Joshua Sariñana

I am a neuroscientist, writer, and visual artist interested in how people create meaning from experience. My work explores how memory, creativity, storytelling, and visual culture shape the ways individuals and communities understand themselves and the worlds they inhabit.

My scientific research focuses on memory, spatial cognition, prediction, and the neural mechanisms that support how people organize experience across time. Through photography, poetry, exhibitions, community-based projects, and public scholarship, I extend these questions beyond the laboratory to examine how meaning is constructed through stories, images, relationships, and place.

Drawing from neuroscience, the arts, and the humanities, I develop methods for working with complex narrative, visual, and cultural materials. Projects such as Mental Mapping, Poetry of Science, Through These Realities, and my research on autobiographical memory investigate how memories, photographs, poems, interviews, and community experiences can be interpreted, visualized, and shared in ways that reveal patterns that are often difficult to recognize through ordinary observation alone.

Situated within neurohumanities and neuroarts, my work uses neuroscience as a source of questions, concepts, and methods for exploring creativity, identity, belonging, and the construction of possible futures across individual and collective life.