Virginie Van Wassenhove

Biography

Virginie van Wassenhove obtained her PhD in Neuroscience and Cognitive Science at the University of Maryland, under the supervision of Professors Poeppel and Grant. During her studies, she focused on the perceptual (psychophysical) and cortical bases (using magnetoencephalography and functional magnetic resonance imaging – MEG and fMRI) of audiovisual speech as a specific case of multisensory integration and predictive coding. In 2005, she worked with Professor Nagarajan (University of California – San Francisco) on learning and plasticity in hearing and audiovisual perception, combining psychophysics and MEG. From 2006 to 2008, she was involved in various projects at UCLA (Prof. Shams, Prof. Buonomano) and Caltech (Prof. Shimojo), which included multisensory implicit statistical learning, time perception, gesture communication and interpersonal interactions. At the end of 2008, she joined the cognitive neuroimaging unit headed by Prof. Dehaene to build NeuroSpin MEG. In 2012, she became group leader of the brain dynamics research team at the French National Institute for Health and Medical Research (INSERM). In 2013, she obtained her habilitation to direct research (HDR) and became Director of Research at CEA. Her research focuses on temporal cognition and multisensory integration.

Conference: Is conscious time conscious of time?

As beings of emotion and thought, we talk about time and its arrow: time that passes, time that is lived, time that lasts, time that marks the measure, and sometimes even future time. Humans have a linear arrow of time, on which they arrange the events of their lives and those of their history, as they recall and anticipate the future. All these intelligible representations of time do not capture the emergent temporal dimension that physics describes, but psychological realities of conscious time that rely on the functioning of our brain in interface with a universe rich in moving information. However, the complex dynamic system that is our brain evolves in time (of physics), and possesses observable, measurable and quantifiable temporal properties. Do the dynamic properties of brain activity that we inscribe on a time arrow describe conscious time? In other words, is the time of consciousness also the consciousness of time?