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4Consciousness in InfantsIn Susan Schneider & Max Velmans (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness, Wiley. 2017.We review evidence that, from birth, infants have purposeful consciousness of rhythmic whole‐body movement, with multi‐modal perception of objects outside their body, and self‐related emotional appraisal of experiences. Newborns also exhibit a special human awareness of the vitality of company in actions and feelings, and a capacity to use imitation of action signs for dialogic exchange of intentions. These abilities are prepared by specific systems of body and brain that develop before birth. T…Read more
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10Consciousness generates agent actionBehavioral and Brain Sciences 45. 2022.Consciousness directs the actions of the agent for its own purposive gains. It re-organises a stimulus-response linear causality to deliver generative, creative agent action that evaluates the subsequent experience prospectively. This inversion of causality affords special properties of control that are not accounted for in integrated information theory, which is predicated on a linear, deterministic cause-effect model. IIT remains an incomplete, abstract, and disembodied theory without explanat…Read more
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14Being misunderstood in autism: The role of motor disruption in expressive communication, implications for satisfying social relationsBehavioral and Brain Sciences 42. 2019.Jaswal & Akhtar's outstanding target article identifies the necessary social nature of the human mind, even in autism. We agree with the authors and present significant contributory origins of this autistic isolation in disruption of purposeful movement made social from infancy. Timing differences in expression can be misunderstood in embodied engagement, and social intention misread. Sensitive relations can repair this.
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6The Spiritual Nature of the Infant Self: An Imaginative Actor in Relations of AffectionJournal of Consciousness Studies 23 (1-2): 258-282. 2016.A newborn infant displays self-other-awareness, searching in its own imaginative space-time of body movement for exciting sights and sounds, and ready to engage impulses and emotions in intimacy with other persons. Soon rhythmic proto- conversations and games invent propositional narratives of aliveness with joyful 'communicative musicality'. By monitoring the life of this inborn per-sonality, and its distress when betrayed, we learn how a self-confident human mind develops an other-aware 'Me', …Read more
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25The Human Nature of MusicFrontiers in Psychology 9. 2018.Music is at the centre of what it means to be human – it is the sounds of human bodies and minds moving in creative, story-making ways. We argue that music comes from the way in which knowing bodies (Merleau-Ponty) prospectively explore the environment using habitual 'patterns of action' which we have identified as our innate ‘communicative musicality’. To support our argument, we present short case studies of infant interactions using micro analyses of video and audio recordings to show the tim…Read more
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4Why theories will differIn J. Zlatev, T. Racine, C. Sinha & E. Itkonen (eds.), The Shared Mind: Perspectives on Intersubjectivity, John Benjamins. pp. 12. 2008.
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48Consciousness in infantsIn Max Velmans & Susan Schneider (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness, Blackwell. pp. 41--57. 2007.
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22Predispositions to cultural learning in young infantsBehavioral and Brain Sciences 16 (3): 534-535. 1993.
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47Emotions of human infants and mothers and development of the brainBehavioral and Brain Sciences 15 (3): 524-525. 1992.
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Subtle is the Lord: The relationship between consciousness, the unconscious, and the executive control network (ECN) of the brainAnnual of Psychoanalysis 28 105-125. 2000.
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9Shared minds and the science of fictionIn J. Zlatev, T. Racine, C. Sinha & E. Itkonen (eds.), The Shared Mind: Perspectives on Intersubjectivity, John Benjamins. pp. 12. 2008.
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5Communication and Cooperation in Early Infancy: A Description of primary IntersubjectivityIn M. Bullowa (ed.), Before Speech: The beginning of Human Communication, Cambridge University Press. 1979.
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Functional relations of disconnected hemispheres with the brain stem, and with each other: monkey and manIn Marcel Kinsbourne & W. Smith (eds.), Hemispheric Disconnection and Cerebral Function, Charles C. pp. 187--207. 1974.
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1Analysis of central activities that generate and regulate consciousness in commissurotomy patientsIn S. J. Dimond & J. Graham Beaumont (eds.), Hemisphere Function in the Human Brain, Elek. 1974.
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22The tasks of consciousness: How could the brain do them?In Brain and Mind, (ciba Foundation Symposium 69). 1979.
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3Consciousness in infantsIn Max Velmans & Susan Schneider (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness, Blackwell. 2007.
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Infancy, mind inIn Richard Langton Gregory (ed.), The Oxford companion to the mind, Oxford University Press. pp. 455--464. 1987.
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University of EdinburghRegular Faculty