An array of illustrated postcards on a table. The central one is purple and has the words 'ReaderBank'
What kind of reader are you? On #WorldBookDay, take a deep dive into the mysteries of the reading imagination with @thereaderbank.bsky.social
👉 readerbank.org
🧵
This is in line with models of intrusive thoughts, which argue sleep loss gives rise to impaired inhibitory control, attenuating the suppression of unwanted thoughts. This may extend to intrusive cognitions - hallucinations - where intentional inhibition and intrusion suppression are also impaired.
Very happy to say my sleep deprivation study from my PhD has been published in the Journal of Sleep Research. Specifically, we found that sleep deprivation may impair the inhibition of irrelevant memories from working memory, which is reversed after recovery sleep.
More to say on this next week when a sister PhD paper will be available!
So there's the lore drop - I hope to be more than just an academic fly-on-the-wall from this point and actually share some stuff coming up in the new year. 😊
And I get to do all of this with the best people! I feel so privileged to learn for a living, and grateful for all the opportunities with such wonderful and supportive folk.
Interdisciplinary work is fun, and I’ve been lucky enough to join the team in taking ReaderBank from Edinburgh to Jaipur and back, tell stories on stage, and present to lots of cool groups of people, like the lovely people at Wellcome, ICHR, and the NHS.
Since my viva, I’ve been working @durhamimh.bsky.social with @aldersonday.bsky.social to create ReaderBank - an interdisciplinary project looking into reading, the imagination, and mental health along in collaboration with Edinburgh International Book Festival.
readerbank.org
I did some cool stuff like attending a Sleep School over in São Paulo, Brazil, where I learned a lot about chronobiology and circadian rhythms. I also broke my hand AND accidentally started a two hour Open Science debate among the ~100 people attending but they’re stories for another time.
One of these upcoming papers comes from a sleep deprivation project I did with the Northumbria Centre for Sleep Research looking at the effects of acute sleep loss on cognitive control mechanisms associated with cognitive models of hallucinations.
My PhD thesis was 'Exploring the association between hallucinations, sleep, and cognitive control' supervised by @petermoseley.bsky.social, Jason Ellis, and @davidesmailes.bsky.social. Loved this experience and will be sharing some in press articles soon!
During this time, I got involved in some amazing qualitative projects around wellbeing and mental health systems. For my undergrad dissertation, I investigated young adults’ experiences of waiting lists in mental health care.
journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...
I'm a research psychologist, and completed my education at Northumbria University in 2024. I was a demonstrator during my postgrad degrees teaching theory, qual and quant methods, and gaining my FHEA.
Firstly, hi, I’m Georgia. I like taking photos, climbing hills and walls, running and walking long distances, and trying not to kill my houseplants. I’m interested in empirically and phenomenologically exploring mental imagery, cognitive control, sleep, and hallucinations.
I deleted X a long while ago, yet I've put off hard launching a BlueSky for over a year. It's sort of sad seeing all my documented efforts as a student etc lost to the void that was Twitter.
And so, because I'm stickler for chronology, I thought I'd post a lil synopsis of the last few years here!
