I have always been fascinated with the human brain and the nature of consciousness. I could hardly believe it the first time I was told that everything I thought, felt, knew, believed - my entire inner universes, and everyone else's, were somehow produced in these 3 pound soggy lumps of flesh. How could it be possible?
It is truly an incredible organ. The human brain is creative, adaptive, flexible - think of all the things we have done with them. Discovered galaxies. Invented ever-increasingly complex technologies. Conceived of ourselves as agents in the world and effected change in it. It allows us to care for our families, plan for our futures. One thing that excites me about the human brain is its inherent drive to find a kind of sense: brains look for patterns. But what is a pattern, and how does the brain know? How does it find signal in the noise? And how do we get from pattern-detection to rational or interpretative processes? How is it that humans come to be understanders? Is it possible to harness the power of human understanding and ingenuity? While I am not directly addressing these questions now, I think my background interests are partly epistemic. It’s difficult to really disentangle the way we make sense of our worlds from the experiences through which we do so. So, my interests are very big picture. Brain anomalies have always fascinated me, and I think I have chosen useful cases as tools to push our concepts to their limits. Can a singular experience fracture but remain singular? Is it possible to conceive of minds in a way that doesn't require them to always be determinately countable in whole numbers? My dissertation will center around my interpretations of cases. I explain the cases that I'm looking at right now below. In the future, I'm interested in using my research to inform work on autism spectrum condition, synaesthesia, and conscious experience in infancy. |
Krista and Tatiana are remarkable little girls, and their existence was a big reason for my initial interest in Neuroscience and philosophy of mind (see the documentary Inseparable, and Susan Dominus' New York Times piece on the girls). They are craniopagus twins conjoined at the head, sharing a "thalamic bridge" connecting the sensory processing areas in their brains. This allows them to share sensations, control each other's limbs, and even hear each others' thoughts. This motivates the idea that biology doesn't place necessary constraints on the privacy of mental contents.
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