You began your career by studying art and filmmaking at a fine arts school. How and why did you make the transition into cognitive neuroscience?

I have always moved back and forth between art and science. Even in high school I had trouble choosing between the two. Later, when I was at art school, majoring in digital film, I became more and more fascinated by consciousness and how to study it scientifically. So, in the end I decided to drop art and move toward science. What struck me afterwards was how the bits of science and art that I loved felt the same. It was the discovery part that I loved and still do.

Discovering how a drawing, painting or motion picture with music could affect someone – the mechanism of how that worked – seemed perfectly comparable to discovering something in science, like how the brain or the imagination works. The process of going from the unknown to the known is amazing and addictive!

In what ways do you think your laboratory’s multidisciplinary approach to science has impacted upon its success?

We bring in students and staff from a broad range of subjects and faculties such as medical imaging, psychology, neuroscience, mathematics and art. The impact of having a multidisciplinary team is often unexpected, where a problem that has hit an impasse in one field might have been solved in a completely different field long ago.

It is surprising how often things like this happen. So, by aligning people with very different skills and backgrounds – and getting them all to speak the same language – we can encourage and provide radical shortcuts in research and innovation.

How does unconscious information affect behaviour and to what extent are our decisions influenced by it?

Most of what goes on in our brains and bodies is unconscious. There is clear evidence to suggest that unconscious information can change our behaviour, our perception and – yes – even our decisions. Another way to think about this is that the criteria for us to be conscious of something is simply different to the criteria for it to affect behaviour and decisions. The effects of unconscious information are not that

huge, they are smaller than the effects of conscious information, but they are there and they are reliable.

Is it possible for someone to use unconscious information to control our behaviour and decisions without us being aware of it?

In theory they could, yes. This was a hot topic in advertising a while back. However, the effects would be very small, but in the right situation that might be enough.

You have developed a guide to practicing and reporting scientific discoveries called ‘Discovery Science’. Could you provide some insight into it?

I developed what I call Discovery Science over many years of empirical work in the lab. It is a step-by-step guide for conducting rapid, agile science with a clear path to maximise the chances of unexpected discoveries, while keeping science lean and efficient. A crucial part of Discovery Science is the idea of the minimum viable experiment (MVE). The idea behind MVE is that rather than investing in a large-scale, detailed or ‘theoretically perfect’ experiment (which in reality cannot be perfect when all the underlying mechanisms are unknown), the MVE seeks rapid feedback from the unknown mechanism with the minimum possible cost (in terms of time and money).

The MVE is inspired by the minimal viable product from the ‘Lean Startup’ world of entrepreneurs. Discovery Science is, in a sense, the Lean Startup for the world of science. It turns out that the best scientists and entrepreneurs both use the same methods. Another important element to Discovery Science is the Pivot – a specific point in the development process where you should be on the lookout for strange or unusual pilot data that could end up being a breakthrough discovery!

Are there any research ideas in the pipeline?

Yes lots! We are doing some fun work looking at modelling whole brain activity, bringing in methods and mathematics from outside the field of neuroscience. We are developing new methods to measure the capacity of the human imagination and how to induce (and measure) visual hallucinations in everyone. In some recent multidisciplinary work we have been investigating how basic neural principles lead to biases in financial risk assessment, ones that bankers and traders are not even aware of.

International Innovation speaks to neuroscientist Dr Joel Pearson – one of the world’s leading authorities on human consciousness – about his laboratory’s approach to research and his method of ‘Discovery Science’

Tapping the mind

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NEURO, MENTAL HEALTH AND COGNITION

THE IDEA THAT we possess an unconscious mind dates back thousands of years. The Hindu texts, known as the Vedas, explored the idea that there were unconscious aspects of our mind that held a power of influence over our wellbeing. One of the central tenets of Ayurveda – a tradition derived from Vedic philosophy – is that each element of an individual holds influence over the others.

However, despite its roots in antiquity, it was the ‘father of psychoanalysis’ Dr Sigmund Freud, who became the most famous proponent of the concept of an unconscious mind, where hidden, deep-rooted forces within us could exert influence on our behaviours. Indeed, even the phrase ‘Freudian slip’ has become part of our

lexicon where, despite ourselves, we say something we did not consciously ‘mean’ to but unconsciously felt or thought.

In the years since Freud popularised his beliefs, there have been many arguments and counterarguments regarding what the unconscious is, or even whether or not it exists. One of the main issues that has stymied the potential for investigation into concepts such as mental imagery, the human imagination, the unconscious mind and the hallucinations many of us experience, is the lack of methods to do so: how do you measure the unmeasurable?

HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESSNow, a multidisciplinary team based at the University of New South Wales, Australia, has developed novel and innovative ways to find out more about the processes that lie behind many of

The University of New South Wales is home to a multidisciplinary team of researchers who have developed innovative approaches to measuring the seemingly unmeasurable: the imagination, hallucinations and the unconscious

Capturing the imagination

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PEARSON LAB: COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE

OBJECTIVES• To conduct collaborative integrative scientific

research in the area of cognitive neuroscience and beyond, focusing on novel discoveries: Discovery Science

• To bridge the gap between brain science research and non-scientific applications

FUNDINGNational Health and Medical Research Council, Australia (NHMRC)

Australian Research Council (ARC)

CONTACTDr Joel Pearson NHMRC Career Fellow University of New South Wales School of Psychology Sydney NSW 2052 Australia

T +61 02 9385 3969 E jpearson@unsw.edu.au

www.pearsonlab.org

@Pearson_lab

JOEL PEARSON started his career studying Art in Sydney. In 2007 he completed his PhD in science in just two years, followed by a research fellowship at Vanderbilt University,

USA. In 2009, Joel took up a faculty position at the University of New South Wales, Australia, where he runs the Pearson Lab, a multidisciplinary agile Cognitive Neuroscience research group.

our thoughts and behaviours. Led by Dr Joel Pearson – a leading world expert in mental imagery – the team has taken two distinct approaches to discovering more about human consciousness and its processes. The first approach is research that examines the individual behaviours and perception that occur without conscious awareness, essentially, the effects of unconscious information. An illusion known as motion induced blindness has been used countless times as a means to study visual consciousness but, remarkably,

Pearson and his group have demonstrated that the effects of the illusion persist even when we are unaware of the illusion.

SIXTH SENSEIn one landmark piece of research, the team discovered that intuition does actually exist and has recently submitted a scientific paper on this work. Intuition is broadly defined as the ability to make correct (or successful) decisions without using rationale or analysis beforehand. Pearson and his team have also demonstrated that unconscious emotions improve the speed and accuracy of decision making – a discovery that could prove important for investigations into how conscious and unconscious information combine to shape and influence behaviours.

THE MIND’S EYEThe researchers’ second approach to understanding human consciousness was to examine the conscious sensory experiences we have without any stimuli, such as mental imagery, hallucinations and synaesthesia. Progress within this particular field of research has been slow in the past, not least because of our ‘seeing what is not there’ is inherently private; what we are ‘seeing’ in our imagination is for our viewing pleasure only. However, Pearson and his colleagues developed a useful technique to measure the perceptual or sensory strength of the human imagination. “We figured out a way to use a perceptual illusion called binocular rivalry to measure mental imagery strength. This method is more objective than prior methods, which often relied on using questionnaires asking people directly about their mental images,” explains Pearson.

Binocular rivalry is the first and, so far, only method to directly measure imagery strength. This perceptual phenomenon

involves presenting a different pattern to each eye, resulting in one of the images reaching awareness, while the other is suppressed. Numerous experiments have demonstrated the efficacy of this particular behavioural measure and the potential consequences of it are far-reaching: “This discovery now allows us to look into the brain mechanisms behind the imagination and how to boost the power of the visual imagination,” Pearson explains. “We can now measure mental imagery in clinical populations and see how it changes with mental and neurological disorders, and we are currently working on new ways to measure the capacity of the imagination.”

TRANSLATIONAL IMPACTImproving understanding of brain mechanisms could lead to improved lives for us all. The findings from Pearson’s research can be translated to assist understanding of the pathology of mental and neurological disorders. The laboratory has just published a paper that shows Parkinson’s disease patients who experience visual hallucinations also have strong mental imagery, compared to Parkinson’s patients without such experiences.

The important implications of this work has led the team to secure new funding, as Pearson enthuses: “We have just received funding from the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council for four years, to study mental imagery and visual hallucinations, how they relate to the visual parts of the brain. We are in the process of developing the first specific treatment for visual hallucinations, which is an exciting project with real, tangible translation from the lab to the clinic”.

The brain is fascinatingly complex and the ways it unconsciously shapes, influences and affects our behaviours is still largely unexplored. However, the work that laboratories such as Pearson’s does provides some truly remarkable insights, and it is conceivable that future findings from brain science will be used to improve several aspects of our lives. Knowing why we do the things we do might put us more in control of our behaviours, which could be of huge benefit, whether we are conscious of it or not.

In one landmark piece of research, the team discovered that intuition does actually exist

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