Jussi Valtonen

Who are you?

I’m a neuropsychologist and a writer. My research interests include questions about the mind and the brain, mental health, and health humanities. In my clinical work, I’ve worked with neurological and psychiatric patients. I currently teach in the Writing MA program at the University of the Arts, Helsinki, where I also lead the Health, Narrative, and the Arts initiative, which seeks to use the literary arts to inform better clinical care.

‍

What is your role in FICEBO?

I’m a hangaround, a prospective/fringe member. I’ve been inspired by FICEBO’s relentless drive and rigorous work for a long time. Mutual interests related to the role scientific evidence in clinical care, expert recommendations, and conflicts of interest brought me together with other FICEBO members. I especially look forward to learning from the exceptional expertise and experience in FICEBO on designing, conducting, and interpreting RCTs.

‍

Favorite part of your job?

Which job?

‍

Why did you decide to enter your field?

I was fascinated to learn about how our mind/brain works. The more I learned, the clearer it became how much there is that we don’t (yet) know. I became interested in how we come to think that we know something, and in how we decide that this one thing here is worth knowing about while that other thing there isn’t. (As the protagonist in Elif Batuman’s novel The Idiot asks, Why is there no department of love?) I may actually have entered my other field (that of fiction writing) much for the same reasons, although I didn’t know it at the time. Or, alternatively, I’ve deluded myself into thinking that my life makes more sense than it does.

‍

Who/What inspires you?

People who willingly fail again, fail better. People who work to see beyond conventional wisdom. People who strive to do the right thing even when it’s seemingly not possible.

‍

The most interesting article you’ve read recently?

McCloskey, M., Jiwon Im, E., Wong, K. W., Luo, E., Upadya, N., Srijomkwan, K., & Chen, C. (2025). Effector independence in writing. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 51(5), 643–663. Calls into question widely accepted views in neuropsychology concerning the cognitive processes that control our hand movements when we write.

‍

Your favorite book and why?

Just one?! A particularly enlightening book about healthcare that helped put many puzzling pieces together for me is Unhealthy Politics: The Battle Over Evidence-Based Medicine by Eric Patashnik, Alan Gerber, and Conor Dowling. I’d recommend it to everyone interested in healthcare and scientific evidence (and not only because it cites studies by FICEBO members).

Some recent fiction that I’ve enjoyed: Flesh by David Szalay, The Idiot and Either/Or by Elif Batuman, The Shakespeare Requirement by Julie Schumacher, We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo, anything by David Sedaris. Chekhov and Tolstoy are all-time favorites.

‍