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I am a Professor in Psychology and the Research Group Lead for Developmental Science at Durham. I’m also the Co-Director of the Discovery Research Platform for Medical Humanities, a £9.6m investment by Wellcome in interdisciplinary research on mental health and health inequalities.From 2012 to 2022 I was a member of Hearing the Voice, an interdisciplinary project that explored the topic of voice-hearing (or auditory verbal hallucinations). Joining originally as a postdoctoral researcher, I was one of six co-applicants for Hearing the Voice’s second Wellcome award in 2015, and in 2020 I became Associate Director of the project (working alongside PI Charles Fernyhough and Co-Director Angela Woods). The project is internationally recognised for its interdisciplinary approach and contribution to psychosis research, which produced over 200 outputs. In 2019 we launched Understanding Voices, the world’s largest web resource for supporting people with distressing voices.I was the co-founder and co-chair of the Early Career Hallucinations Research (ECHR) group, a network of over 270 ECRs in 27 countries conducting research on hallucinations and related topics. In 2024 I became Scientific Chair of its counterpart network for senior researchers, the International Consortium on Hallucinations Research. In 2023 my book Presence: The Strange Science of the Unseen Other won the British Psychological Society Book Award for Popular Science.My research is broadly focused on mental health and neurodiversity. This includes work on psychosis and autism primarily, but has also involved research on inner speech, mental imagery, executive functioning, categorisation, and perception. My most recent research has concerned ‘felt presence’: the sensation that someone is present without any sensory cues. Such experiences occur in psychosis, Parkinson’s, epilepsy, bereavement, survival situations, and around the boundaries of sleep.A felt presence (FP) refers to the sensation of someone being close by without any clear sensory evidence. Such experiences have long been known to occur within several neurological conditions – most notably as part of the ‘minor hallucinations’ of Parkinson’s disease – but their basis and wider significance has not been clear. This picture is now changing: an integrated science of presence is fast emerging, incorporating experiences in schizophrenia, sleep paralysis, bereavement, and survival situations.In this lecture I will draw on cases from Presence to argue for a dual-route account of FP experiences, incorporating the bodily self and the relational self. We will focus on three main areas: i) Felt presence in psychosis and schizophrenia. Despite being described in some of the earliest phenomenological work on schizophrenia, FP have only recently been recognised as a common but under-reported feature of psychosis. Drawing on the work of Durham University’s Hearing the Voice project (2012-2022) I will present phenomenological data on FP in early psychosis and discuss the challenge of distinguishing such experiences from unusual beliefs and paranoia.ii) Felt presence in survival situations: Some of the most famous reports of presence are known as ‘Third Man’ experiences, based on Ernest Shackleton’s account of a phantom companion during the final leg of the Endurance expedition to Antarctica in 1916. Almost a century later, Scottish adventurer Luke Robertson attempted a similar journey with similarly uncanny results. I will discuss the commonalities of these two cases based on my interviews with Luke, and explain how they shed new light on the identity of Shackleton’s ‘Third Man’.