Professor James Tresilian 

Professor of Psychology at the University of Warwick

Educated in the UK, JT spent a large part of his career working abroad. First in the Institute for Sport and Exercise Science at Arizona State University and then in the School of Human Movement Studies at the University of Queensland, Australia. For the last 15 years he has been Professor of Psychology at the University of Warwick, but likes to describe himself as a behavioural neuroscientist. In addition to his contributions to over one hundred scientific articles and chapters, he is author of a major tertiary level textbook (‘Sensorimotor Control & Learning: An Introduction to the Behavioral Neuroscience of Action’) and a popular science book, ‘How You Feel: A story of the mind told by the body’, on which his talk will be loosely based. These days he gets the most pleasure from goal keeping and despite his great age, still plays three full games a week.

A Path Less Travelled

Psychologists are interested in the mind. They endeavour to study it or heal it or measure it. They are not interested in the body, at least not in the vastly larger part thereof outwith the skull. Unfortunately, the mind is hidden deep within the head and can only be interrogated via responses made by the body. Refinements of brain imaging technology are sure to make direct communication with the mind possible one day. Perhaps that day is not far off, but while we wait, we will have to make do with keypresses and handle turns, vocalizations and sweaty palms. For today’s psychologists, these are like windows of the soul – portals to the mind within. The body is little more than an inconvenience and the psychologist’s goal is to choose responses that make the body’s contribution as small as possible so that it becomes, in effect, invisible. If you’re interested in the body, psychology is not for you; anatomy or physiology or sport and exercise science would be better bets. If all this seems OK, congratulations! Like most psychologists today, you are a dualist. Dualists come in variety of different shapes and sizes, and although they haven’t yet reached a consensus on what the mind is, they all agree on what it isn’t – it isn’t of the body and the body isn’t where you should be looking for it. And that is where they have all gone wrong. The body is where you should be looking. The mind isn’t something that resides inside our heads – thoughts, feelings, perceptions are not things that happen inside, they are things that we do and our bodies are part of the doing of them. This is what I will try to convince you of, to take a path less travelled.