On the morning of December 19, 2025, the 139th session of the Gao Juefu Psychology Lecture was held in Room 108 of the School of Psychology at Nanjing Normal University. The lecture was delivered by Professor Georg Northoff, who is the Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, Chief Scientist of Psychology, Brain Imaging, and Neuroethics at the University of Ottawa, and Chair of the Canadian Centre for Mind Research. His presentation was titled “Cognitive Dynamics: Insights from the Temporal Dimension.” Organized by the School of Psychology at Nanjing Normal University, the lecture was chaired by Associate Professor Ma Yuanxiao. Attendees included Professor Hu Chuanpeng, Professor Gao Chuanji, and graduate students from the school.

 

Prior to the lecture, Associate Professor Ma Yuanxiao provided a brief introduction to Professor Georg Northoff. Professor Northoff primarily employs neuroimaging techniques such as fMRI, EEG, and MEG to integrate neuroscience, psychology, psychiatry, and philosophy to explore the neural and psychological mechanisms underlying self, consciousness, and mental disorders. He has conducted extensive experimental research on the temporal characteristics of neural activity. Professor Northoff has published over 900 academic papers in internationally renowned SCI journals including Nature Neuroscience, Neuron, and PNAS, authored more than 20 monographs, and received over 43,000 citations.

 

This lecture focuses on spatiotemporal neuroscience, using the “iceberg model” to illustrate the relationship between brain cognition (surface layer) and deeper mechanisms such as dynamics and temporal scales. It explores four key dimensions: attention, thought, memory, and consciousness. Centered on the theme of “dynamics/temporal scales,” it emphasizes that understanding attention and memory should not rely solely on static indicators like average reaction times or average brain activation. Instead, attention should be paid to the fluctuating structures of behavior and neural signals within time series. Professor Georg Northoff noted that inter-trial fluctuations in reaction times may reflect genuine shifts in cognitive states. Different meditation practices correspond to distinct ranges of attentional allocation, potentially revealing quantifiable “temporal windows” in the brain.

 

At the mechanistic level, Professor Northoff highlighted “phase dynamics”: beyond power/amplitude, temporal variations in phase and frequency must be examined. Using sustained attention tasks and thought probes, research revealed that frequency-slip in alpha bands distinguishes focused from distracted states, whereas amplitude alone shows no significant differences. The lecture concluded by focusing on memory processing, introducing intrinsic timescales and autocorrelation windows. It highlighted that the encoding phase may exhibit longer time windows due to the need for cross-temporal information integration, correlating with subsequent retrieval performance. Computational modeling further suggests that higher brain regions exhibit longer time windows, aiding in explaining the temporal integration mechanisms of perception and memory.

 

 

Additionally, Professor Georg Northoff emphasized that depression transcends the category of mood disorders, with its core pathological mechanism manifesting as a systemic slowing of brain information processing speed and cognitive rhythms—a phenomenon he defined as a “speed disorder.” This perspective offers a novel theoretical dimension for understanding the pathology of depression and developing clinical intervention strategies. During the interactive session, Professor Georg Northoff engaged in discussion with Professors Gao Chuanji and Hu Chuanpeng, as well as several graduate students from the school, addressing questions regarding research methodologies and the neural mechanisms of meditation. The lecture concluded successfully amidst lively discussion.