114: Steve Fleming: Lab culture, learning as a PI, and the allure of cognitive neuroscience

May 26, 2025

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Steve Fleming is a professor in psychology at University College London. I invited Steve to talk about his work on meta-cognition, but we ended up spending the entire episode talking about lab culture, starting a lab, applying for funding, Steve's background in music, and what drew him to do cognitive neuroscience. There's even a tiny discussion about consciousness research at the end.

BJKS Podcast is a podcast about neuroscience, psychology, and anything vaguely related, hosted by Benjamin James Kuper-Smith.

Support the show: https://geni.us/bjks-patreon

Timestamps

0:00:00: Steve ran his lab in London from Croatia for a few years

0:23:57: Lessons as a PI: students and postdocs are adults and will figure it out

0:28:45: Learning more skills as a postdoc vs. starting a lab

0:41:13: Contacting departments to apply for grants

0:52:19: Steve's background in music

1:07:13: What drew Steve to cognitive science? A brief discussion of the future of consciousness research

1:27:23: A book or paper more people should read

1:33:02: Something Steve wishes he'd learnt sooner

1:38:16: Advice for PhD students/postdocs

Podcast links

Website: https://geni.us/bjks-pod
BlueSky: https://geni.us/pod-bsky

Steve's links

Website: https://geni.us/sfleming-web
Google Scholar: https://geni.us/fleming-scholar
BlueSky: https://geni.us/fleming-bsky

Ben's links

Website: https://geni.us/bjks-web
Google Scholar: https://geni.us/bjks-scholar
BlueSky: https://geni.us/bjks-bsky

References and links

FIL at UCL: https://www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/

ERC Starting Grant: https://erc.europa.eu/apply-grant/starting-grant

Wellcome Trust Early-Career Award (without strict time restrictions): https://wellcome.org/research-funding/schemes/wellcome-early-career-awards

Example paper by Josh Mcdermott on music: McDermott, Schultz, Undurraga & Godoy (2016). Indifference to dissonance in native Amazonians reveals cultural variation in music perception. Nature.

Carter (2002). Consciousness.

Chalmers (1995). Facing up to the problem of consciousness. Journal of consciousness studies.

Dehaene, Al Roumi, Lakretz, Planton & Sablé-Meyer (2022). Symbols and mental programs: a hypothesis about human singularity. Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

Isaacson (2021). The code breaker.

Marr (1982). Vision: A computational investigation into the human representation and processing of visual information.

Pinker (1997). How the mind works.

Tononi (2004). An information integration theory of consciousness. BMC neuroscience.