Who are we

The relationship between the body, the brain and the mind is complex and magnificent, which is why lots of people are investigating it. This website focuses on attempts to better understand the way the body, brain and mind interact. The lead scientist, Dr Lorimer Moseley, is particularly interested in the role of the brain and mind in chronic and complex pain disorders. Through collaborations with clinicians, scientists, patients and thoughtful friends, the team is exploring how the brain and its representation of the body change when pain persists, how the mind influences physiological regulation of the body, how the changes in the brain and mind can be normalised via treatment, and how we can teach people about it all in a way that is both interesting and accurate. This website includes links to published articles, current projects, teaching resources for clinicians and lecturers, Lorimer’s books, seminars and conferences and other info that the team thinks is intriguing, important or irresistible.

Dr Lorimer Moseley

NHMRC Senior Research Fellow

Prince of Wales Medical Research Institute

Sydney, Australia

Dr Lorimer Moseley is a clinician and researcher with a special interest in pain and brain sciences. He is author of Painful Yarns. Metaphors & stories to help understand the biology of pain, and co-author with David Butler, of Explain Pain, which is a key text for pain sciences at universities throughout the world. He completed his doctorate in medicine at the University of Sydney and post-doctorates at the University of Queensland and the University of Sydney. In 2004, he was the first allied health professional to be appointed Nuffield Medical Research Fellow at Oxford University, UK. He has over 75 scholarly works including articles in British Medical Journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, Current Biology, Brain, PAIN and Neurology. He is Associate Editor of PAIN, the British Journal of Sports Medicine, and Reviews in Pain. He won Best Paper at the Would Congress of Physical Therapy, the Elsevier Award for Rehabilitation, the Cardon Award for Excellence in Rehabilitation Research. In 2007, he received the Ulf Lindblom Award, given by the International Association for the Study of Pain to the outstanding mid-career clinical scientist working in a pain-related field. He has recently returned to Sydney, where he is NHMRC Senior Research Fellow at the Prince of Wales Medical Research Institute.

Lorimer is NHMRC Senior Research Fellow at the Prince of Wales Medical Research Institute, Sydney Australia where he works as a clinician and researcher with a special interest in pain and brain sciences. He is author of Painful Yarns. Metaphors & stories to help understand the biology of pain, and co-author with David Butler, of Explain Pain, which is a key text for pain sciences at universities throughout the world.

Lorimer completed his doctorate in medicine at the University of Sydney and post-doctorates at the University of Queensland and the University of Sydney. In 2004, he was the first allied health professional to be appointed Nuffield Medical Research Fellow at Oxford University, UK. He has over 75 scholarly works including articles in British Medical Journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, Current Biology, Brain, PAIN and Neurology. He is Associate Editor of PAIN, the British Journal of Sports Medicine, and Reviews in Pain. He won Best Paper at the World Congress of Physical Therapy, the Elsevier Award for Rehabilitation, the Cardon Award for Excellence in Rehabilitation Research. In 2007, he received the Ulf Lindblom Award, given by the International Association for the Study of Pain to the outstanding mid-career clinical scientist working in a pain-related field.

Collaborators

David Butler

David is an internationally renowned clinical educator and pain scientist and Director of the Neuro Orthopaedic Institute

David is also the author of 3 books and numerous book chapters including Explain Pain with Lorimer Moseley. He has developed and implemented pain science curricula for undergraduate and post-graduate programs and has taught over five thousand clinicians in 25 countries. He is a regular keynote speaker at clinical conferences across the world and covers concepts of clinical reasoning, physical health of the nervous system and pain sciences.

Dr Alberto Gallace

Alberto is a cognitive neuroscientist with a special interest in the study of the cognitive and neural aspects of tactile information processing across the body surface.

In 2001 Alberto gained a scholarship to undertake a doctorate at university of Milan. Two years of his 4 year PhD program were spent at Oxford University as a visiting student. After the completion of his PhD in 2005, he worked for 2 years in the Department of Experimental Psychology of Oxford University on crossmodal integration. While working in Oxford he also obtained a Junior Research Fellowship from Wolfson College.

In 2007 Alberto returned to Italy where he was appointed as a researcher and lecturer in the Department of Psychology of University of Milano-Bicocca. His work investigates multisensory integration, synaesthesia, body representation, spatial attention and spatial information processing in both neurologically normal participants and patients affected by neurological and neuropsychological disorders. His work underpins the very first neurocognitive model of tactile awareness.

Since 2005, he has written two book chapters, 35 articles and more than 30 conference abstracts. He has been invited as speaker at a number of international conferences and his work has been the focus of popular media articles in different countries. He has published in general science (eg Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) and leading journals in his field (eg Experimental Brain Research, Pain, Journal of Neuropsychology, Consciousness and Cognition, Brain Research, Neuroscience Letters, Perception, Psychological Bulletin, Perception & Psychophysics, Neuroscience and Biobehavioural reviews, Acta Psychologica).

Neil O’Connell

Neil O’Connell is a researcher in the Centre for Research in Rehabilitation, Brunel University, West London, UK. He divides his time between research and training new physiotherapists and previously worked extensively as a musculoskeletal physiotherapist.

He is currently fighting his way through a PhD investigating chronic low back pain and cortically directed treatment approaches. He is particularly interested in low back pain, pain generally and the rigorous testing of treatments. He also tends to get all geeky over controlled trials.

Luke Parkitny

Luke is a PhD student at the Prince of Wales Clinical School at the University of New South Wales. He is researching some of the factors that play a role in the development of complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS). Luke joins the team with a background of clinical practice and research in Western Australia. He has rapidly cultivated an interest in all things pain and has very successfully exploited every opportunity to share this knowledge with other health professionals and lay-persons. We’ve been too busy to get round to photoshopping his photo.

Professor Charles Spence

Charles is the head of the Crossmodal Research Laboratory based at the Department of Experimental Psychology, Oxford University.

He is interested in how people perceive the world around them. In particular, how our brains manage to process the information from each of our different senses (such as smell, taste, sight, hearing, and touch) to form the extraordinarily rich multisensory experiences that fill our daily lives. His research focuses on how a better understanding of the human mind will lead to the better design of multisensory foods, products, interfaces, and environments in the future. His research calls for a radical new way of examining and understanding the senses that has major implications for the way in which we design everything from household products to mobile phones, and from the food we eat to the places in which we work and live.

Over the years, Charles has consulted for a number of multinational companies advising on various aspects of multisensory design, packaging, and branding. He has also conducted research on human-computer interaction issues on the Crew Work Station on the European Space Shuttle. Charles and his group are currently working on problems associated with the design of foods that maximally stimulate the senses (together with Heston Blumenthal, chef of The Fat Duck restaurant in Bray). His group also has a very active line of research on the design of auditory, tactile, and multisensory warning signals for drivers and other interface operators (together with Toyota). Charles is also interested in the effect of the indoor environment on mood, well-being, and performance (together with ICI).

Charles has published more than 300 articles in top-flight scientific journals over the last 15 years. Charles has been awarded the 10th Experimental Psychology Society Prize, the British Psychology Society: Cognitive Section Award, the Paul Bertelson Award, recognizing him as the young European Cognitive Psychologist of the Year, and, most recently, the prestigious Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Germany, not to mention the 2008 IG Nobel prize for nutrition, for his groundbreaking work on the ‘sonic crisp’!

Heidi Allen

The day to day working of this site is done by Heidi, along with some of the other places you can find Body in Mind (twitter, facebook, YouTube …). Heidi is a health professions publisher by background with a manual therapy research focus. She also runs her own blog, HeidiAllen.id.au which talks about applications of new media in health and publishing and how to practically use social media in clinical practice and research. Heidi can be found online as DreamingSpires.