Sebastian Dieguez

Welcome to my page.

Here you will find some quick info about me, but mostly this is a non-professional place where I plan to concentrate most of the stuff that I do.

I live in Lausanne, Switzerland. I studied psychology, then some brain science, then I worked as a clinical neuropsychologist for some years at the local hospital (CHUV), then I did a PhD in cognitive neuroscience at EPFL, and now I'm a scientist at University of Fribourg, Laboratory for Cognitive and Neurological Sciences. Currently, I mostly work on the psychology of conspiracy theories, but as you can see in the Publications page, my interests cover a wide range of topics. I have some publications on bodily illusions, case reports of weird neurological cases, reviews on altered states of (bodily) consciousness (including near-death experiences), experimental studies (sometimes involving some neuroimaging technique), varied ramblings on historical and literary aspects of cognition, and stuff that look more like essays. I occasionally try to find some consistency into this mess of a career, but all I can think of is that I am definitely interested in bizarre things, unusual beliefs and how the human brain tends to diverge from the truth. Voilà.

So that was the academic part. The rest of the time, I write (see the page Other, where I switch to French). I have a long-standing collaboration with Cerveau & Psycho (the French equivalent of Scientific American Mind, more or less) where I put out a monthly paper on the links between literature and psychology/neuroscience (I'm approaching my 100th paper for them).

I also write on a weekly basis for Vigousse, a satirical journal covering the French speaking part of Switzerland. There, I usually discuss some recent piece of scientific research and link it to current affairs, I encourage critical thinking against conspiracy theories and fake news, but mostly I just try to be funny. I take satire very seriously, and so I also write fake news (or fake fake news) in a page somewhat resembling The Onion.

My ongoing projects still involve the study of conspiracism, reflecting on the notion of post-truth, and drawing links between literary fiction and cognition. I work currently on something involving Flat Earth beliefs and the psychology of expertise.

If you're a researcher, journalist, student, editor, conference organizer, very rich person or just someone curious about my work, you can easily reach me with the info below. Thank you for your interest.