© Pint of Science, 2025. All rights reserved.
By having the right kind of chemical and electrical stuff, brains — organs that look so deceptively boring that Aristotle believed they were up there only to cool down our blood — produce thoughts. If this isn't cool enough, human brains can produce thoughts about thoughts. In a night of science at the pub, two cognitive neuroscientists will show how these meta-thoughts are not just a party trick, but an essential component of the human mind. Nadine will tell us about how our ability to reflect on our brain processes allows us to tell imagination from reality, and Matan will show us that knowl…
Pretending Not to Know: Self-Knowledge in Action
Dr Matan Mazor
(Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in Cognitive Neuroscience at Oxford)
When you know someone really well, you can sometimes predict their words and actions before they happen. One person you know exceptionally well is yourself—after all, you’ve spent every single moment of your life with this person. Can you predict how you would behave in different situations? For example, can you anticipate how you would try to solve a puzzle if you didn't already know the solution? Cognitive neuroscientist Matan Mazor shows that people can predict their own behaviour surprisingly well, but that they do so based on a simplified, "cartoon" mental model of their own mind.
Is That Really There or Am I Just Imagining It? How Our Brain Distinguishes Reality from Imagination
Dr Nadine Dijkstra
(Principal Investigator of the Imagine Reality Lab)
Picture a bright red apple in your mind—got it? Believe it or not, your brain lights up almost the same way as if you were seeing a real one. Inside your skull, reality and imagination are just electrical and chemical signals firing away. In this talk, cognitive neuroscientist Nadine Dijkstra explains how the brain imagines and perceives and how the lines between imagination and reality are a lot blurrier than we'd like to think.
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