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Dr Jonny Smallwood wins €1.8M European Research Council grant

Posted on 4 March 2015

Jonny’s project, entitled “Not all minds that wander are lost”, will explore the mechanisms that support our capacity to generate conscious thoughts.

Dr Jonny Smallwood has secured a €1.8M research grant from the European Research Council lasting 4.5 years. Jonny’s project, entitled “Not all minds that wander are lost”, will explore the mechanisms that support our capacity to generate conscious thoughts. Jonny is interested in mechanisms linking cognition and brain activity (neurocognition). He will use this grant to investigate the conscious thoughts that don’t depend on information or input from the environment. These types of thoughts are experienced daily by people as mind-wandering and daydreaming and a key part of the research is to identify how this universal experience leads to positive outcomes such as creative thought but also less useful outcomes like rumination and worry.