Liverpool Hosts Interdisciplinary Cognitive Diversity Workshop
If you close your eyes, can you imagine a red apple? How vivid is your imagery? Is it almost like seeing an actual apple in front of you, or do you find it difficult to conjure up any sort of image at all?
Philosophy’s Laura Gow and Georgina Brighouse hosted a ‘brainstorming workshop’, along with philosophers from the Research Network SPIN: Sense Perception in the North, to explore these questions and their implications for philosophical work on cognition. They were joined by Dr Reshanne Reeder, a cognitive neuroscientist in the University of Liverpool’s psychology department, who is well-known for her research into people’s varying capacities to experience mental imagery, and her work on aphantasia and hyperphantasia.
Attendees were lucky enough to be able to try out Reshanne’s ‘Ganzflicker’ experiment, where exposure to a rhythmically flashing light induces pseudo-hallucinations. Reshanne’s work investigates how our differing capacities for mental imagery affects what we experience.
Here’s Georgina trying it out!