Research Areas:

• Cognitive Science
• Consciousness Studies
• Science & Technology Studies
• Media Studies

Biography:

Dr. Maja Gutman Mušič is an interdisciplinary scholar whose research work integrates Philosophy of Mind, Media Studies, and Science & Technology Studies to advance a fundamental understanding of two themes: the human-machine relationship and the psychological dynamics of dreams.

Maja is currently Co-director of the digital project "2020 Dreams" under an advanced contract with Stanford University Press. The project explores the historical significance of 2020—2021 as seen through the prism of collective dreaming by using computational tools to find semantic similarities between thousands of dream reports and waking realities represented through the world of news coverage.

At the end of 2021, Maja returned from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where she worked as a Fulbright Visiting Project Scientist. Her research focused on automated recognition of archetypal patterns in a large collection of dream reports using the latest Natural Language Processing tools.

Previous work:

Dr. Gutman Mušič completed her Ph.D. in Anthropology of Everyday Life – Media Studies at the Institute for Humanities, Alma Mater Europaea (AMEU-ISH), Ljubljana, Slovenia (2016). In her thesis, she explored the governing principles of human immersion and attention (understood as a cognitive resource) and how they relate to media consumption at large. The thesis is built on critical theory, structuralist, post-structuralist, semiotic, and psychoanalytical findings to understand our position in complex digital environments. Between 2016—2020, Dr. Gutman Mušič collaborated with UCLA as a Research Associate. Apart from dream science, Maja has also been focused on Human-Machine Psychology, particularly the theoretical aspects of embodied cognition and its behavioral expressions in cultural data, such as virtual environments (VRE). To fully co-develop new tools and methodologies for measuring immersion in multi-sensory environments, she started combining philosophical approaches with recent advances in data analytics and cognitive science. Her research output consists of over 20 international conference presentations on immersion in virtual and digital media environments, media representations, narrative structures, symbolism, and modern computational approaches to dream analysis.