Biography
Director, Kinds of Intelligence Programme
My research concerns the mechanism by which the brain creates, maintains and manipulates representations of events that are not currently available to perception. These representations can take many forms: they can be memories of veridical past events (“episodic memory”), conceptualisations of potential future events (“episodic foresight”), or simulations of unobservable physical or psychological mechanisms (“causal reasoning”/ “state-attribution”).
My current research focusses on the hypothesised bidirectional relationship between memory and obesity. There is accumulating evidence that obesity is associated with damage to areas within the brain’s “core recollection network” that is known to be crucial for memory, and for event representation more generally. These findings are concerning in their own right, but rendered more so by evidence that memory may play a key role in the regulation of consumption, and that memory deficits may interfere with this process.
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