• Question: why did you decide to do this topic of scince

    Asked by anon-188712 to Alex on 5 Nov 2018.
    • Photo: Alex Reid

      Alex Reid answered on 5 Nov 2018: last edited 5 Nov 2018 1:48 pm

      Hi, thank you for the question. I actually became interested in the sleep research through art, in particular a movement called ‘surrealism’. The movement had a particular fascination with dreams and the unconscious mind, and tried to put them on canvas, which led to lots of really weird and wonderful paintings. I decided to do research on dreams as a result. I later found it was super hard to measure dreams! Most obviously, people forget them really easily and as scientists we need clear and accurate measures. As such I moved into the area of sleep and memory consolidation, as we can get higher quality and clearer measures, and I still find the area hugely interesting.

      If you are interested here is one of my favorite surrealist paintings, it is called ‘The Persistence of Memory’ by an artist called Salvador Dali. https://www.flickr.com/photos/artexplorer/5042254324

Comments

  • Photo: Paul

    Paul commented on :

    There has always been a motive of “how we process information REALLY, in everyday situations” thorughout my research training. I became interested in how people – adults and children – attend to information that is emotionally “loaded” – that is positive (like smiling faces) or indicates threat (like angry or fearful faces), and how attention to these object differ to very simple (coloured bars, flashes of light) objects that most theories of attention are based on. This took me to another type of a “salient” stimulus category – multisensory stimuli, those that engage most of our senses at once. I designed a project for my PhD to study how adults pay attention to visual and audiovisual information, and how we can learn about this topic by record electrical activity from the brain, using for example EEG – electroencephalography. After my PhD , I became interested where we can using this knowledge and go interested in how kids differently pay attention to multisensory information. From then on, I have been working on attention and learning with multisensory information, how we can use EEG to understanding these processes better, and how this can be relevant to how people, children and adult alike, learn in natural environments, like classroom or the office. I wrote a blog post on how we learn in everyday situations, like classroom, where information stimulates many of our sense – have a look https://bold.expert/learning-occurs-in-multisensory-environments/ . On that blog there are many more interesting posts about how we learn and how studying the brain is useful to understand these processes better. 🙂