Ana Chkhaidze

I study what our thoughts are made of. Humans differ in how they experience their own thoughts. Some think they hear sentences in their “mind's ear” (verbalizers), others report seeing thoughts in their “mind’s eye” (visualizers), while some struggle to find the words to describe their inner world. Can we trust these subjective judgments? I am looking for neural fingerprints of these phenomenal differences. Internal representations allow us to travel through time and space, remember and recall memories, plan the future, solve problems, and perform a wide range of other cognitive tasks. Accounting for individual phenomenal, and physiological differences in types of internal representations people build has the potential to reshape our understanding of a host of functions. I am using behavioral, EEG, and fMRI and paradigms to tackle these question.