Overview

I am a cognitive scientist, father, two-bit philosopher, and bad artist from Dublin, Ireland.  My principal professional interests lie in helping to develop a cognitive science that goes beyond the limitations of an individualistic, psychological and Cartesian view of mind and matter.  I have particular interests in coordination within and among people, in the links between rhythm, speech, and language, and in philosophical foundations such as enactive theory. I see my work as a small contribution to the exploration of the thesis that mind and life are inseparable.

My empirical research is focussed on the rich topic of joint speech, where two or more people say the same thing at the same time. This includes chanting, prayer, recitation, and the like, and it is a special case of the more general domain of highly synchronized activity. This rich and understudied topic requires us to reevaluate our assumptions about the individuals and collectives. I have recently finished a book on the topic; further information, a precis, and a lot of supporting material, can be found at jointspeech.ucd.ie.

My professional activities are described in the above tabs.  Links to various websites I maintain, contribute to, or am in some way associated with are on the right.

Some recent talks are linked here, and my publications are almost all available here.

Some videos on the perplexities and limitations of imagistic (representational) theories of vision are here.

I have built a connectionist simulator for use in teaching the basics of artificial neural networks. Basic Prop. The current version is 1.4. Let me know if you use it.