Guillaume Thierry

I am passionate about the human mind and how it makes sense of the world around us. My research is devoted to understanding how we form concepts, consciously or unconsciously, how we manipulate them, through language or nonverbally, how we learn, remember, forget, and imagine. In my applied work, I strive to inspire individuals to attain higher state of awareness of the world and of themselves. I share real stories and construct fictional ones to entice the imagination of others and invite everyone along on the path to higher levels of insight, understanding, and joy. Specifically, I use experimental psychology and electroencephalography to study language comprehension in the auditory and visual modalities, and mainly the processing of meaning by the human brain. I have investigated a range of themes, such as verbal/non-verbal dissociations, visual object recognition, colour perception, functional cerebral asymmetry, language-emotion interactions, language development, developmental dyslexia, and bilingualism. Since 2005, I have received funding form the BBSRC, the ESRC, the AHRC, the European Research Council, and the British Academy to investigate the integration of meaning in infants and adults at lexical, syntactic, and conceptual levels, using behavioural measurements, event-related brain potentials, eye-tracking and functional neuroimaging, looking at differences between sensory modalities, different languages in bilinguals, and coding system (verbal / nonverbal). Today I focus mainly on linguistic relativity and the philosophical question of mental freedom.