The Science of Self Awareness feat. Steve Fleming

The notion of self awareness has been at the heart of philosophy for millenia. Now it’s the subject of research by neuroscientists, and is the focus of research at Steven Fleming’s lab, where he asks: what supports the remarkable capacity for human self-awareness? 

To address this question, Steve and his team combine experimental and theoretical approaches to understanding how people become self-aware of aspects of their cognition and behaviour, and why such awareness is often impaired by psychiatric and neurological disorders. 

Steve Fleming is a Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience and Sir Henry Dale Wellcome Trust/Royal Society Fellow at the Department of Experimental Psychology, Principal Investigator at the Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging, and Group Leader at the Max Planck-UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research. His latest book is devoted to this work, titled “Know Thyself: The Science of Self-Awareness.”

He joins Greg for an episode on metacognition. They discuss mind reading, optimal self-awareness, confidence in your own knowledge, and learning to develop metacognition.

Episode Quotes:

Sports coaches aren't usually the best players, but that's not their role anyway

The coach then can provide the external perspective. So it's not necessarily the coach needs to have good metacognition themselves, although that might well be true as well. It's more that they are in a sense, providing this surrogate, external self-awareness for the players performance.

Confidence & knowledge

Confidence is aligned with some objective notion of accuracy. But if I walk around thinking I know everything about the economy, I don't need to read the newspaper to find out how that works and so on. Then I've got a strong confidence in my model of how the economy works and maybe I then don't go and seek out information and I try and spout my views to everybody who will listen. And that's a case where my confidence has been decoupled from the underlying knowledge base, the accuracy. And that might happen for various reasons, but we do think, and we've done some experiments on this showing that confidence acts as this metacontroller to weigh how sensitive you are to new evidence. 

The emerging study of metacognition

There's this long intellectual tradition, but it was only relatively recently that there seems to be the tools starting to emerge in psychology labs that could gain an empirical foothold on how to measure and study self-awareness in simple tasks. And that's what psychologists often referred to as metacognition or thinking about thinking.

Show Links:

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at University College London
• Professional Profile at Psychology Today
• Professional Profile at the MetaLab
• Steve Fleming on Twitter

His Work:

• Steve Fleming on Google Scholar
• Know Thyself: The Science of Self-Awareness