Professor
Hyeongdong Park
- Brain-body interactions
- Perceptual consciousness
- Self-consciousness
- Voluntary action
- Meditation
- Neurophilosophy
-
Education
Ph.D. in The Doctoral School of Brain-Cognition-Behaviour, Pierre and Marie Curie University (2014)
-
Location
W13, 506
- Phone
-
Laboratory
Brain-Body Interactions and Consciousness Lab
Biosketch
- I am a cognitive neuroscientist investigating neural mechanisms of consciousness. I am currently an assistant professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at KAIST.
- I received my Ph.D from The Doctoral School of Brain-Cognition-Behaviour at Pierre and Marie Curie University (UPMC), France in 2014, under supervision of Dr. Catherine Tallon-Baudry. Then I moved to Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland and worked as a post-doc, with Prof. Olaf Blanke, until 2020. Then, I worked as an associate professor at Taipei Medical University in Taiwan until July 2023.
- Our lab investigates how interactions between the brain and body (e.g., heart, lung, stomach) play functional roles in human conscious experiences, including perceptual awareness, bodily self-consciousness, and voluntary action. Here at KAIST, we further aim at applying and extending previous basic research on brain-body interactions to 1) clinical (e.g., mental disorders associated with consciousness and emotion), 2) industrial contexts (e.g., VR-based rehabilitation), and 3) other types of conscious experiences (e.g., meditation, sense of agency, metacognition).
- Our final aim is solving The Hard Problem of Consciousness (i.e., explaining why and how subjective conscious experience can arise from the physical brain). For that we will use interdisciplinary approaches including neuroscientific, psychological, engineering, and philosophical methods.
Key Papers
- Park, H.-D.*, Barnoud, C., Trang, H., Kannape, O., Schaller, K., Blanke, O.* (2020) Breathing is coupled with voluntary action and the cortical readiness potential. Nature Communications, 11: 289.
- Park, H.-D.*, Blanke, O. (2019) Heartbeat-evoked cortical responses: Underlying mechanisms, functional roles and methodological considerations. NeuroImage, 197: 502-511.
- Park, H.-D.*, Blanke, O*. (2019) Coupling inner and outer body for self-consciousness. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 23(5): 377-388.
- Park, H.-D.*, Bernasconi, F., Salomon, R., Tallon-Baudry, C., Spinelli, L., Seeck, M., Schaller, K., Blanke, O. (2018) Neural sources and underlying mechanisms of neural responses to heartbeats, and their role in bodily self-consciousness: an intracranial EEG study. Cerebral Cortex, 28(7), 2351-2364.
- Park, H.-D., Bernasconi, F., Bello-Ruiz, J., Pfeiffer, C., Salomon, R., Blanke, O.* (2016) Transient modulations of neural responses to heartbeats covary with bodily self-consciousness. Journal of Neuroscience, 36(32), 8453-8460.
- Park, H.-D., Correia, S., Ducorps, A., Tallon-Baudry, C.* (2014) Spontaneous fluctuations in neural responses to heartbeats predict visual detection. Nature Neuroscience, 17, 612-618.
Courses
- The computer and the mind
- Brain-body interactions and embodied cognition
- Philosophical issues in brain and cognitive sciences