Catherine Tallon-Baudry

Principal Investigator

catherine.tallon-baudry [AT] ens.psl.eu

I am a senior Cnrs researcher, initially trained in biology at Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon. My PhD work in Lyon revealed the existence of gamma-band oscillations in humans and their role in visual cognition. After a post-doc in Bremen, Germany, I joined the Hospital Pitié-Salpêtrière, Paris, in 2002, where I unexpectedly found a double dissociation between the neural correlates of spatial attention and of visual consciousness. I got intrigued by consciousness, but also dissatisfied by cognitive accounts of consciousness. I thus decided to concentrate on the core property of consciousness, subjectivity. In 2012 I moved to Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris, where I began to work on the link between brain-viscera interactions and subjectivity, finding along the way that such interactions account for a lot of the so-called “noise” in the human nervous system.

More info

Marco Solcà

Post-Doc

marco.solca [AT] ens.psl.eu

I am a post-doctoral fellow at the subjectivity, brain and viscera lab and a psychiatrist at the Geneva University Hospital.  I hold a PhD in Neuroscience from the Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL, Switzerland) and a MD form the Geneva University. During my PhD, I worked on bodily self-consciousness with Prof. Olaf Blanke focusing mostly on the interoceptive contribution to multisensory integration and body representation. My main research interest is on the effect of rhythmic visceral signals on cognition and brain activity. More specifically I’m currently investigating interoceptive processing in eating disorders with the final aim of developing new diagnostic tools and therapeutic approaches.

Evgeny Parfenov

Post-Doc

evgeny.parfenov [AT] ens.psl.eu

How do we perceive bodily signals? How does the brain integrate information from within the body and the surrounding environment? Those are the questions I have been interested in since I was an undergraduate student. I started by studying tactile perception in patients with delusional infestation during my bachelor's and master's. During my PhD, I focused on the evaluation of heartbeat perception and investigation of the role of the insula cortex in interoception. Now in the Subjectivity, Brain and Viscera lab, I work on the somatotopic representation of the stomach. 

Magdalena Sabat

PhD Student

magdalena.sabat [AT] ens.psl.eu

After a bachelor's in Cognitive Science at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow, Poland, I joined ENS's 5-year PhD program, specializing in Neuroscience. My research interests revolve around perception and consciousness in the framework of system neuroscience, recently leaning towards dynamical systems. I'm supervised by Catherine Tallon-Baudry and Yves Boubenec and my PhD projects aim to explore the relationship between the body and the brain and how the two (or one?) continuously interact and together give rise to subjective experience. In the Subjectivity, Brain & Viscera group I work on a literature review on the concept of arousal using modern natural language processing tools. 

magdalenasabat.github.io 

Anthony Clément

PhD Student

anthony.clement [AT] ens.psl.eu

After having completed a science course at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris and a medical course at the University of Paris Descartes, I joined Catherine Tallon-Baudry’s team for my PhD. My project aims to better define the concept of “internal attention” and to clarify the neural mechanisms at play when attention is directed towards mental content, especially visual mental images. As a psychiatrist, I am also interested in the links between internal bodily signals and the emergence of disorders of self-consciousness.

Marie Loescher

PhD Student

marie.loescher [AT] ens.psl.eu

I’m interested in the role of afferent bodily signals in the biological definition of a minimal sense of self, or subjectivity. In my PhD research, which is co-supervised by Catherine Tallon-Baudry and Patrick Haggard, I investigate whether and how bodily signals might be used by the brain to mark incoming external information as more or less relevant for the organism, i.e., the self. To this end, I monitor cardiac, gastric and brain activity while presenting auditory and tactile stimuli inside or outside of peripersonal space. More generally, I like to hang out at the intersection between biology and philosophy (and also at the seaside, in my free time).

Marylin Chahine

Student Intern

marylin.chahine [AT] ens.psl.eu

Following a bachelor's degree in computer engineering at the American University of Beirut (AUB), I have joined the Cognitive Science master’s program at the Ecole Normale Superieure to pursue my interest in philosophy of mind and cognitive neuroscience of consciousness. In the Subjectivity, Brain, and Viscera lab, I am thus working on my M2 internship project which aims to describe the representational dimensions we use in the conscious processing of real-life scenes, and the effect of understanding a scene’s narrative on these representational dimensions using VICE – a Bayesian machine learning model.