Catherine Tallon-Baudry
LNC2, Ecole Normale Supérieure, Inserm, Paris
Title
Interoception & Cognition
Biosketch
Catherine Tallon-Baudry is a CNRS senior scientist in Cognitive Neuroscience at Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. She earned her PhD in Neuroscience in Lyon, France in 1997, showing the existence of gamma-band oscillations in humans and their role in visual cognition, a line of research she further developed as a Marie-Curie post-doctoral fellow in Bremen, Germany, using ECoG recordings in awake monkeys. She obtained a Cnrs tenure position and moved to to Hospital Pitié-Salpêtrière in Paris to create her own research group, where she unexpectedly found a double-dissociation at the neural level between spatial attention and visual consciousness. This led her to question the view of consciousness as a high-level cognitive function. To concentrate on subjective experience, she moved to the Department of Cognitive Sciences at Ecole Normale Supérieure to create a new research group developing and testing the neural subjective frame hypothesis, which posits that the first-person perspective inherent to subjective experience and the minimal self are rooted in visceral signals, particularly from the heart and the stomach. These rhythmic, self-generated signals may provide a temporal scaffold that coordinates neural activity across different brain regions, facilitating the integration of disparate sensory and cognitive processes into a unified, self-centered experience.