Paranormal Brains: Can neuroscience explain the unseen?
Featuring presentations from:
Kian Godhwani
Maria Chamas
Elizaveta Solomonova
Adam Smith
Kian Godhwani
Kian is a master's student at the McGill Lab for Computational and Translational Psychiatry (McPsyt) under the supervision of Dr. David Benrimoh. Most of his time is spent trying to answer one question: What if we could predict and prevent the onset of psychosis? His thesis project is focused on building an open-world video game, Echoing Tides, that can monitor and predict psychosis risk in vulnerable populations.
Maria Chamas
Maria is pursuing a Master’s degree in Neuroscience at the Université de Montréal, focusing on characterizing sleep health and sleep patterns in deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals. Her research interests lie at the intersection of neuroscience and sleep medicine, including neuroimaging and the complex relationships between sleep, dreams, health, cognition. Through her involvement with the Dream Engineering Lab, Maria has collaborated on the study Agency, Meaning, and Mystical Experience in Encounters with Autonomous Dream Characters, research that she will draw on in her presentation.
Elizaveta Solomonova
Elizaveta Solomonova is a Research Associate in Ian Gold’s Neurophilosophy Lab at McGill University and an Affiliate Assistant Professor of Psychology at Concordia University. She trained in sleep neuroscience at the Université de Montréal (MSc, PhD), using EEG and polysomnography, and spent fifteen years studying sleep and dreaming before turning to psychosis and social cognition. Dr. Solomonova’s research examines normative and anomalous experiences at the edges of sleep and waking. She combines neurophysiological, phenomenological, and cross-cultural methods to understand these edge experiences.
Adam Smith
Adam Smith is a doctoral candidate in the School of Religious Studies at McGill University, specializing in phenomenology, philosophy of religion, and subjectivity. His research bridges ancient and medieval metaphysics with twentieth-century French and German phenomenology, focusing specifically on the phenomenological origins of immanent experience and lived-body awareness. He focuses even more specifically on the work of Michel Henry, in particular his book L’essence de la manifestation.