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This session will be delivered through the medium of English.
Speaker
Guillaume Thierry (Staff)
Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience Bangor University
How does the human brain turn sounds, symbols, and experiences into meaningful thought? Guillaume Thierry is dedicated to exploring this profound question. Over the past twenty years, he has studied how we process and understand language across both auditory and visual modalities, with a particular focus on how the brain accesses and integrates meaning, in one, two or more languages. Guillaume’s work spans a wide range of topics, from how verbal and non-verbal communication differ to the effects of bilingualism on the the way we think. He has investigated areas such as visual object recognition, colour perception, language-emotion interactions, and language development in both children and adults. Using neuroscientific methods, such as electroencephalography (EEG), eye-tracking, and neuroimaging, Guillaume examines how the brain constructs meaningful representations of the world. Supported by funding from organisations such as the European Research Council, the British Academy, and the Polish Academy of Science, his research probes how meaning emerges at lexical, syntactic, and conceptual levels, and how this process varies across languages, sensory modalities, and forms of communication. Over the past decade, his focus has turned to linguistic relativity (the idea that the languages we speak might shape how we think) and interactive communication. Such questions, along with the broader philosophical challenge of understanding mental freedom, lies at the heart of Guillaume’s work, bridging the disciplines of psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy.