Jonathan Schooler

Photo of Jonathan Schooler
Psychological & Brain Sciences

Specialization

 

Professor, Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences; Director, Center for Mindfulness and Human Potential

Bio

Jonathan Schooler is a professor in the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences at UC Santa Barbara and he directs the university's Center for Mindfulness & Human Potential. He joined the faculty at UC Santa Barbara in 2007. A fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, he was also an Osher Fellow at the Exploratorium Science Museum in San Francisco. His work has been supported by the National Institute of Mental Health, Unilever Corporation, Center for Consciousness Studies, Office of Educational Research, Canada Foundation for Innovation, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, Canadian Institute for Health Research, the Bial Foundation, and the Bower Foundation. He is on the editorial boards of the journals Consciousness and Cognition and Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience. Jonathan is the author or co-author of more than one hundred and fifty papers published in scientific journals or edited volumes and was the editor (with J.C. Cohen) of the book Scientific Approaches to Consciousness, which was published in 1997 by Lawrence Erlbaum.  Prior to UC Santa Barbara, Jonathan was a professor of psychology, Canada Research Chair in Social Cognitive Science, and a senior investigator at the University of British Columbia's Brain Research Centre.  Before that he was an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Pittsburgh and a research scientist at Pittsburgh's Learning Research and Development Center. He earned his B.A. at Hamilton College and his Ph.D. at the University of Washington.

Research

consciousness; mind-wandering; creativity; memory; relationship between language and thought, problem-solving, and decision-making; free will; the mind-body problem; experience sampling research methods

Publications

Franklin, M. S., Mrazek, M. D., Anderson, C. L., Johnston, C., Smallwood, J., Kingstone, A., & Schooler, J. W.. (2014). Tracking Distraction The Relationship Between Mind-Wandering, Meta-Awareness, and ADHD Symptomatology. Journal of attention disorders, 1087054714543494.

Schooler, J. (2015). Bridging the Objective/Subjective Divide - Towards a Meta-Perspective of Science and Experience. In T. Metzinger & J. M. Windt (Eds). Open MIND: 34(T). Frankfurt am Main: MIND Group.

Smallwood, J., & Schooler, J. W.. (2015). The science of mind wandering: empirically navigating the stream of consciousness. Annual review of psychology, 66, 487–518.