Avery is an experience designer, creative technologist, writer, and storytelling coach. He works at the intersection of mind and brain, with a particular passion for movement and meditation.
Skills
Experience Design
Meditation & Meditative Psychotherapeutic Approaches
Unity Development
Your ideal research study
I would like to study the ways to which verbal habits introduce error into the self-reporting of phenomenology with freeform verbal descriptions. As a writer who often translates non-verbal internal experience into words, I’ve observed that sometimes my descriptions will drift away from actually describing internal experience; it’s as though my mind’s generative language model starts predicting what comes next (much like a large language model), rather than being constrained by the actual experience it’s trying to report. The design of the study would entail prompting participants, mid-description of an internal experience, to assess whether they are actually describing the experience. I would look at how various conditions, populations, and elicitation paradigms impact the perceived accuracy of phenomenological report.
What drew you to consciousness
I’ve been interested in experience for as long as I can remember. In recent years I’ve developed a meditation practice and used those tools to explore the details of my emotional life. It’s clear that there is rich patterning to conscious experience that’s yet to be well-documented; furthermore, there are many techniques for exploring consciousness from contemplative traditions which can inform basic consciousness science as well as therapeutic interventions.
Hobbies
Piano composition
Writing poetry
