Professor Joydeep Bhattacharya

Staff details

Joy studies complex human behaviour including music, language, aesthetics, decision making, flow and creativity.

I am a Professor of Psychology. Before joining Goldsmiths, I was associated with Max Planck Institute (Germany), Austrian Academy of Sciences (Austria), and California Institute of Technology (USA). I am a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and the Association for Psychological Science.

I have a wide-ranging research interest, but specifically, over the last twenty years, I have been investigating the neural mechanisms of creative cognition, including several forms of artistic activities (music cognition, visual artistry), and the elusive Aha! moment. I am equally fascinated by the challenges of understanding ever-changing brainwaves and the spectrum of complex behaviour that makes us human.

Academic qualifications

  • PhD (Thesis: In search of regularity in irregular, complex time series) 2000

Teaching and supervision

I supervise projects on various topics related to creativity, aesthetics, music cognition, decision-making, problem-solving, personality and individual differences, and flow.

Research interests

My main themes of research relate to the study of complex cognition including creativity, music perception, emotion, and flow. I am a member of our Cognition and Neuroscience Research Group. I have published more than 150 articles on the following topics (in alphabetical order):

Chaos theory
Causality
Creativity
Decision making
Emotion
Flow experience
Individual differences
Music perception and neuroscience of music cognition
Neuroimaging (EEG, MEG, fMRI)
Brain network
Noninvasive brain stimulation
Nonlinear time series analysis

Publications and research outputs

Book

Pereda, Ernesto; Gonzalez, Julian; Bhattacharya, Joydeep and Rial, Ruben. 2010. Nonlinear Analysis of Biomedical Data. Tenerife, Spain: University of La Laguna Press. ISBN 978-84-7756-806-3

Book Section

Andrade, Paulo E. and Bhattacharya, Joydeep. 2018. Not Cure But Heal: Music and Medicine. In: Albert Cheung-Hoi Yu and Lina Li, eds. Systems Neuroscience. 21 Cham, Switzerland: Springer, pp. 283-307. ISBN 9783319945910

Rahman, Shama and Bhattacharya, Joydeep. 2016. Neurocognitive Aspects of Musical Improvisation and Performance. In: Giovanni Emanuele Corazza and Sergio Agnoli, eds. Multidisciplinary Contributions to the Science of Creative Thinking. Singapore: Springer, pp. 261-279. ISBN 978-981-287-617-1

Marin, Manuela M. and Bhattacharya, Joydeep. 2010. Music Induced Emotions: Some Current Issues and Cross-Modal Comparisons. In: Joao Hermida and Mariana Ferreo, eds. Music Education. Hauppauge, NY: Nova Science Publishers, pp. 1-38. ISBN 978-1-60876-655-0

Article

Barik, Kasturi; Dey, Spandan; Watanabe, Katsumi; Hirosawa, Tetsu; Yoshimura, Yuki; Kikuchi, Mitsuru; Bhattacharya, Joydeep and Saha, Goutam. 2024. Self-Supervised Machine Learning Approach for Autism Detection in Young Children using MEG Signal. Biomedical Signal Processing and Control, 98, 106671. ISSN 1746-8094

Zioga, Ioanna; Harrison, Peter M. C.; Pearce, Marcus T.; Bhattacharya, Joydeep and Luft, Caroline Di Bernardi. 2024. The association between liking, learning and creativity in music. Scientific Reports, 14, 19048. ISSN 2045-2322

Chaudhuri, Soma; Pickering, Alan and Bhattacharya, Joydeep. 2024. Evaluating poetry: Navigating the divide between aesthetical and creativity judgments. Journal of Creative Behavior, ISSN 0022-0175

Conference or Workshop Item

Cameron, Daniel; Lindsen, Job P.; Pearce, Marcus; Wiggins, Geraint; Potter, Keith and Bhattacharya, Joydeep. 2012. 'Entrainment of Premotor Cortex Activity by Ambiguity in Musical Metre'. In: Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition and the 8th Triennial Conference of the European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music. Thessaloniki, Greece July 23-28.

Collaboration with non-academic partners

I have received several consultancy research grants funded by private companies/organizations.