Michael Banissy

Biography

Work featured in several media sources, eg New Scientist magazine , Scientific American, Reuters, and the BBC. Invited talks given at a number of public events, eg Open City Docs Fest and Wellcome Trust Packed Lunch Series. Articles written for several popular science outlets (eg Scientific American, AEON Magazine). Academic qualifications BSc MSc PhD

Research Interest

My current research fits broadly into two main areas: 1) neurocognitive mechanisms of social perception and 2) synaesthesia. Social perception My research in this area examines the brain basis of our ability to perceive and interpret social signals displayed by others (e.g. emotional expressions, facial identity, voice perception, eye gaze), how these abilities vary between us, and how they change as we age. My lab use a range of techniques including human brain imaging, non-invasive brain stimulation, and neuropsychology (e.g. prosopagnosia studies) to address these questions. Synaesthesia My work on synaesthesia partially overlaps with the work on social perception. Here, I have examined a rare experience in which individuals experience tactile sensations on their own body when simply observing touch/pain to another person. This interpersonal synaesthetic experience, known as mirror-touch synaesthesia, offers insights not only into the condition of synaesthesia, but also into how our brain shapes interpersonal representations between self and other. In addition to this, my lab are also conducting studies examining other variants of synaesthesia including linguistic-colour synaesthesia (where words evoke colour experiences), lexical-gustatory synaesthesia (where words evoke taste experiences), and tone-colour synaesthesia (where listening to music evokes visual experiences).