Department of Philosophy, Program in Neuroscience
Trinity College
Hartford, CT 06106

Research

Understanding consciousness is my core research interest. This implicates phenomenology – the philosophical effort to characterize the essential structures of experience – and cognitive neuroscience – the empirical quest to understand the function of the brain and nervous system. Phenomenology and cognitive neuroscience are very different in their methods, presuppositions, and principal findings, so the effort to establish a scientific neurophenomenology draws broadly from many disciplines, and inevitably takes some unconventional turns.

Both narratology and musicology deploy formal tools and templates to their domains of study. Much of my recent work reapplies those templates to the data of neuroscience.

Web pages:

Scanning the Neurocracy: What do Brodmann Areas do?

The Labyrinth of Consciousness

Texts:

Radiant Cool (MIT Press, 2003)

· Search inside

· or read about it: Emily Eakin, “Art and Science Meet, with Novel Results.” NYTimes, October 18, 2003.

· Walter Ellis, “A Neuro-noir Journey to the Centre of the Mind.” Times Higher Education Supplement, November 28, 2003.

Selected papers, by topic:

Consciousness:

...and philosophy:

Popping the Thought Balloon in The Philosophy of Daniel Dennett, a comprehensive assessment, D. Ross, A Brook, D. Thompson, eds., MIT Press, 2000

Consciousness and Its Discontents, Communication and Cognition, 30(3/4): 273-285, 1997.

Twilight of the Zombies, American Philosophical Association, Pacific Division, March 1997.

Schizophrenia:

Civil Schizophrenia, in Distributed Cognition and the Will, D. Ross and D. Spurett, eds. (Cambridge: MIT Press), in press.

Through a glass darkly: Schizophrenia and Functional Brain Imaging, Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology, forthcoming.

Conscious and Unconscious

Leaping to Conclusions: Connectionism, Consciousness, and the Computational Mind, in Connectionism and the Philosophy of Mind, J. Horgan and J. Teinson, eds. Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991.

Connectionism and the Freudian unconscious

The Fables of Lucy R.: Association and Dissociation in Neural Networks, in Connectionism and Psychopathology, D. Stein, ed., Cambridge University Press, pp. 247-272, 1998.
Connectionist Hysteria: Reducing a Freudian Case Study to a Network Model, Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology, 1(2):69-88, June 1994.

Teaching and Learning

Street Rigor: Service Learning and the Liberal Arts.
Context, Conversation, Community, in Excellent Teachers, Teaching Excellence, M. McLaughlin and D. Hyland, eds., Trinity College Press, in press.
Sojourning in the Art World: Service Learning in the Philosophy of Art, in Philosophy and Service Learning, D. Lisman, ed., American Association for Higher Education, in press.
Brain Teasers: After-Hours Experiments in Cognitive Neuroscience, in Neuroscience Methods: The Undergraduate Laboratory Experience, D. Blackburn, ed. Trinity College Press, 1996.

Ocassional flights (fiction and essays)

Rubellium West, Pioneer of Ice Age Archeology
'She never knew she was a rabbit' (and other epitaphs), Socrates Lecture, Independent Degree Program, Trinity College, 2006.

Life in the fast lane of Liberal Arts

My Strategic Plan

Standard CV

Dan Lloyd