experiences, and VR. Elaine was also happy to introduce us to her current project on ‘Becoming Sensitive’ where she debates the importance of the Arts and Humanities in preparing learners to make and represent information in ways that are important for future problem solving.
Here is the show.
Show Notes:
- how well can we know what we don’t experience directly? (and limitations of language)
- leaving room between imagination and experience
- the vocabulary of 'bereavement': What happens when novels end?
- the future of digital books and the future of experiencing fiction in VR: 1st person vs. 3rd person immersion
- the role of language in immersive environments
- Elaine’s current project, ‘Becoming Sensitive’
- perceptual learning: the ability to differentiate one’s experience (preparing us for noticing or for being sensitive)Dr. Auyoung’s faculty webpage:
https://cla.umn.edu/about/directory/profile/eauyoungLink to paperback edition of Dr. Auyoung book:
https://www.amazon.com/When-Fiction-Feels-Real-Representation/dp/0197621279/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1MMDE5NRJ6GV4&keywords=when+fiction+feels+real&qid=1650048589&sprefix=when+fiction+feels+real%2Caps%2C96&sr=8-1 -
This is episode #18 of the podcast and it’s Thursday, the 26th of May, 2022.
Today, I interviewed Dr. Elaine Auyoung, Donald V. Hawkins Professor and Associate Professor of English at the University of Minnesota, and Affiliate Faculty of the Center for Cognitive Sciences. She is the author of “When Fiction Feels Real: Representation and the Reading Mind”, recently released in paperback from Oxford University Press. In addition to the project on “Unselfing” described on her faculty webpage, Elaine is also working on a book project on “Becoming Sensitive,” which uses cognitive research on expertise and perceptual learning to show how training in the arts and humanities prepares learners to notice and respond to information in ways that are important for future problem solving but have been difficult to assess.
We had an amazing time covering many important topics from Elaine’s book, but the episode went over the usual podcast duration, so I’ve decided to split it into two parts. We started with the definition of Reality Novels and ways to describe the experience of reading. For Tolstoy, for instance, readers’ effort to comprehend the characters’ sensations and emotions as fully as possible is an aesthetic and ethical end in itself. However, the way in which such writers convey the felt experience of the fictional worlds has remained relatively underexplored.
We then looked into the extent to which literary experience depends on the the knowledge and abilities that readers bring to a text, one one hand, and how much it relies on the set of strategies employed by the skillful writer, on the other hand. Another point we addressed was the importance of the translation process in maintaining the level of immersive experience of reading.
In Part II, we talked about how to bridge the gap between the readers’ experience and the experience of firsthand perception — I.e., how well can we know what we don’t experience directly? As always, we concluded with a discussion technologies like e-books and multimedia experiences.
This is Part I of the episode.Show Notes:
- what is realist fiction?
- what is the experience of reading?
- how do we get from words on a page to the reader’s immersive experience of the story
- the knowledge and abilities that readers have vs.the set of strategies employed by the skillful writer
- how cognitively taxing is reading a novel?
- the importance of the sensory properties of a language that inevitably get lost in translationLink to Dr. Auyoung's book (paperback edition) :
https://www.amazon.com/When-Fiction-Feels-Real-Representation/dp/0197621279/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1MMDE5NRJ6GV4&keywords=when+fiction+feels+real&qid=1650048589&sprefix=when+fiction+feels+real%2Caps%2C96&sr=8-1 -
This is episode #17th of the podcast and it’s Thursday, the 12th of May, 2022.
I sat down with Dr. Sally Warmington, a retired medical doctor and narrative researcher from Melbourne, Australia with a deep interest in the encounter between health professionals and those seeking care. Her experiences as a doctor, student, teacher and patient inform her research at the intersection of anthropology, cultural theory and linguistics. Her book "Storytelling encounters as medical education: crafting relational identity" demonstrates the key role of storytelling in medical education and practice and its potential to promote collaborative, better quality care.
We had a fascinating discussion on many important topics covered in Sally’s book, but the episode went over the usual podcast duration, so I’ve decided to split it into two parts. This is Part II.
We continued our discussion from Part I on ethics in clinical practice, focusing on the concept of ‘ethical mindfulness’ — how to bring in and apply ethical values in research. We then moved to the importance of medical students’ reflective writing, process which allows students to become more aware of the emotional and relational aspects of the clinical encounter. And, in this context, we explored various options to the questions “Do patients’ stories matter? And, are doctors aware of their importance?” Dr. Warmington argues for a universal adoption of practices that promote dialogic engagement between medical students, clinical teachers, and patients, giving us lots of examples from her own research and clinical experience.
Here is the show.
Show Notes:- ethical mindfulness in research and clinical practice
- reflective writing in medical teaching practice
- how should we approach medical care?
- toward a universal adoption for practices that promote dialogic engagement between students, clinical teachers, and patients.
- Can empathy be taught? (The need to look for another way of framing the issues around the clinical encounter)
- detached concern vs. engagement practice in medical encounters
Note:
Link to Dr. Warmington’s book:
"Storytelling encounters as medical education: crafting relational identity" is available on the Routledge website:
https://www.routledge.com/Storytelling-Encounters-as-Medical-Education-Crafting-Relational-Identity/Warmington/p/book/9781032177007#
Her research papers can be found on Google Scholar.
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This is episode #16 of the podcast and it’s Thursday, the 28th of April, 2022.
Today, I sat down with Dr. Sally Warmington, a retired medical doctor and narrative researcher from Melbourne, Australia with a deep interest in the encounter between health professionals and those seeking care. Her experiences as a doctor, student, teacher and patient inform her research at the intersection of anthropology, cultural theory and linguistics. Her book "Storytelling encounters as medical education: crafting relational identity" demonstrates the key role of storytelling in medical education and practice and its potential to promote collaborative, better quality care.
We had a fascinating discussion on many important topics covered in Sally’s book, but the episode went over the usual podcast duration, so I’ve decided to split it into two parts.
We started talking about the importance of storytelling in clinical context and that of identity work — how storytelling tells something about who we are in relation to others. The focus here is not only how people become doctors, but also what kinds of people emerge from contemporary clinical training and how students play an active part in their own identity construction. We also talked about the role the analyst plays in such research — their training, language, cultural orientation, memories as an investigator influencing the study. As investigators, Sally believes, we should apply what she calls “ethical mindfulness” — paying close attention to the participants, but also to our own sensations, perceptions and emotional responses, process which requires an acute self-awareness and an awareness of others.
In Part II, we talked about the connection between storytelling and empathy, its role in clinical settings and medical education, and the importance of helping students develop an awareness of the emotional and relational aspects of the clinical encounter.
This is Part I of the episode.
Show Notes:
- the role of stories and storytelling in clinical practice
- identity construction; identity dissonance
- empathy and the formation of professional identities
- “ethical mindfulness” and cognitive and sensory self-awareness in clinical practice
- the analyst’s role in clinical researchNote:
Link to Dr. Warmington’s book:"Storytelling encounters as medical education: crafting relational identity" is available on the Routledge website:
https://www.routledge.com/Storytelling-Encounters-as-Medical-Education-Crafting-Relational-Identity/Warmington/p/book/9781032177007# -
This is episode #15 of the podcast and it’s Thursday, the 14th of April, 2022.
My invited speaker today is Dr. Clay Routledge, an existential psychologist and the Arden and Donna Hetland Distinguished Professor of Business at North Dakota State University, the director of the Psychology of Progress Project, a faculty scholar at the Sheila and Robert Challey Institute for Global Innovation and Growth, a senior research fellow at Archbridge Institute, and an editor for Profectus, a periodic web-based magazine focused on civilizational progress and human flourishing.
Our topic of discussion is nostalgia and nostalgic experience. Nostalgia is generally defined as a sentimental longing or wistful affection for the past. We started by summarizing the concept’s long history of three millennia, where it received different characterizations, and then moved to how people understand and experience nostalgia today. While nostalgia is a past-oriented emotion that has implications for the present, as it leads to increments in self-esteem, it also has implications for the future.
The second part of the discussion moved toward technology when we talked about the possibility of using immersive technologies to experience nostalgic moments. Here is the show.
Show Notes:
- nostalgia and nostalgic experience
- the concept’s history of three millennia and its different characterizations
- methodological approaches to understanding nostalgia
- nostalgia and the cross-cultural lexicon
- nostalgic reverie
- scent-evoked nostalgia and self-esteem
- nostalgia, a past-oriented emotion with implications for the present and for the future
- does our current (scientific) understanding of nostalgia allow us to experience it in virtual reality?
Links:
https://www.psychologyofprogress.org/ -
This is episode #14 of the podcast and it’s Thursday, the 24th of March, 2022.
My guest today is professor Charles Spence, a world-famous experimental psychologist with a specialization in neuroscience-inspired multisensory design. He has worked with many of the world’s largest companies across the globe since establishing the Crossmodal Research Laboratory (CRL) at the Department of Experimental Psychology, Oxford University in 1997. Prof. Spence has published over 1,000 academic articles and edited or authored, 15 books (a sample is provided in the Notes). His work focuses on the design of enhanced multisensory food and drink experiences, through collaborations with chefs, baristas, mixologists, chocolatiers, perfumiers, and the food and beverage, and flavour and fragrance industries. Prof. Spence has worked extensively in the world of multisensory experiential wine and coffee and has also worked extensively on the question of how technology will transform our dining/drinking experiences in the future.
We started the discussion addressing how many senses do humans have, after which we jumped right into important questions related to sense harmony, sensory overload, sense congruency, dominance, and harmony.
The second part of the discussion moved toward technology (as I usually like to do), brainstorming about how can we use the senses to provide the best immersive experience in augmented, virtual, and mixed reality. Here is the show.
Show Notes:
- How many senses do humans have and use
- Sensory dominance: Are vision and hearing our most important and most complex senses?
- Looking at sensory combinations
- How do senses interact?
- How much do we know about individual differences in somatosensory stimulation and perception?
- Considering cross-modal brain plasticity
- The role of technology (i.e., AI / AR / VR) in shaping our awareness and use of the senses
- Ethical implicationsNote:
Links to some of Dr. Spence’s more recent (and popular) books:
1) Spence, Charles. 2017. Gastrophysics: The new science of eating. Penguin Viking.
[International bestseller; winner of the 2019 Le Grand Prix de la Culture Gastronomique from Académie Internationale de la Gastronomie. ]2) Spence, Charles. 2021. Sensehacking - How to Use the Power of Your Senses for Happier, Healthier Living. Penguin UK.
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This is episode #13 of the podcast and it’s Thursday, the 10th of March, 2022.
My invited speaker today is Dr. Nicole Redvers, a member of the Deninu K’ue (“Deneh-noo-kweh”) First Nation in Denendeh. She has worked with Indigenous patients, scholars, and communities around the globe her entire career. Dr. Redvers is an assistant professor in the Department of Family and Community Medicine and the Department of Indigenous Health at the University of North Dakota where she helped develop and launch the first Indigenous health PhD program. Dr. Redvers is co-founder and current board chair of Canadian charity the Arctic Indigenous Wellness Foundation based in Yellowknife, NWT, providing traditional Indigenous-rooted Land-based wellness supports to northerners. She has been actively involved at regional, national and international levels promoting the inclusion of Indigenous perspectives in both human and planetary health research and practice. She authored the trade paperback book titled, ‘The Science of the Sacred: Bridging Global Indigenous Medicine Systems and Modern Scientific Principles’.
We started the discussion with the inclusion of indigenous perspectives in planetary health and sustainable healthcare education, and then we narrowed the topic to the revitalization of traditional wellness services in the Canadian north with a focus on the preservation of Traditional Medicines. She hopes her book will help build bridges between traditional knowledge and western medicine.
We’ve also talked about the considerable interest (and even some initiatives out there) to create immersive experiences to teach indigenous languages and bring awareness to indigenous knowledge and perspective, and to the traditional healing practices in a land-based setting. Here is the show.
Show Notes:
- promoting the inclusion of indigenous perspectives in planetary health and sustainable healthcare education.
- defining Traditional Medicine(s)
- building “bridges” between traditional knowledge and western medicine
- Indigenous languages and their connection to the land and wellness
- immersive experiences to teach indigenous languages and bring awareness to indigenous knowledge and perspective in a land-based settingNote:
Link to Dr. Redver’s book:
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/599277/the-science-of-the-sacred-by-nicole-redversnd/Paper mentioned:
Nicole Redvers, Yuria Celidwen, Clinton Schultz, Ojistoh Horn, Cicilia Githaiga, Melissa Vera, Marlikka Perdrisat, Lynn Mad Plume, Daniel Kobei, Myrna Cunningham Kain, Anne Poelina, Juan Nelson Rojas, Be’sha Blondin. The determinants of planetary health: an Indigenous consensus perspective. Lancet Planet Health 2022; 6: e156–63
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This is episode #12 of the podcast and it’s Thursday, the 24th of February, 2022.
My guest today is Dr. Jay Friedenberg, Professor of Psychology at Manhattan College where he founded and directs the Cognitive Science Program, and where he had served as Department Chairperson for over a decade. Dr. Friedenberg is a vision researcher and has published articles on symmetry detection, center of mass estimation and empirical aesthetics. In addition, he has written a number of science books. These include undergraduate texts in cognitive science, artificial intelligence and non-linear dynamics. He is also an artist focusing on pastel landscapes and urban sketching and is serving his third year as President of the Haiku Society of America.
We started the discussion with his book on "Understanding Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts: An Interdisciplinary Approach”, addressing the challenges in defining beauty, art, and creativity. After considering whether beauty is sensory in nature or more intellectual, we debated if beauty and art can be studied scientifically, and addressed the role of intuition in art creation.
The second part of the discussion moved toward technology. Since AI has found its way into the world of art for quite some time now, we looked at how it has already influenced the art industry. Is AI going to replace artists or is there always going to be some human intervention required to create art? And, if so, is the art ecosystem going to equally welcome both kinds of art creation?
Looking in the future, Jay shared his opinion on the role of AI in the art space in the next 10-20 years, debating who should own the copyright and the ethical implications of AI in creating art. Here is the show.
Show Notes:
- Defining beauty, art, and creativity
- Is beauty sensory/emotional in nature or more intellectual? What is the role of intuition in art creation?
- Can beauty and art be studied scientifically?
- AI and the art industry
- The role of AI in the art space in the next 10-20 years
- Should AI own the copyright?
- Ethical implications of AI in art creationNote:
Links o Jay Friedenberg's books on Amazon:
1) Jay Friedenberg. The Future of the Self: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Personhood and Identity in the Digital Age. 1st Edition. University of California Press. 2020. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08KCW7319/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_tkin_p1_i4
2) Jay Friedenberg. Understanding Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts: An Interdisciplinary Approach. 2020.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08G1SG16R/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_tkin_p1_i2
Jay's art:
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