Attention and Dreams: How the Mind Works

Babies spend much of their awake time exploring and learning about the world, eventually growing into adults who can communicate and understand the world around them. How do they do this and what enables them to learn this way? We often talk about babies being like ‘sponges,’ picking up on everything around them, but at the same time their attention span is very limited and easily disrupted. I will talk about infant attention and how they attend to objects and people in a way that will help them to learn about the world around them.

Whether it’s someone unseen calling your name after an all-nighter, the sleep paralysis demon paying you a 3am visit, or the strange, uncontrollable - sometimes brilliant - thoughts that creep in after midnight, our sleep (or lack of it) shapes some of the mind’s most mysterious experiences. In this talk, we’ll explore how sleep influences the way we experience and represent the world, revealing how our reality is an intricate balance of perception, imagination, and hallucination - an equilibrium sustained by our inherent need for sleep.

This is not an immersive experience. Please do not fall asleep.