We are delighted to welcome Michael Wheeler to the Platform, who joins us as a Visiting Fellow in the Narrative and Cognition Lab. Michael is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Stirling. He will be a Visiting Fellow in the Narrative and Cognition Lab until January 2025.
Read on for an interview Michael about his research and interests.
- If your research was a film, what would the title be?
I’ll go for The Dark Knight Returns (to Cognitive Science). What I love about Batman is that, unlike say Superman or The Flash, he doesn’t have any super powers. He does extraordinary things given only what the ordinary processes of human evolution, development, learning and training (alongside, admittedly, a very large amount of money!) can provide. In a way, this reflects what I think is at the core of my research, which is a principle of ‘no magic’ (what I once called, referencing a different fictional universe, the Muggle Constraint). I want to understand how the quite astonishing phenomena exhibited by the human mind – phenomena such as thought, experience, aesthetic creativity, and so on – are explained by processes that, in and of themselves, are wholly unmysterious. This isn’t science imperialism – although I love the moment in The Martian when the stranded astronaut Mark Watney declares ‘I’m going to have to science the s*** out of it’ – because I don’t think science has a monopoly on the activity of demystifying: art, philosophy, literary theory and other practices can do it too.
2. What will you be doing during your Visiting Fellowship?
I’ll be joining Marco Bernini’s Narrative and Cognition Lab to work on the issue of implicit narrativity. Many thinkers across different disciplines have been attracted by the idea that narratives are important features of our cognitive and emotional lives. Some have even argued that narrative is an essential component of the self (roughly, the self is, at least in part, constituted by the stories it tells about itself). But a lot of our experiences don’t seem to have the form of a narrative (rather, they seem to be the basic elements that figure in self-related narratives), and neither do some life-shaping things that we experience (novels do, but what about instrumental music?). This might suggest that some of the excitement about narrative and cognition is misguided. However, maybe one can talk about narrativity (both mind-internal and out there in the world) that is unarticulated, hidden, potential, or in some other way implicit in form. Or maybe not. It would be good to find out.
3. What expertise and experiences will you be drawing on during the fellowship?
I’m primarily a philosopher of science with particular interests in cognitive science, psychology, biology and AI. Adopting what is sometimes called a distributed cognition approach, I’ve spent many years trying to understand the subtle and complex ways in which human beings intimately couple with technology and other artefacts to transform, enhance, and sometimes impede, their psychological performance. I also have a strong track record of collaborating not only with researchers from other academic disciplines (including psychologists, linguists, computer scientists, literary theorists and classicists, among others), but also with artists, musicians and innovators from the technology sector.
4. Why are you excited about working in The Platform?
My most recent projects have attempted to bring (distributed) cognitive science into a mutually productive relationship with the arts and with humanities research, as part of a ‘movement’ that is sometimes known as the cognitive arts and humanities. This general; approach is well-established at Durham and well-represented in The Platform. More specifically, it seems to me that the human mind is such a complicated, multi-faceted phenomenon that its functioning and misfunctioning, including its patterns of health and disorder, will be unravelled only by a combination of science, the arts (plus their accompanying humanities disciplines), and philosophy. This is, at its very heart, a creative, collaborative, risky and experimental business, so I’m hope that I’ll fit right in to the Platform’s ethos. More specifically, the notion of narrativity sits at the interface between literary theory, philosophy and psychology, so our cross-disciplinary project as part of the Narrative and Cognition Lab – of trying to ascertain the coherence and scope of the idea of implicit narrativity – provides a concrete working-out of my current interests.
5. What changes would you like to see as a result of your research?
My own research goals are very much on the side of explanation and understanding, rather than extra-academic impact, so the main change I would like to see as a result of my research – which of course is just one strand in a huge collective endeavour – is a better understanding of the workings of thought, intelligence, experience and affectivity. It’s an area in which much has been accomplished, but in which so much more remains to be done. I’d also like to help establish a wider appreciation of the sometimes heterogeneous suite of intellectual and artistic resources that will be needed to achieve this improved understanding.
6. What interests or hobbies do you have outside your research that might surprise people?
I have a background in rock and pop music which meant that I didn’t start my first degree until I was 28. These days music is ‘just’ a (serious!) hobby, but I still play live and record, under the name of Mike Wheeler. If you use Spotify, you can check out my latest recorded material (and then you can scroll down to my Spotify bio to find out more about my previous musical life).
If I’m not playing music, I’m probably watching one of my kids play football for either Glasgow University or Heriot-Watt University.
