The Whitehead Lectures are funded and organised by the Departments of Computing and Psychology at Goldsmiths College, University of London, with the aim of stimulating interest and debate in the area of cognition, computation and creativity. All are welcome to attend.

The meetings for the lent term 2007 [January .. March] are listed below. All seminars to be held at 4pm in the Pimlott Lecture Theatre, (Ben Pimlott Building), unless otherwise stated.

For directions to Goldsmiths College see: http://www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/find-us/

To be added to the seminar mailing list, please contact Mark Bishop by email: m.bishop@gold.ac.uk

Wednesday, 17^th January, 16.00

Autonomy and automaticity

Tillmann Vierkant
- Dept. Philosophy, University of Edinburgh

Abstract: The idea of human autonomy has recently come under severe pressure from the cognitive sciences. There are by now many experimental results that seem to show that the conscious self does not control the behaviour of the body. In this talk I will examine this challenge and some solutions to it that have been proposed, especially by philosophers. I will argue that philosophers have succeeded in pointing out many weaknesses in the challenge, but I will try to show as well that some parts of the challenge remain untouched by the most important counter arguments and present indeed a serious challenge for practical philosophy.

Dr. Tillmann Vierkant joined the Department of Philosophy at Edinburgh University to lecture on Philosophy of Mind. His PhD, awarded in 2002 , investigated philosophical concepts of self in contemporary cognitive sciences. This research was conducted under the supervision of Professor Wilhelm Vossenkuhl and Professor Wolfgang Prinz at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences. He then undertook a three year post-doctoral research project on the consequences of contemporary cognitive science for practical philosophy as part of the interdisciplinary research project Voluntary Action: Nature and Culture of Willed Actions. This project was lead by Prof. Prinz, Prof. Goschke, Prof Maasen and Prof Vossenkuhl. Apart from his research Dr. Vierkant coordinated the project especially the cooperation with the philosophical board. His current primary research interests include: The relationship between narrative and implicit cognitive processing, theories of volition and freedom of the will informed by contemporary cognitive science and the importance of phenomenal consciousness for practical philosophy.

Wednesday, 31^th January, 16.00

Is action based on perception rather than knowledge? The evidence from presence in virtual environments

Mel Slater
- Centre de Realitat Virtual (CRV), Edificio U, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Spain.

Abstract: : This talk will present a number of studies of the responses of people to situations and events in immersive virtual environments. The evidence from these studies suggests that people tend to respond to these events as if they are real, in spite of knowing for sure that they are not. Results from studies concerned with the use of virtual environments in psychotherapy will be presented, and also a virtual simulation of the Stanley Milgram obedience experiment. Immersive virtual environments may therefore provide a research tool for social and psychological scientists and also for policy makers, in order to investigate problems under laboratory style conditions that would otherwise not be possible due to practical or ethical constraints.

Prof. Mel Slater is an ICREA Research Professor and works at the Virtual Reality Centre of Barcelona, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Spain. He is also a Professor of Virtua Environments at University College London in the Department of Computer Science. His major research interest since the early 1990s has been computer graphics and virtual environments, and founded the Virtual Environments and Computer Graphics group at UCL in 1995 after he had moved there from Queen Mary, where he had been Head of Department of Computer Science from 1993 to 1995. He was EPSRC Senior Research Fellow from 1999 to 2004 at UCL. He led the EU FET project Presencia from 2002 to 2006, and currently leads the EU FET Integrated Project PRESENCCIA.

Wednesday, 7^th February, 16.00

Upgrading humans: technical realities and new morals

Kevin Warwick
- Department of Cybernetics, University of Reading

Abstract: In this presentation a look will be taken at how the use of implant technology is rapidly diminishing the effects of certain neural illnesses and distinctly increasing the range of abilities of those affected. An indication will be given of a number of problem areas in which such technology has already had a profound effect, a key element being the need for a clear interface linking the human brain directly with a computer. However, in order to assess the possible opportunities, both human and animal studies from around the world will be reported on. The main thrust of this lecture will be an overview of Professor Warwick's research which has led to him receiving a neural implant which linked his nervous system bi-directionally with the internet. With this in place neural signals were transmitted to various technological devices to directly control them, in some cases via the internet, and feedback to the brain was obtained from such as the fingertips of a robot hand, ultrasonic (extra) sensory input and neural signals directly from another human’s nervous system. A view will be taken as to the prospects for the future, both in the short term as a therapeutic device and in the long term as a form of enhancement, including the realistic potential, in the near future, for thought communication – thereby opening up tremendous commercial potential. Clearly though, an individual whose brain is part human - part machine can have abilities that far surpass those who remain with a human brain alone. Will such an individual exhibit different moral and ethical values to those of a human? If so, what effects might this have on society?

Prof. Kevin Warwick is Professor of Cybernetics at the University of Reading. He carries out research in control theory, robotics, biomedical engineering and artificial intelligence. Kevin has been awarded higher doctorates (DScs) both by Imperial College and the Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague. He was presented with The Future of Health Technology Award from MIT (USA), was made an Honorary Member of the Academy of Sciences, St.Petersburg, was awarded the University of Malta medal from the Edward de Bono Institute and in 2004 received The IEE Achievement Medal. In 2000 Kevin presented the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures, entitled 'The Rise of The Robots'. These lectures were also presented by Kevin in Japan, China and Korea.

Wednesday, 21^st February, 16.00

The mind beyond the skin: intermental thought in the novel

Alan Palmer
- Department of Linguistics and English Language, Lancaster University, UK.

Abstract: After referring briefly to the 'cognitive turn' that has been taking place in narratology since the 1990s, I will discuss the study of fictional minds. Readers enter the storyworlds of novels and then follow the logic of the events that occur in them primarily by attempting to reconstruct the fictional minds of the characters in those storyworlds. These reconstructions by readers of the minds of characters are central to our understanding of how novels work, because fictional narrative is, in essence, the description of fictional mental functioning. The lecture will then consider intermental thought in the novel. Such thinking is joint, group, shared or collective, as opposed to intramental, or individual or private thought. It is also known as socially distributed, situated or extended cognition, and also as intersubjectivity. Intermental thought is a crucially important component of fictional narrative because much of the mental functioning that occurs in novels is done by large organizations, small groups, work colleagues, friends, families, couples and other intermental units. It could plausibly be argued that a good deal of the subject matter of novels is the formation, development and breakdown of these intermental systems. However, this topic is completely absent from traditional narrative theory. To illustrate, I will discuss the presentation of intermental thought in the opening few pages of George Eliot's Middlemarch. I will go much further than simply suggesting that the town of Middlemarch provides a social context within which individual characters operate, and will argue that the town literally and not just metaphorically has a mind of its own. I call it the Middlemarch Mind.

Alan Palmer is an independent scholar living in south east London. His book Fictional Minds (University of Nebraska Press, 2004) was a co-winner of the MLA Prize for Independent Scholars and also a co-winner of the Perkins Prize (awarded by the Society for the Study of Narrative Literature). He was a judge for the 2006 Perkins Prize. He has contributed essays to the journals Narrative, Style and Semiotica, as well as chapters to a number of edited collections including Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences (ed. David Herman). Alan Palmer is an honorary research fellow in the Department of Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster University and his chief areas of interest are narratology, cognitive poetics and cognitive approaches to literature, the cognitive sciences and the study of consciousness, the nineteenth century novel, modernism and the history of country and western music.

Wednesday, 28^th February, 16.00

Attentional blink on the right, alien hand on the left: ERP studies on the fragile connection and competition between hemispheres

Rolf Verleger
- Neurophysiologie der Kognition, Germany

Abstract: : The presence of the hemi-neglect syndrome after lesions of the right cerebral hemisphere leads to the assumption that the right hemisphere somehow controls perception. The mechanisms of competition between right and left hemisphere were here studied in healthy participants and in G.H., an exceptional neurological patient. In healthy participants, we used a two-stream version of the attentional blink paradigm. In this task, left-hemifield targets are drastically better identified than right-hemifield targets. ERP measurement of interhemispheric differences revealed right-hemisphere advantages in speed, in continuous engagement, in modification of activation by expectancy, and in rapid interruption of other-hemisphere activation. Similar observations can be made in G.H. who suffers from split-brain symptoms, lacking conscious control of his left hand. Among other fascinating findings, ERP measurement during perceiving and responding to centrally presented stimuli again revealed right-hemisphere advantages, both in speed of perception and in motor activation. Further, ERPs showed compensatory processing for the missing transfer of motor information between hemispheres. Thus, our brains are much more asymmetrically constructed than would be usually realized.

Prof. Dr. Rolf Verleger studied psychology at the University of Konstanz, Germany, where he worked for his diploma thesis in 1976 about event-related EEG potentials (ERPs) in schizophrenia, then had research positions at the Central Institute of Mental Health in Mannheim, Germany, and at the department of psychology at Tübingen, Germany, where he received his Ph.D. Since 1988, he holds the position of a neuropsychologist at the department of neurology at the University of Lübeck, Germany, seeing patients and doing research on functions and dysfunctions in cerebral control of higher cognitive functions. In 1998, he was appointed the title of professor. He was president of the German Society of Psychophysiology 2000-2005.

Wednesday, 7^th March, 16.00

Multisensory contributions to 'touch': recent findings

Charles Spence
- Crossmodal Research Laboratory, Department of Experimental Psychology, Oxford University

Abstract: : The last few years has seen a growing realization amongst scientists that human perception is inherently multisensory. In particular, a rapidly growing body of research now highlights the existence of important connections between the human senses of sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste. One consequence of the multisensory nature of our perceptual experience is that changing what a person sees can change what they feel when they touch/interact with an object/surface. Similarly, research now suggests that changing what an object or surface sounds like, even what it smells like, can also change how it will be perceived, evaluated, and ultimately used. In this talk, I hope to illustrate how our growing understanding of the rules governing multisensory perception (derived from the field of cognitive neuroscience research) demonstrates just how multisensory what we introspectively think of as tactile perception, or the sense of touch, really is. I also hope to highlight some of the challenges that one needs to face when trying to apply laboratory-based research findings to account for our real-world tactile interactions.

Prof. Spence's research is primarily directed at the topics related to attention and information-processing within a multisensory setting. He is particularly interested in questions related to the role of attention in multisensory perception, and much of the work involves the investigation of multisensory illusions such as the rubber hand illusion. Prof. Spence is also interested in investigating how our understanding of multisensory perception can be used in a consumer psychology setting to improve the perception of everything from everyday objects, foods and indoor environments. Prof. Spence has been the recipient of the 10th Experimental Psychology Society prize (2002), the British Psychology Society, Cognitive Section award (2002), the Paul Bertelson medal from the European Society for Cognitive Psychology recognizing him as the 'young European Cognitive Psychologist of the year (2003)', and the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award from the Alexander Von Humbolt Foundation, Germany: "in recognition of past accomplishments in research and teaching".

Wednesday, 14^th March, 16.00

Technological metaphors for the soul

Chris Beckett
- Institute of Health and Social Care, Anglia Ruskin University

Abstract: : Science fiction is typically seen as being about technology, science and the future: a form of fiction-writing that allows us to perform thought-experiments about technological change and its impact on human beings. But science writers aren't just doing though-experiments about the future. Often they are using imaginary technology and bizarre worlds to explore very much the same kinds of questions other writers and artists: questions about what it is to be human, how we relate to one another and to the world. From this angle, science fiction is not primarily about technology or the future, but uses technological and other 'scientific' devices to provide metaphors to express the writer's intuitions and reflections about life, experience, existence, identity, authenticity, our place in the world. What are the particular attractions of technological metaphors and why use them, rather than just writing about the world 'as it actually is'? I am a writer who did not deliberately set out to write only science fiction, but has found science fictional devices indispensable to say what I want to say. In this talk I will try and explain how and why I do this, and what I feel it enables me to do.

Chris did not set out to be a science fiction writer. He doesn't feel that he is especially hooked on writing about science or the future. His stories are usually about his own life and the things he struggles to make sense of. But, for some reason, they almost always end up being science fiction. He thinks he likes the freedom it gives him to invent things and play with ideas. One thing he likes about writing fiction is finding things emerging in his own stories which he wasn't conscious of, a bit like a dream whose symbolism only slowly dawns on the dreamer. Some of his stories draw on his experience as a social worker. He now lectures on social work at Anglia Ruskin University and is the author of several texts in this area. In case anyone wonders whether this is the same Chris Beckett; it is!

Wednesday, 21^st March, 16.00

Shadows of artistry on the cortical canvas of functional connectivity patterns

Joydeep Bhattacharya
- Goldsmiths, University of London

Abstract: Across races and cultures, we love music, appreciate visual art, and produce novel ideas by creative imagination. Music, visual art and cognition are deeply interrelated, acting like two convex mirrors each reflecting and amplifying the other. Yet, the simplest questions, such as, “How do we perceive natural music? Does everyone listen to music in the same way? Why someone prefers pop over classical? What are the neural correlates of perception of visual art? How does an artist mentally compose an artwork?” are yet to be completely understood. Brain imaging and lesion studies are successful in localizing the brain activities during higher cognitive performances. However it is becoming increasingly established that near and distant brain areas not only become co-active but also become functionally co-operative leading to a dense brain network with functionally connected multiple brain regions. To assess the underlying network connectivity, we recorded multichannel EEG signals during such higher cognitive tasks and analysed them by using new analytical measures. In this talk, I will present the results of functional connectivity analysis underlying human expertise in music, in visual art during the perception of music, visual art, and of creative imagery.

Dr. Bhattacharya received his PhD from Indian Institute of Technology. Later he was associated with Max-Planck-Institute for Physics of Complex Systems, Germany as a DAAD Fellow and with California Institute of Technology, USA as a Sloan Fellow. After working at Austrian Academy of Sciences as a tenured Senior Scientist for several years, he moved to Goldsmiths last October. He is fascinated by the ever present brain rhythms and synchronizations and tries to understand higher cognitive functioning of human brain.