JOSEPH FAUSEY, CLASS OF 2024
RESUME
Hi! My name is Joe, and I am a cognitive science major and English minor here at Dartmouth. I focus principally on attention-based and linguistic cognition—how those mechanisms develop, how the brain maintains and nurtures them, and how they interface with one another.
My father was in the Air Force, so I am “from” several places across the continental US. New Mexico, Oklahoma, Illinois, California, Virginia, and Florida are all states I have called home. My heart lives in Florida—the swamp state, with the bulk of my childhood friends and half of my extended family living there. I’ve lived there the longest, although even within the state we continued to change our scenery every few years. These days, I call Hanover my home; I have set up my own life here, and have finally wrested control of my geography from the grips of childhood circumstance. In my free time, I love to read, write, walk in nature, canoe on the Connecticut, and pursue superfluous academic interests, whether they be philosophical, psychological, or otherwise.
I have a particular (non-superfluous) interest in research on how the brain comprehends and transmits meaning. All human brains are wired for the creation of robust associative conceptual networks which underly our capacity for comprehension. This requires the complex integration and interpretation of a continuous stream of perceptual input and the automatic filtration of sensory noise from meaningful content in order to build a coherent understanding of the world. However, perhaps more impressive is the mind’s ability to project that learned information—to relay the semantic contents of one mind to another. This projection—language—allows for the social cooperation and technological innovation which maintains humanity’s position as the dominant species on the globe. How linguistic facilities, structures, and grammars interact with the brain’s capacity for deep structure stands at the center of my research interests, and guides my research ethos.
My other speciality within the cognitive sciences is psychophysics—specifically attention and working memory. I ask questions about how the brain’s low-level circuitry is able to process and interpret its environment. Particularly of interest to me is how the brain integrates differential streams of sensory information into a complex, interconnected whole. Understanding—consciousness—by necessity originates from sensory uptake, so in order to grasp how the mind is able to communicate a subjective interpretation of the world, it is critical to comprehend the substrate of sensory perception, and how the machinery shared by all humans is able to pass information upwards to higher-level, language-relevant areas of the brain. Attention builds our semantic maps—our internal representations—and working memory allows us to manipulate them. These truths illustrate the degree to which attention and working memory is integral to the brain’s capacity for language.
When not researching, I am writing. My favorite stories are those with worlds in and of themselves—those built upon other realities, other futures, and other pasts. I have a particular affinity for science fiction, and the works of authors ranging from H.G. Wells to Liu Cixin. My research interests inform my writing. The philosophy I’ve acquired across my studies stresses individual agency, and how the plight of individuality conflicts with the necessity of the common good. How much should one sacrifice for social function? What gets lost in the in-between, how much meaning is lost when I attempt to transmit an idea from my mind to yours? Questions like these, that lie in the realm of subjectivity, rather than objectivity—those of qualification, not quantification—are best explored through the creative medium, and writing provides a useful outlet for entertaining new ideas and viewpoints which aid in the processing of our complicated and often counter-intuitive world.
As an English minor, I’ve been able to develop and expand my writing horizons into a myriad of disciplines, all of which show glimpses of my underlying philosophy on life and the world. My portfolio includes both long-form and short-form fiction, as well as sketch-writing and non-fiction personal essay writing. Through these creative outlets, I am able to process and clarify my interiority, and project a version of myself I am comfortable with expressing to a wider audience, all the while developing a unique prosodic voice that I find fun to write and hopefully people will find enjoyable to read.