Brendan
Bo
O'Connor

Bren is a cognitive scientist, scholar of imagination, and outsider artist. He is an associate professor at University at Albany SUNY where he directs the Imagination & Cognition Lab, using psychology, philosophy, and neuroscience to investigate the role of future thinking and imagination in empathy, effective altruism, equality, intergroup processes, and morality. He is a member of the Purpose Makerspace, a puppeteer and parade tech marshal with Processional Arts Workshop, the creator and director of the Lucid Dream Minigolf project funded by the New York State Council on the Arts and the Alliance of Resident Theatres New York, and a frequent collaborator of the MAP Lab. His work is visible in the scientific community through peer-reviewed research articles published in flagship journals (e.g., Psychological Science, PNAS, Cognition, Emotion, JPSP, Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, Trends in Cognitive Science, and Personality and Social Psychology Review).