David Carmel
I am a cognitive neuroscientist based in the Psychology Department at the University of Edinburgh. My specific interest is consciousness, the most fundamental aspect of our inner lives. The very existence of consciousness is a deep mystery: How does the activity of a physical system like the brain give rise to something that has subjective experience? To address this, my lab explores the processes involved in perceptual awareness. We use behavioural experiments, physiological measurements and brain stimulation techniques to examine what distinguishes conscious and unconscious visual perception, how the brain chooses what to bring into awareness, and how awareness interacts with faculties like attention and emotion. These issues are the focus of our project’s research into predictive processing, which offers a very useful theoretical framework for coming up with interesting hypotheses and devising experiments to answer them.