Dr Sam Wilkinson

I work on hallucinations, delusions, psychosis, psychological trauma, brain injury, and the nature of illness and wellbeing. I also have a general interest in perception, action and emotion as viewed from predictive processing and embodied perspectives, and especially in the way that the mind harnesses social and cultural context to enhance and shape cognition.

My office is Byrne House FF12, and my Office Hours are Thursdays at 1pm and Fridays at 2pm.

Biography:

Before joining the department at Exeter in September 2018, I was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Edinburgh on the ERC-funded project "Expecting Ourselves: Embodied Prediction and the Construction of Conscious Experience" (March 2017 - September 2018). This project sought to understand consciousness in terms of the predictive processing framework.

Before that (August 2013 - March 2017), I was a postdoc on the interdisciplinary Wellcome Trust-funded "Hearing the Voice" project, which examined the phenomenon of hearing voices in a wide variety of contexts (including, importantly, non-clinical contexts).

From September 2009 to May 2013 I worked towards the completion of my PhD at the University of Edinburgh. My thesis was on delusions and the nature and norms of believing. Previously, I got a Masters in Philosophy and Cognitive Science at the Jean Nicod Insititute in Paris, and an undergraduate degree at the University of Oxford.

Research supervision:

Please email me if you are interested in doing a PhD (or MA by Research) in the following areas:

• Philosophy of psychiatry - especially on psychosis, delusions, voice hearing, depression, or on the nature of mental illness in general;
• Philosophy of cognitive science - especially on the nature of explanation in the cognitive sciences, or anything related to predictive processing and Bayesian approaches to cognition.