The Author

My name is Micah Allen. When people ask me where are you from I typically say Florida. This is not really true, but it simplifies things a bit. The complete story is somewhat longer and more confusing; I was born in Talladega, Alabama (if you’re not first, you’re last!) where I lived until the age of 4, at which time I moved to Bermuda to live with my grandmother. After Bermuda I lived in Florida for about 15 years, and also moved around to places like Dallas and San Francisco.

At graduation I didn’t have any particular academic interests or career goals to speak of, except for a recently discovered fascination with Freudian and behavioral psychology. I enrolled as a psychology student at the University of Central Florida, and spent the next four years developing a love affair with neuropsychology and neurobiology. Since then I’ve worked in labs investigating the neuroscience of schizophrenia, schwaan cell tumors, and team cognition and cognitive science.

Near the end of my bachelors, I took my first philosophy of mind and cognitive science courses and started work on an honors thesis chaired by Shaun Gallagher. Researching narrative and psychopathology for this project really pulled me away from neuroscience, and for the first time I began to seriously consider philosophical perspectives on psychology.

This shift ultimately resulted in attending the University of Hertfordshire (a UK uni) for an MA in Philosophy and Phenomenology. My masters thesis was a synthesis of analytic work on intention, cognitive science, and phenomenological theories of the sense of agency. Near the end of my MA I was accepted into a Cognitive Neuroscience PhD program at Århus University, where I research plasticity and social interaction with my colleagues at the Interacting Minds social cognitive neuroscience laboratory. In my extremely limited spare time I enjoy cooking, reading sci-fi and comic books, playing video games, and hanging out with my girlfriend.

Links:

http://www.cfin.au.dk/menu799-en

http://au.academia.edu/MicahAllen

http://twitter.com/neuroconscience

http://www.google.com/profiles/UCFMicah