Dr Daniel Yon

Dr Daniel Yon is an experimental psychologist, cognitive neuroscientist, author and Director of the Uncertainty Lab at Birkbeck, University of London. Research in his lab uses tools from psychology and neuroscience to study how the brain builds models of ourselves and the world around us to guide perception, action and belief.

After studying Psychology at Oxford, Daniel received his PhD from Birkbeck in 2018 and joined the Faculty there in 2021. He has held Visiting Fellowships at the Institute of Advanced Study, Paris and All Sous College, Oxford. In 2024 he was awarded the EPS Prize for distinguished and original contributions to experimental psychology and in 2026 he was awarded the APS Spence Award for transformative contributions to psychological science. He was written and broadcast about his research for a range of outlets – including BBC Radio 4, BBC Science, New Scientist and Scientific American – and in 2025 Penguin published his first book A Trick of the Mind: How the Brain Invents Your Reality.

How The Brain Invents Your Reality

How does your brain decide what it’s seeing, from the physical world or the physical world of other people? In his new book A Trick of the Mind, Daniel Yon argues that your brain is like a scientist: using past experiences to build theories of how the world works, and using these models to predict and make sense of it. Through this process, your brain constructs the reality that you live.

This idea has transformative implications. It radically reshapes how we think about perception, and explains how we come to make false judgements about other people, or form false beliefs about ourselves. In this talk, he will reveal how seeing your brain as a skullbound scientist revolutionises our understanding of mental illness and neurodiversity – and unearth how our brain’s paradigms can shift and change in an uncertain and unstable world.