• Question: Hi Shanti, What kind of reponses/reactions have other people displayed when seeing your research over the years?

    Asked by anon-188716 to Warren, Shanti, Pizza Ka Yee, Paul, Alex on 11 Nov 2018.
    • Photo: Paul Matusz

      Paul Matusz answered on 11 Nov 2018:

      Hi Isla,

      I work on understanding how what we know about how people pay attention and learn new information in the world differs between traditional research (that typically uses just visual or just auditory etc. objects) and how information is typically presented in the real world – across multiple senses at once (“multisensory information”).
      From my experience, both with researchers, but also with specialists who care about these functions in the real world – head teachers, teachers and educators, as well as doctors treating different disorders of the brain from the eyes through dyslexia to problems with moving – do recognise the fact that the existing research may be limited in what it can tell us about “real world” attention and memory.
      So the responses are generally quite positive, as the fact of “multisensoryness” of everyday world makes intuitive sense to people. 🙂

    • Photo: Alex Reid

      Alex Reid answered on 13 Nov 2018:

      Hi Isla, thanks for the question. I know this was addressed to Shanti but as I am tagged in it I will answer it too 🙂 I study sleep and memory and, generally speaking, there is a lot of interest in this area from the general public. I think it probably has something to do with the fact that most people spend around 1/3 of their lives asleep so they want to know what is going on! However I am always acutely aware of what I do and do not know about the area. For example, I am not a medical professional, I am a psychologist, so when I get questions about medical conditions such as sleep apnea (breathing problems in sleep), narcolepsy (excessive sleepiness) or insomnia (trouble sleeping) I don’t really know how to answer nor am I comfortable doing so. Sometimes people also ask me to interpret dreams, which is not what I do! Cab drivers in particular keep asking me to do this for some reason. If someone has had a weird dream of, say, playing table tennis on top of a volcano while wearing a pirate costume, I will literally have no idea what that means!

Comments