Professor Adam Zeman

About me:

Prof. Zeman trained in Medicine at Oxford University Medical School, after a first degree in Philosophy and Psychology, and later in Neurology in Oxford, at The National Hospital for Neurology in Queen Square, London and Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge. He moved to Edinburgh in 1996, as a Consultant and Senior Lecturer (later Reader) in the Department of Clinical Neurosciences and to the Peninsula Medical School (now University of Exeter Medical School) in September 2005 as Professor of Cognitive and Behavioural Neurology. His specialised clinical work is in cognitive and behavioural neurology, including neurological disorders of sleep.

His main research interests are disorders of visual imagery and forms of amnesia occurring in epilepsy. He has an active background interest in the science and philosophy of consciousness, publishing a wide-ranging review of the field in Brain (2001; 124:1263-1289) and an accessible introduction to the subject for a general readership (Consciousness: a user’s guide, Yale University Press, 2002). In 2008 he published an introduction to neurology for the general reader, A Portrait of the Brain (Yale UP), and in 2012, Epilepsy and Memory (OUP) with Narinder Kapur and Marilyn Jones-Gotman.

From 2007-2010 he was Chairman of the British Neuropsychiatry Association. He launched and continues to direct its training course in neuropsychiatry.

Broad research specialisms

• Cognitive Neurology, especially:
  • memory disorders associated with epilepsy, including Transient Epileptic Amnesia, accelerated long-term forgetting and autobiographical amnesia
  • disorders of visual imagery
• Neurological disorders of sleep
• Case studies in neuropsychiatry
• Conceptual issues in the relationship between neurology and psychiatry, mind and brain

Interests:

• Visual imagery: experience, behaviour, neuroscience. The vividness of visual imagery varies greatly between individuals, and can be affected by neurological and psychiatric disorders. With colleagues in Edinburgh, he coined the term ‘aphantasia’ in 2015 to describe the absence of a mind’s eye. Extensive resulting publicity has led to many thousands of contacts, allowing a large database of individuals with aphantasia to be developed and its opposite hyperphantasia. He is currently investigating their neuropsychological associations and neural basis.
• Transient Epileptic Amnesia: temporal lobe epilepsy can give rise to episodes of transient amnesia, often occurring on waking and frequently associated with ‘non-standard’ forms of memory impairment: autobiographical amnesia, topographical amnesia and accelerated long term forgetting. His team has investigated these through the TIME project since 2003.
• Dementia: epilepsy, neuropsychology, brain imaging. His NHS Cognitive Disorders Clinic is linked to the Devon Memory Clinic service. As a counterpart to the TIME study, which investigates memory impairment occurring in epilepsy, he has recently launched a study investigating epilepsy occurring in dementia with Dr John Baker, a Clinical Fellow funded by the Alzheimer Society, and colleagues in the Memory Clinic Service (the PRESIDE study). He is collaborating with Prof Nick Fox in London and Dr Alicia Smith in Plymouth to test the hypothesis that accelerated long-term forgetting may be an early feature in Alzheimer’s disease. Following a recent audit study showing that valuable diagnostic information is often omitted from radiological reports on patients with dementia, He is collaborating in a service improvement project with Dr William Mukonoweshuro in Plymouth.
• Neurological sleep disorders: these disorders, which include causes of excessive sleepiness such as narcolepsy, parasomnias, such as sleep-walking and chronic insomnia have been neglected in British medical education and by clinical services. He is collaborating in a nationwide study of the provision of sleep education and has recently completed an audit of the work of his Sleep Disorders Clinic. This field of research is wide open to enthusiastic youngsters – please contact him!
• Single cases in neuropsychiatry: although these belong to an ancient tradition, single case reports remain powerful tools in the exploration of fascinating areas of cognitive neuroscience. His recent papers of the neural correlates of Cotard’s syndrome and aphantasia, and on psychogenic déjà vu illustrate their potential.
• Brain and mind: all these topics speak to the fundamental question of the relationship between brain and mind, the ‘problem of consciousness’. They speak also to the corresponding relationship between neurology, the medical specialty involved in caring for disorder of the brain, and psychiatry, the specialty involved in caring for disorders of the mind. He has written on these topics in the past and will continue to explore them further.

Qualifications:

BMBCh MA DM FRCP