Jussi Valtonen to join FICEBO

We are thrilled to welcome Jussi Valtonen to our research group at FICEBO. Jussi is a remarkable individual with a multifaceted career, blending the worlds of literary fiction, science, and journalism. As a novelist, he has captivated readers with his thought-provoking fiction, including, most recently, the novel They Know Not What They Do (He eivät tiedä mitä tekevät). With a PhD in neuropsychology, he brings deep insights into the workings of the human mind. And as a journalist, he has explored and explained complex topics to a broad audience. We are excited to see how his unique perspective and expertise will enrich our research endeavors.

To give you a better sense of who Jussi is and what drives him, we sat down for a conversation about his thoughts on the intersection of art and science.

FICEBO Interview Questions:

1. Your career spans two different fields—fiction writing and neuropsychology. What initially drew you to these areas, and how have they influenced one another in your work?

I didn’t know much about psychology before studying it as an undergraduate, but it seemed like a promising way to learn about how the mind works. After graduating I then had the amazing opportunity to study cognitive neuropsychology at Johns Hopkins, which became a life-changing experience because of my fantastic mentors and grad student peers. Before going to Hopkins, I’d done research both with behavioral and brain-research methods, but only with neurologically intact participants. At Hopkins I was introduced to how much researchers can learn from studying single brain-damaged individuals in series of carefully designed experiments, and was shown how powerfully evidence collected in this way can inform our understanding of the brain and of human cognition. This work became the basis of my PhD dissertation.

I’d always also been an avid reader of fiction. That (as it turns out) can become a slippery slope towards dabbling in fiction of your own. On a very practical level, my experiences of American academia and of my reverse-culture shock after returning to Finland deeply influenced the writing of my novel They Know Not What They Do.

2. As a novelist, you’ve explored complex human emotions and societal issues. How do you see your background in neuropsychology shaping your writing, and vice versa?

Cognitive psychology and cognitive neuropsychology study how the human mind processes information, including the ways in which our thinking is compromised, biased, partial, short-sighted, and affected by our circumstances. These are deeply human qualities that I believe every novelist is also interested in, because they are an essential aspect of the human condition. Tolstoy and Chekhov, for example, were razor-sharp observers of human behavior, and their fiction often notes how beautifully flawed, mixed, and human our motives are, even (or especially) when we think we’re seeing things clearly.

3. You've recently joined the FICEBO research group. What motivated you to take this step, and how do you envision your role within the team?

As a neuropsychologist, I’ve worked with both neurological and psychiatric patients, and both as a researcher and as a clinician. What you discover as a researcher in the clinical field – sometimes to your great surprise, as it was in my case – that clinical decision-making is not always strictly evidence-based in the sense you might get from textbooks or introductory courses.

Clinical work is a deeply human endeavor, in which not everything can be known or controlled. At the same time, it would seem immensely important to understand, to the best of our abilities, which clinical procedures actually work, and what their real benefits are – in the hard, evidence-based sense of the word – and to identify the ones that don’t provide as much value to patients as is believed.

FICEBO of course has been conducting exactly this kind of groundbreaking work for a long time, and I’ve admired your members’ work ever since learning about it. I’m excited and looking forward to learning from all of you. And of course hoping to contribute whatever I can with my background.