Subjective experience emerges from the dynamic interplay of two key mental processes. The first captures information from our external world—the vibrant green of trees or the expansive blue of sky reaching our sensory systems. The second draws from our internal landscape of memories, thoughts, and emerging ideas. The Brain and Consciousness Lab explores a fundamental question: how do these two streams merge to create our continuous, unified experience of being conscious?
Rumination presents a particularly compelling case study in subjective experience. This pattern of repetitive, self-focused negative thinking serves as a powerful predictor of depression onset and relapse. But why do some individuals become trapped in these mental loops while others can flexibly shift their attention? Understanding this difference is central to our research mission.
We tackle these questions using a comprehensive toolkit of neuroimaging methods—EEG, MEG, and fMRI—combined with behavioural approaches including questionnaires, reaction time measures, and eye-tracking. This multi-method approach allows us to map the neural mechanisms underlying both healthy consciousness and its disruptions in psychiatric conditions, ultimately working toward better understanding and intervention.
Awareness represents your brain's remarkable ability to monitor its own cognitive processes—essentially, knowing how well you're performing on mental tasks and how confident you should be in your decisions. This metacognitive capacity functions as an internal quality control system, allowing you to evaluate the accuracy of your own judgments even when no external feedback is available.
Why is Awareness Important? This self-monitoring becomes crucial in everyday life when you must rely on your own assessment of performance. Your brain's awareness mechanism continuously calibrates your confidence, whether your judgments are accurate or mistaken. While scientists have identified that interconnected regions in the frontal and lateral brain areas support this awareness, the precise functional contributions of each region remain an active area of investigation.
We investigate these questions through various brain imaging tools to uncover the underlying neural mechanisms of awareness.