John Pickering

John Pickering was educated at a Rudolf Steiner school, then went to Edinburgh to study forestry, but changed to psychology, people being more interesting than trees. After a PhD on visual perception at Sussex, supervised by Stuart Sutherland, he worked in the US at Rochester and Stanford. He returned to the UK to lecture at Warwick, from which he has retired although still teaches and does research there.

His interests have always centered on consciousness in general and human experience in particular. He is a founder member of the Consciousness & Experiential Psychology Group of the British Psychological Society.

He has come to understand that consciousness is not reducible to neuropsychology, much less to physics and that studying it leads naturally into the humanities, arts and spiritual traditions.  He has studied Eastern traditions in Sri Lanka, Japan, China, Korea, India and Thailand.  He believes that engaging with them enhances the scientific study of consciousness.

His research presently concerns process philosophy and biosemiotics. His aim is to make it relevant to promoting more sustainable ways of life.