#557 Stephen Fleming - Know Thyself: The New Science of Self-Awareness
RECORDED ON AUGUST 17th 2021.
Dr. Stephen Fleming is Wellcome Trust/Royal Society Sir Henry Dale Fellow at the Department of Experimental Psychology and Principal Investigator at the Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging where he leads the Metacognition Group, at University College London. The question that drives most his research is: what supports the remarkable capacity for human self-awareness? To address this question, he combines experimental and theoretical approaches (psychophysics, computational modelling, neuroimaging) to understand how people become self-aware of aspects of their cognition and behavior (such as perception, memory and decision-making), and why such awareness is often impaired in psychiatric and neurological disorders. Current interests focus on understanding contributions of human prefrontal cortex to metacognition, and how self-awareness and social cognition may share a core neurocomputational basis. He is the author of Know Thyself: The New Science of Self-Awareness.
In this episode, we focus on Know Thyself. We start by discussing what self-awareness is, its components, and the sorts of mental tasks associated with it. We discuss the evolutionary rationale for it. We talk about individual differences in self-awareness, and ask if it is possible to improve it. We discuss how self-awareness might interfere with performance, and if experts are good at explaining how they do things. We talk about how knowledge about metacognition might improve learning and decision-making. We discuss how a lack of metacognition correlates with more extreme political attitudes. We talk about how self-awareness can promote social cooperation. Finally, we discuss if we should delegate decisions to AI systems, their limitations, and if they could become self-aware.
Time Links:
Intro
What is self-awareness?
The evolution of self-awareness
Individual differences in self-awareness, and how to improve it
Self-awareness, expertise, and performance
Learning, and decision-making
Lack of metacognition and political extremism
Social cooperation
Self-awareness in AI
Follow Dr. Fleming’s work!
Follow Dr. Fleming’s work:
Faculty page: https://bit.ly/3sjYiKY
ResearchGate profile: https://bit.ly/3AGXWmc
Know Thyself: https://amzn.to/3tkl5YB
Twitter handle: @smfleming