Jennifer Windt

Jennifer Windt is a senior research fellow at the Department of Philosophy and Monash Centre for Consciousness and Contemplative Studies at Monash University.

Through her research, funded by the Australian Research Council, she seeks to understand what our minds do when left to their own devices, for example when we fall asleep and dream, or when our thoughts and attention wander away from ongoing tasks and activities in the here and now. What do we think about and how does experience change when we dream or daydream? How well do we understand the fluctuations in kinds of mental states, but also between conscious and unconscious states in sleep and waking? And how does the ubiquity of spontaneous thoughts change our scientific understanding of sleep and wakefulness?

Jennifer is the author of Dreaming (MIT, 2015), which received the 2018 William James Prize awarded by the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness. She promotes independent, high-quality open access publications that are free of charge for both readers and authors. She co-edited the open access collection Open MIND  (also published by MIT in 2016), and is co-founder and editor-in-chief of the open access journal Philosophy and the Mind Sciences.