Ep. 534 - Professor John Duncan - a pioneer of modern cognitive neuroscience
My Time Capsule
Cast Off Productions
4.8 • 817 Ratings
🗓️ 12 October 2025
⏱️ 98 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Professor John Duncan is among the pioneers of modern cognitive neuroscience. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2008 and a Fellow of the British Academy in 2009. In 2012, he was awarded the Heineken Prize for Cognitive Science by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. After completing his education at the University of Oxford in 1976, Duncan worked for two years with Michael Posner at the University of Oregon, and then worked at the Medical Research Council (MRC). As of 2018, he is Programme Leader at the MRC's Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge; he is also a Professorial Research Fellow in the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of St John's College, Oxford. His latest book, The Animal and the Thinker: Instinct, Reason and the Dance of Our Divided Selves, is out now.
Professor John Duncan is our guest in episode 534 of My Time Capsule and chats to Michael Fenton Stevens about the five things he'd like to put in a time capsule; four he’d like to preserve and one he’d like to bury and never have to think about again .
Buy John ducat’s latest book, The Animal and the Thinker, here - https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/461766/the-animal-and-the-thinker-by-duncan-john/9780753560921
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Produced and edited by John Fenton-Stevens for Cast Off Productions .
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Transcript
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| 1:12.3 | Hello, welcome to another episode of My Time Capsule. |
| 1:30.1 | I'm Mike Fenton-Stevens, and my Time Capsule is a podcast where people tell me five things from their life they wish they had in a time capsule, four things they love, and one thing they'd like to bury and forget. |
| 1:42.4 | My guest in this episode is the author and academic |
| 1:45.7 | Professor John Duncan. Now, John is one of the pioneers of modern cognitive neuroscience. |
| 1:52.1 | No, don't turn off, he's a fascinating man. He's worked for more than 40 years on the puzzles |
| 1:57.0 | of mind and brain, with joint appointments at the universities of Cambridge and Oxford. |
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