Are you following? Paying attention, or not, to thoughts and actions

This event will be held in English.

What is consciousness? What is attention? Can we pay attention and be conscious while we sleep? If you are interested in the answers to these questions, join us for Conversations on Consciousness, a series of discussions hosted by Columbia University Professor Alfredo Spagna and Columbia Global Centers | Paris. Professor Spagna will speak with internationally recognized scientists from the Paris Brain Institute on the most recent discoveries in neuroscience, detailing how the brain makes us who we are.

The conversation will be followed by a reception.

Speakers

Thomas Andrillion

Dr. Andrillon is a cognitive neuroscientist at the "Institut national de la santé et de la recherche médicale" (Inserm). He works at the Paris Brain Institute, within the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital, in the "Sleep, Dreams and Consciousness" team (DreamTeam). Before joining the Paris Brain Institute in 2021, Dr. Andrillon did his PhD (2016) under the supervision of Sid Kouider, at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris and then became a research fellow at Monash University (Melbourne, Australia) in the laboratory of Nao Tsuchiya. Dr. Andrillon also collaborated with Giulio Tononi and Chiara Cirelli (University of Wisconsin at Madison) and Yuval Nir (Tel Aviv University). Dr. Andrillon’s research is at the interface of sleep and consciousness science and focuses on the local aspects of sleep: how wake intrusions during the night can help sleepers monitor their environment as well as how sleep intrusions during the day can explain lapses of attention.

Paolo Bartolomeo

Dr. Paolo Bartolomeo is a clinical neurologist and neuroscientist with experience in cognitive and neuroimaging research on brain-damaged patients. He leads the PICNIC Lab at the Paris Brain Institute, where he has coordinated several EU and French projects, supervised 17 PhD theses and 8 post-doctoral researchers, and published more than 180 papers in international peer-reviewed journals. Dr. Bartolomeo is the author of several books, including “Attention Disorders After Right Brain Damage” (Springer, 2014) and two books written for the French-speaking public, “Penser droit” (Flammarion, 2020) and "Dernières nouvelles du cerveau" (Flammarion, 2023). His team at the PICNIC Lab has made significant contributions to the field, including the discovery of connectional biomarkers of recovery from stroke-induced attentional disorders and the discovery of a functional region in the left temporal lobe important for visual mental imagery.

Liane Schmidt

Dr. Liane Schmidt is a cognitive neuroscientist at INSERM, the French Institute for health and medical research. Her work addresses the question of how higher-order prognostic beliefs about the future, the world, and the self shape value-based decision-making and the judgment of experiences. Dr. Schmidt addresses this question by combining behavioral testing with brain imaging and mathematical models in healthy humans and patients with psychiatric, neurological, and metabolic disorders.

Monica Toba

Monica Toba is a neuropsychologist with a PhD in neuroscience obtained at the Paris 6 University. Since 2014, she has been an associate professor (Maître de Conférences HDR) of neuroscience at the University of Picardy Jules Verne. She is affiliated both with the Laboratory of Functional Neurosciences UPJV and with the Paris Brain Institute. Her research focuses on the executive and visuospatial attention, especially in the framework of unilateral spatial neglect that typically affects left-sided events after right hemisphere damage, with an impact on complex cognitive activities. Currently, her studies combine neuropsychological, neuroimaging and computational approaches in order to define models of the brain and interactions between different nodes of the attention network based on stroke patients data.

Alfredo Spagna (Host)

Professor Spagna is a faculty member of the Psychology Department at Columbia University and the Director of Undergraduate Studies for the Neuroscience and Behavior Major. He is an award-winning cognitive neuroscientist, studying the intersection between attention, consciousness, and imagination. He received his Ph.D. from La Sapienza University in Rome in 2014.

The Place

For nearly sixty years, Columbia University students and faculty have come to study, teach, or pursue their research at Reid Hall, an exceptional space in the world of international education and cultural exchange. Our public events draw on the rich resources of the Columbia campus and our local partners, creating a "third space" of intellectual exploration and research that resists easy categorization. Our workshops, lectures, and performances bring together a diverse audience to address pressing issues through creative, rigorous, and open dialogue.

Today, Reid Hall is home to several Columbia University initiatives: Columbia Global Centers | Paris, Columbia Undergraduate Programs, M.A. in History and Literature, Columbia’s architecture program, and the Institute for Ideas and Imagination. This unique combination of resources is enhanced by our global network whose mission is to expand the University's engagement the world over through educational programs, research collaborations, regional partnerships, and public events.

The views and opinions expressed by speakers and guests do not necessarily reflect the official policies or positions of Columbia Global Centers | Paris or its affiliates.