Michael Pitts is professor of psychology at Reed College. His research examines the neural basis of perception, attention and consciousness from a cognitive neuroscience perspective. Much of his recent work has focused on developing “no report” experiments (with EEG, fMRI, MEG, and iEEG measures) to isolate neural signals associated with conscious perception from cognitive processes needed to report what one is conscious of.
Pitts earned his B.A. in psychology at the University of New Hampshire in 2001 and his Ph.D. in psychology at Colorado State University in 2007, followed by four years of postdoctoral studies in neuroscience at the University of California, San Diego. Over the past seven years, he has been co-leading the COGITATE Consortium, a large international “adversarial collaboration” aimed at testing competing neuroscientific theories of consciousness.