Zoltan Dienes

Email: dienes@sussex.ac.uk
Phone: +44 1273 678550
Fax: +44 1273 678058

Teaching

I organize Conscious and Unconscious Mental Processes, a final year option course; Philosophy of Psychology, a final year core course; and Philosophy of Science, a masters level course. I am Director of Taught Programmes and Deputy Head of School.

Research publications

I am interested in the distinction between conscious and unconscious mental states, particularly knowledge, but also intentions. Much of the knowledge we acquire for dealing with the world appears to be unconscious. For example, we can use the rules of grammar to comprehend and produce grammatical utterances within a fraction of a second, yet we cannot describe more than a few rules of grammar. We can learn not only to use certain linguistic structures, but also to appreciate certain styles of music, to obey cultural rules, or to gain perceptual motor mastery of a domain without consciously knowing the underlying regularities. How is such knowledge acquired? By what  methods can we know whether knowledge is conscious or unconscious? What type of structures can be learnt unconsciously? How can such learning be computationally modelled? In addition, I am interested in hypnosis, a way of acting which I argue is intentional but the person is strategically unaware of those intentions. I have recently started looking at the cosncious and uncosncious determinants of sexual fantasy content.