Cognitive Neuroscience Girona

“The cosmos is full beyond measure of elegant truths; of exquisite interrelationships … We are made of star stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself”    Carl Sagan (Cosmos, 1980)

Think of the last time you met someone new. Within a split second, you probably started building a whole story about this person inside your head: friendly or a bit annoying, trustworthy or not, someone like you or not. Most of that information was not directly or explicitly present: your brain filled it in, drawing on patterns it had quietly collected over many, many earlier encounters with people.

It seems that the brain is very often inferring ‘what is going on’. It is constantly on the lookout for structure and 'rules' in the world around us: which events tend to follow each other, which sights and sounds belong together, how people, objects and situations usually behave. Like a data miner sifting through an endless stream of real-world input, it extracts regularities and turns them into 'models of the world' inside our heads. Most of this learning happens without intent and unconsciously, and a lot of the resulting knowledge is even applied unconsciously too. That’s how you know when it is safe to cross a busy street, sense that something is “off” in a conversation, or build a whole story about a stranger at the speed of light that goes far beyond what you can actually see.

My research asks how the brain does this. How does it pick up patterns from experience without us noticing, and how does this implicit knowledge shape what we perceive, think and decide? And, perhaps most intriguingly, how do we become aware of what we have learned? How do we gain conscious insight into our own implicit knowledge, and eventually develop metacognitive control over it? In short, I study the path from implicit knowledge of the world to knowing what we know (quite a journey!).