Welcome to my site!
I'm Ben. I'm a recent cognitive neuroscience postgraduate with a background in psychology and philosophy.
I'm also an avid science-fiction fan, a hobbyist designer of my own smart home electronics, 3D models, and 3D prints, and I enjoy learning about how to improve my personal productivity. I love taking copious pictures of my cat (Soju), travelling and experiencing new cultures, following the latest trends in tech, and eating copious amounts of Korean BBQ!
What you'll find here.
On this site, you'll find various articles I've written on the things I enjoy and find interesting. Articles are mainly focused on Psychology and Neuroscience fields that I'm familiar with, such as spatial cognition, predictive processing, autism, and visual imagery. These are intended to be easy to understand and accessible, even if you're not yet acquainted with the topics I discuss.
You'll also find some of my notes detailing my design process for various 3D print or smart-home/IoT projects. Some of these may include instructions on how to build similar devices and objects, and some might just be an insight into why I made the decisions I did and how I overcame some of the problems that arose, depending on how broadly useful or desirable I believe the things I create are.
Lastly, I may post some unrelated, personal content, such as book reviews/summaries, recommendations for content that I consider informative or helpful, my productivity and personal-knowledge management workflows and aids, personal anecdotes, etc. I might even post the occasional cat-gallery if Soju's been especially cute or naughty as of late (though best to check his Instagram for more consistent cat-based content).
My research interests.
Spatial Cognition:
I'm particularly interested in exploring spatial cognition; how the brain enables us and other animals to navigate around the world effectively. I'm also interested in how memory and spatial processing is interlinked, and how the same brain region seems to be heavily involved in these two areas.
I find this fascinating, especially when we can take what we've learned about how the brain might function, and apply it to computer simulations or out in the real world. It's extremely exciting to see a simulated mouse explore a new environment efficiently and effectively while having an understanding of what's going on behind the hood to enable it to find it's way and avoid obstacles. In fact, that's what first got me truly fascinated with spatial navigation specifically, enough so that I intend to pursue a P.
It's also great to see how such research can translate into improving the lives and outcomes of others, such as how we can use data from performance on spatial navigation tasks as an early screening method to detect Alzheimer's before it has really started to take hold. This is what originally got me interested in spatial cognition in general - a topic I'll probably cover in the future and link here.
Predictive Processing:
I also have a strong interest in understanding how established knowledge about the context of the current environment and the situation we find ourselves in informs the way that we process sensory information. One relatively new and increasingly popular theory for how this is achieved is referred to as predictive coding (or predictive processing outside of perceptual processing).
This is a little difficult to summarise effectively here, and I highly suggest you check out one of my articles on the topic for a better understanding. Regardless, you can think of predictive coding as describing a way in which 'higher' regions of the brain use contextual information to 'generate' predictions about what they expect to find in the incoming sensory data stream. These regions then feed these predictions back down into the 'lower' regions of the brain - regions which find different features such as lines, dots, colours, faces, etc. Any inconsistency between the prediction and the actual incoming data is then sent back to the higher areas of the brain. This 'prediction error' informs these areas whether they were correct or not. If there's a lot of prediction error, then these regions need to change their underlying 'model' of the world so that they can generate more accurate predictions. The ultimate aim is to reduce the prediction error as much as possible, meaning that the brain has a good handle on it's current environment and what to expect.
I really love this idea, and there's a good amount of evidence in favour of predictive theories similar to the one described above. However, it is quite a complex subject. If you're interested to find out more, I plan to write a series of introductory articles on various predictive theories in the future, partly inspired by the fMRI work I did under the supervision of Dr Fraser Smith during my neuroscience MSc, so keep an eye out for those!
Autism Spectrum Disorder
A side interest of mine is understanding how autism came about and how it manifests differently for different people. This is partially a selfish interest, as I struggle with some of the same things that individuals on the spectrum often find difficult, and I received a diagnosis of autism myself in my late twenties. I would not consider myself especially knowledgeable in this area however - not compared to my other interests, and I'll likely post less many autism-related articles here compared to others.
Visual Imagery
One of the reasons why I first got into psychology was when I listened to a podcast - I forget which unfortunately - that talked about how people could literally 'see' things then they conciously thought about them. They could produce those images at will! I thought that was amazing! Then I found out that almost everyone could do this to varying degrees, and that it was quite rare for someone not to see these images, or hear their thoughts, imagine a taste, etc.... Turned out I was in the minority and lack the ability to create visual imagery' in my mind's eye - something referred to as aphantasia.
Rather than being disheartened by it though, I just thought it was cool, and wanted to know what other seemingly fundamental abilities people might differ on, how these differences affect the way we see and interact with the world and others, and why these differences occur. That, alongside some experiences I had as an ESL teacher, really got me interested in learning psychology, and I ultimately ended up doing a conversion MSc in Psychology in which I focused my dissertation on how we might 'tap into' our ability to produce visual imagery in order to improve our chances at attaining our goals - and whether a lack of ability in this area diminished our goal-attainment chances. I'll probably write about this at some point too, so stay tuned!
Thank you for visiting my website, and I hope you enjoy exploring my thoughts and work in the fields of cognitive neuroscience, psychology, and creative design!