Research on the neurobiology of embodied predictive processing and computational neurophenomenology.
I’m an Associate Professor at the Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies, and the Centre for Functionally Integrative Neuroscience, at Aarhus University in Denmark. I am also an honorary Senior Research Fellow at Cambridge Psychiatry, where I work together with Professor Paul Fletcher to investigate psychiatric and health-harming disruptions of brain-body interaction.
At the most general level, my research interests concern the computational mechanisms by which visceral and somatic states influence awareness, interoception, emotion, and self-monitoring. You can read more about my work at our lab website, the Embodied Computation Group.
Academic Biography: As an undergraduate I studied experimental psychology at the University of Central Florida, and worked together with Shaun Gallagher in the interdisciplinary application of philosophy, phenomenology, and experimental psychology to the embodied self. In 2012, I completed a PhD in Neuroscience at Aarhus University within the Interacting Minds Centre, where I worked with Chris Frith and Andreas Roepstorff to investigate how mindfulness-based stress reduction impacts cognitive control and affective neural processing. From 2013 – 2018 I was a Postdoctoral Fellow jointly in the FIL and ICN at University College London, where I worked with Professor Geraint Rees and Karl J Friston to develop embodied predictive processing models of metacognitive inference. More recently, I worked as a postdoctoral fellow at Cambridge Psychiatry together with Paul Fletcher on a variety of projects investigating brain-body interaction, predictive processing, and metacognition in health-harming disorders such as obesity and prophylactic gastrectomy.
I’m extremely active on social media and love to be involved in science outreach. You can find our latest publications here and here (Google Scholar). Read more about our research here. My CV is here. You can also keep up with my thoughts on cognitive science and neuroscience at my blog, Neuroconscience. Here is a summary of our research impact. The easiest way to get in touch with me is to tweet @neuroconscience or @micahgallen. I also manage the @cogneurojobs twitter account, where you can find funding calls and job postings in the fields of psychology, neuroscience, and brain imaging.