Marc M. Anderson
is an Associate Professor at the Department of Culture, Cognition & Computation and at the Interacting Minds Center, Aarhus University. He is also a member of the Recreational Fear Lab at Aarhus University, Denmark. His research is concerned with the cognitive and physiological underpinnings of play in humans and with the development of methodologies to study play in experimental and ecological field settings.
Ramesh Balasubramaniam
is a Professor of Cognitive and Information Sciences at the University of California, Merced. He received his PhD from the University of Connecticut in 2000. The primary aim of his research is to understand the organization of human action, with the eventual goal of developing a comprehensive theory of embodied cognition. Dr. Balasubramaniam’s research program uses methods from complex dynamical systems, robotics, neuroimaging, and statistical physics to study human movement production at the cognitive, neurophysiological, and ecological levels of analysis. His work is supported by several grants from the National Science Foundation and other funding agencies.
Marco Bernini
is Associate Professor in Cognitive Literary Studies in the Department of English Studies at Durham University. He is a narrative theorist working on the relationship between mind and narrative and on how fictional narratives explore and model cognitive processes. He has also worked on the extended mind theory, on empirical studies on readers, on theories of complexity and emergence, and on consciousness and mind wandering. He has a recently published monograph for Oxford University Press on Beckett and cognition (Beckett and the Cognitive Method: Mind, Models, and Exploratory Narratives, 2021), and co-directed an interdisciplinary project on dreams, narrative, and liminal cognition (thresholdworlds.org.uk). He leads the newly established “Narrative and Cognition Lab” (2023-2030) at the Durham Institute for Medical Humanities.
Stephan Besser
is Assistant Professor of Literary Studies and Modern Dutch Literature at the University of Amsterdam. He is a researcher at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA) and a former fellow of the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (NIAS). Stephan is the author of Pathographie der Tropen: Literatur, Medizin und Kolonialismus um 1900 (Königshausen und Neumann, 2013).
is Professor of Rhetoric at University College Roosevelt, Utrecht University. He is the author of Literary Reading Cognition and Emotion: An Exploration of the Oceanic Mind (Routledge, 2011) and a co-editor, together with Emily T. Troscinako, of Cognitive Literary Science: Dialogues between Literature and Cognition (OUP, 2017).
Suzanne Dikker
merges cognitive and environmental neuroscience, performance art and education in her work. She uses a crowdsourcing neuroscience approach to bring human brain and behavior research out of the lab, into real-world, everyday situations, with the goal to characterize the brain basis of dynamic human social communication. As a Research Professor at the Max Planck - NYU Center for Language, Music and Emotion and member of the art/science collective Harmonic Dissonance, Suzanne leads various research projects, including MindHive, a community science platform that supports community-based initiatives and student-teacher-scientist partnerships for human brain and behavior research.
Ksenia Fedorova
(PhD) is Assistant Professor at Leiden University, NL. She is the author of Tactics of Interfacing: Encoding Affect in Art and Technology (MIT Press, 2020) and the co-editor of Media: Between Magic and Technology (2014, in Russian); other publications of hers appeared in Leonardo Electronic Almanac, Media & Culture Journal, Acoustic Space, and Dialog of Arts. In 2007–2011, she led the “Art. Science. Technology” program at the Ural branch of the National Center for Contemporary Arts (Ekaterinburg, RU). Ksenia’s interests encompass media art theory and history, aesthetics, philosophy, science and technology, and visual culture studies, with a focus on the effects of technologies on human perception and interaction.
Joerg Fingerhut
heads the “Arts and Minds Lab” at the Berlin School of Mind and Brain, Humboldt-Universität (Berlin). Previously, he was Deputy Professor of Philosophy of Mind at Ludwig Maximilian University (Munich). As an empirically engaged philosopher of mind and aesthetics he works, theoretically and experimentally, on embodied theories of cultural artifacts. Those span from architecture and urbanism to pictures and moving images. Moreover, he is interested in the potential of art to change our perspective on the world and explores this topic within the European H2020-consortium ARTIS (Art and Research on Transformations of Individuals and Societies).
is Assistant Professor and Post-doc researcher in Philosophy of Technology and Ethics at Delft University of Technology. She obtained her PhD in Philosophy at the University of Exeter (UK). A central theme in her research is the human/technology relationship. She focuses on the posthuman, human enhancement, and cyborgs, and the role of myths, narratives, and (science) fiction in this context. Within this framework, neurotechnology is of particular importance. Franssen approaches this topic from an autobiographical viewpoint as someone who has close personal experience with the chronic disease of epilepsy as well as deep brain research and brain surgery.
Antye Guenther
is a visual artist and researcher. She is currently a PhD in the Arts Candidate at the Maastricht Experimental Research in and through the Arts Network (MERIAN). In her performance and installation works she draws on her education in photography as well as on experiences in former East Germany, studies in medicine, and military training. She addresses themes such as (non)biological intelligence and supercomputers, human enhancement and posthumanism, technological imaginaries and science fiction.
Noah Hutton
is a filmmaker and independent researcher based in New York. He was nominated for a 2021 Independent Spirit Award for Best First Screenplay for Lapsis, a sci-fi feature film he wrote, directed, scored, and edited. In 2020 he completed In Silico, a ten-year documentary begun in 2009 and supported by Sandbox Films and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation about a ten-year project to simulate the human brain on supercomputers. He has authored chapters for The Cambridge Handbook of the Imagination (2020) and the Springer Series on Bio- and Neurosystems (2019).
Mauri Kaipainen
PhD, Adjunct Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of Helsinki, is a former Professor of Media Technology at Södertörn University (Sweden), Professor of New Media at Tallinn University, and Professor of Applied Cognitive Science at the Media Lab of the University of Art and Design Helsinki (today Aalto University). He studied education, musicology, and cognitive science at the University of Helsinki, earning his PhD in 1994 on a computational model description of musical knowledge ecology. As Professor of New Media at Tallinn University (2005–08) he established the international master program Interactive Media and Knowledge Environments. At the Media Lab of the University of Art and Design Helsinki he contributed to a number of media projects,
Machiel Keestra
is Central Diversity Officer, philosopher at the Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies, and researcher at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation at the University of Amsterdam. He has published on human action and tragedy, the history and philosophy of science, interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity, metacognition and reflection, and dialogue and narrative identity. Keestra has been president of the International Association for Interdisciplinary Studies and a founding board member of the global Interdisciplinary and Transdisciplinary Alliance. He co-initiated the Keti Koti Table, a reflection and dialogue method that focuses on the shared history of slavery and its aftermath, with over 30.000 participants so far in the Netherlands and abroad.
Julian Kiverstein
is Senior Researcher in the Department of Psychiatry at Amsterdam University Medical Research Center. He is trained as a philosopher of mind and works at the intersection of philosophy of mind, phenomenology, embodied cognitive science, and cognitive neuroscience. He has published widely on issues relating to 4E (embodied, extended, ecological, and enactive) cognition. He is co-author (with Michael Kirchhoff) of the monograph Extended Consciousness and Predictive Processing: A Third-Wave View (Routledge, 2019).
Halbe Kuipers
(PhD University of Amsterdam, 2022) investigates the work of perspectivism: its different philosophical conceptualizations, its deployment in different fields such as anthropology, environmental studies, disabilities studies, and film studies, and, above all, its practical and ethical implications in regard to us as Moderns. He has been a long standing (or sitting, and at times rolling) collaborator of the Montréal Experimental Laboratory for Research Creation, SenseLab. He is currently employed at the University of Amsterdam as a Lecturer in Film Studies.
Karin Kukkonen
is Professor in Comparative Literature at the University of Oslo. She leads the interdisciplinary initiative Literature, Cognition and Emotions (2019–2023), a prioritized area of research and teaching at the Humanities Faculty at the
Flora Lysen
is an Assistant Professor at Maastricht University, where she researches past and present (media) technologies embedded in scientific research, particularly in the field of medical imaging and brain science. In her most recent book Brainmedia: One Hundred Years of Performing Live Brains, 1920–2020 (Bloomsbury, 2022), she examines ways in which scientists, science educators, and artists use new media to conceptualize, examine, and demonstrate the “brain at work”. In her current research she focuses on the history of artificial intelligence in the field of automating (medical) image reading in the post-WWII period.
Shannon McBriar
(MPhil, DPhil Oxford) is a Lecturer in Literature at Amsterdam University College and a research affiliate at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam. Her research interests lie at the crossroads of literary modernism, literary ecologies, and the cognitive humanities. She was a contributor to Hubbub, an interdisciplinary residency at The Wellcome Collection in London, exploring the phenomenon of mind wandering within the context of attention and rest. Her current research focuses on the dynamics of uncertainty in modernist fiction in dialogue with a range of cognitive and ecological frameworks. Most recently, she has guest edited, with Meindert Peters (University of Oxford), a special issue of Symbiosis: Transatlantic Literary and Cultural Relations on transatlantic cognitive cultures (2022).
Mark Miller
is a philosopher of cognition. His research explores what recent advances in neuroscience can tell us about happiness and well-being, and what it means to live well in our increasingly technologically-mediated world. Mark is currently a Senior Research Fellow at Monash University’s Centre for Consciousness and Contemplative Studies, a Research Fellow at the University of Toronto’s Psychology Department, and a visiting researcher at Hokkaido University’s Center for Human Nature, Artificial Intelligence and Neuroscience.
is Professor of Film, Media and Culture at the Department of Media Studies of the University of Amsterdam. She is one of the co-founding editors of Necsus: European Journal of Media Studies and a board member of The Open Foundation that promotes scientific research into psychedelics and the psychedelic experience from a multidisciplinary perspective. Her previous books include The Matrix of Visual Culture (Stanford UP, 2003) and The Neuro-Image: A Deleuzian Film-Philosophy of Contemporary Screen Culture (Stanford UP, 2012). Her latest book is New Blood in Contemporary Cinema: Women Directors and the Poetics of Horror (Edinburgh UP, 2020).
Shannon Proksch
is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Augustana University in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. She received her PhD in Cognitive and Information Sciences at the University of California, Merced in 2022. She holds a BA in Music from Texas A&M University, Corpus Christi and an MSc in Mind, Language and Embodied Cognition from the University of Edinburgh. Her research blends empirical and philosophical methods from the dynamical systems and predictive processing frameworks to examine the neural, behavioral, and social dynamics of music cognition―from lower-level beat processing to higher-level coordination and social interaction. Her work has been supported, in part, by a National Science Foundation Traineeship in Intelligent and Adaptive Systems.
Majerle Reeves
focuses in her research on building mathematical models to solve active problems in Public Health and Cognitive Science. She received her PhD in Applied Mathematics at the University of California, Merced in 2023. She earned a BA in Mathematics and a BSc in Mechanical Engineering from California State University, Fresno in 2017. Her past research work includes building more equitable machine learning and statistical models to predict suicide death from administrative patient records, parameter estimation for stochastic processes, and system identification using neural networks. Her work was supported, in part, by a National Science Foundation Traineeship in Intelligent and Adaptive Systems.
Alexander Sack
is a Professor of Brain Stimulation and Applied Cognitive Neuroscience at the Faculty of Psychology & Neuroscience, Maastricht University. He is an expert in noninvasive brain stimulation, fundamental and applied cognitive neuroscience, and clinical brain research. Sack has become an influential leader in
Felix Schoeller
is a cognitive scientist with expertise in emotion, mental health, and human-computer interaction. His work concerns synthetic emotions and their therapeutic applications. Felix is a member of the American Psychological Association, the Association for Computing Machinery, and the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society. He graduated from the University of Copenhagen and holds a PhD in Cognitive Science from the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences. His work was featured in Aeon, The Verge, Rolling Stone, Big Think, and Ars Electronica.
Michael J. Spivey
has a PhD in Brain and Cognitive Sciences from University of Rochester and is Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of California, Merced. After 12 years as a psychology professor at Cornell University, Spivey moved to UC Merced in 2008 to help build their Cognitive & Information Sciences PhD Program. His research uses eye-tracking, computer-mouse tracking, and dynamical systems theory to explore how brain, body, and environment work together to make a mind what it is. In 2010, Spivey received the William Procter Prize for Scientific Achievement from the Sigma Xi Scientific Research Honor Society.
Pia Tikka
PhD, is filmmaker and EU Mobilitas Research Professor at the MEDIT Centre of Excellence, Tallinn University. She holds the honorary title of Adjunct Professor of New Narrative Media at the University of Lapland. She is the founder and principal investigator of NeuroCine research group (since 2011), and a founding member of neuroscience project aivoAALTO at the Aalto University (2010–2014). Actively engaged with the film and media industry, she is a voting member of the Society for Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image and the European Film Academy. As a filmmaker, she has directed two feature films and several interactive new media works. Tikka is the author of the monograph Enactive Cinema: Simulatorium Eisensteinense (2008) and publishes widely on enactive media and neurocinematics studies. She currently heads an Estonian Research Council-funded research project at her Enactive Virtuality Lab at Tallinn University.
has performed as a dancer, dance teacher, and choreographer since 1998. Since 2015 she works as a dance researcher and head of the Academy at ICK Dans Amsterdam. She implemented and develops an artistic research curriculum for BA Dance students at Codarts University of the Arts Rotterdam and coaches MA choreography students at Codarts/Fontys. She is member of DAS THIRD, a 3rd cycle research group in the performing arts at the Graduate School of Amsterdam University of the Arts and a PhD candidate at PhDArts Leiden University (NL).
Ties van de Werff
is head of the research center What Art Knows and a teacher in the interdisciplinary Bachelor iArts (both at Zuyd University of Applied Sciences, NL). Ties has a background in practical philosophy, science and technology studies, and community arts. He is interested in the ethics and aesthetics of societal engagement practices: how makers (from artists to engineers) make their work valuable and relevant to others, and how such valuation practices can be cultivated and diversified.
Michael Wheeler
is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Stirling. His primary research interests are in philosophy of science (especially cognitive science, psychology, biology, and AI) and philosophy of mind. In pursuing these interests, he often finds himself developing ideas at the interface between the analytic and the continental philosophical traditions. He has published widely on the nature of, and the prospects for, so-called 4E (embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive) cognition, with a special focus on the subtle and complex ways in which human beings intimately couple with technology to transform, enhance, and sometimes impede, psychological performance. His most recent research explores the possibility of bringing 4E cognitive science into a mutually productive relationship with the arts and humanities.