Advisory Board
Charles is a psychologist and writer. His research focuses on the interdisciplinary study of inner experience (referring to the contents of consciousness such as thoughts, memories, inner dialogue, visual imagery, feelings and emotions). He is a professor of psychology at Durham University, where he is Director of the Centre for Research into Inner Experience and founder of the spinout InnerScape. He is active in outreach and public engagement work on themes relating to his research, with regular contributions to mainstream media. His latest non-fiction book is The Voices Within: The history and science of how we talk to ourselves, published by Profile Books/Wellcome Collection. His other non-fiction books include The Baby in the Mirror: A child’s world from birth to three (Granta, 2008) and Pieces of Light: Memory and its stories (Profile, 2012; shortlisted for the 2013 Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books). He is the author of two novels: The Auctioneer (Fourth Estate, 1999) and A Box of Birds (Unbound, 2013). He is the editor of Others (Unbound, 2019), an anthology exploring how books and literature can show us other points of view, with net profits supporting refugee and anti-hate charities.
Centre for the Sciences of Place and Memory 