Trial lecture
Designated topic:?To be announced.?
Time and place: Friday 13 February, 13.15-14.00 PM, Harald Schjeldrups hus, Forsamlingssalen
Dissertation summary
When we encounter something completely unfamiliar, our bodies know what to do before our minds catch up. This is the core observation of my doctoral research at the University of Oslo, where participants explored an abstract virtual reality artwork – a digital environment deliberately stripped of recognisable features and context. The study asked: How do we cope when nothing around us makes sense? Participants wore Virtual Reality headsets and navigated Mutator VR Vortex (Latham, Todd, Putnam & Todd), a generative artwork full of abstract objects. Afterwards, they described their experiences in long, detailed interviews. The results reveal a powerful, instinctive drive at the core of human perception. Participants reported feeling pulled to explore even before they could identify what they were looking at. They reached out, moved closer, and tested what they could do – all without conscious planning. Through these bodily actions, they built a sense of who they were in this new place. Their identity emerged through doing. This "curiosity drive" operates below conscious awareness. It pushes us to engage with unfamiliar situations before we understand them. Rather than first thinking and then acting, we act our way into understanding – and into a sense of self. These findings contribute to foundational theories of perception in philosophy and cognitive science. They show how bodily sensitivity guides what was worth attending to, while the consequences of action revealed what mattered. This provides evidence for what is called the "minimal self" – the basic sense of being someone who experiences, prior to any story we tell about ourselves
Evaluation committee
- Dr Desiree Foerster, University of Chicago
- Dr Joel Krueger, University of Exeter
- Professor Alexander Refsum Jensenius, University of Oslo
Chair of the defence
Supervisors
- Professor Nanette Nielsen, University of Oslo
- Dr Remy Haswell-Martin, University of West London.