Every day we encounter a variety of people, and we need to recognize their identity to interact with them appropriately. The most common ways to recognize a person's identity include the recognition of a face and of a voice. Recognizing a face or a voice is effortless, but the neural mechanisms that enable us to do so are complex. The face of a same person can look very different depending on the viewpoint and it can be partly occluded. Analogously, a voice can sound very different when it is saying different words. The neural mechanisms that enable us to recognize a person's identity need to abstract away from stimulus differences that are not relevant for identity recognition. Patient studies indicate that this process is executed with the contribution of multiple brain regions (Meadows, 1974; Tranel et al., 1997). However, the localization accuracy allowed by neuropsychological studies is limited by the lack of control on the location and extent of lesions. Neuroimaging studies individuated a set of regions that show stronger responses to faces than other objects (Kanwisher et al., 1997; Rajimehr et al., 2009), and to voices than other sounds (Belin et al., 2000). These regions do not necessarily encode information about a person's identity. In this thesis, a set of regions that encode information distinguishing between different face tokens were individuated, including ventral stream regions located in occipitotemporal cortex and the anterior temporal lobes, but also parietal regions: posterior cingulate and superior IPS. Representations of face identity with invariance across different viewpoints and across different halves of a face were found in the right ATL. However, representations of face identity and of voice identity were not found to overlap in ATL, indicating that in ATL representations of identity are organized by modality. For famous people, multimodal representations of identity were found in association cortex in posterior STS. / Psychology

This thesis focuses on the transformation of identities of international master students attending Örebro University along with their perception of how this experience will affect their future. A qualitative content analysis of 10 semi-structured interviews was employed to explore the topic and answer the research questions. The thesis is guided by the theoretical background that stands on the synthesis of Jenkins’ perception of identity and the identity theory, supplemented by the understanding of international students as ‘student travellers’. The analysis of respondents’ narratives revealed that all aspects of their identity were affected. International students, throughout their stay abroad, live in a certain bubble as they distance themselves from the society on one hand and identify with the international students’ group on the other, affecting their social identity. However, before a new identity is formed and while the old one is being changed, the students experience a state of limbo during which uncertainty of roles emerges. Their person identity is influenced as well due to the international experience providing an opportunity to consciously alter some aspects of personality and, furthermore, to promote their independence, open-mindedness, and awareness of other cultures. Additionally, through contact with these other cultures, the international student develops into a person of two minds – international and of the country of their origin. In regards to the students’ perception of the future, the desire to stay international, to travel and live abroad is essential in creating something of a nomad life. Moreover, the respondents considered the international experience to have a positive impact on their career through an advantageous position over others along with the acquisition of an international network.

The desire to enhance and make ourselves better is not a new one and it has continued to intrigue throughout the ages. Individuals have continued to seek ways to improve and enhance their well-being for example through nutrition, physical exercise, education and so on. Crucial to this improvement of their well-being is improving their ability to remember. Hence, people interested in improving their well-being, are often interested in memory as well. The rationale being that memory is crucial to our well-being. The desire to improve one’s memory then is almost certainly as old as the desire to improve one’s well-being. Traditionally, people have used different means in an attempt to enhance their memories: for example in learning through storytelling, studying, and apprenticeship. In remembering through practices like mnemonics, repetition, singing, and drumming. In retaining, storing and consolidating memories through nutrition and stimulants like coffee to help keep awake; and by external aids like notepads and computers. In forgetting through rituals and rites. Recent scientific advances in biotechnology, nanotechnology, molecular biology, neuroscience, and information technologies, present a wide variety of technologies to enhance many different aspects of human functioning. Thus, some commentators have identified human enhancement as central and one of the most fascinating subject in bioethics in the last two decades. Within, this period, most of the commentators have addressed the Ethical, Social, Legal and Policy (ESLP) issues in human enhancements as a whole as opposed to specific enhancements. However, this is problematic and recently various commentators have found this to be deficient and called for a contextualized case-by-case analysis to human enhancements for example genetic enhancement, moral enhancement, and in my case memory enhancement (ME). The rationale being that the reasons for accepting/rejecting a particular enhancement vary depending on the enhancement itself. Given this enormous variation, moral and legal generalizations about all enhancement processes and technologies are unwise and they should instead be evaluated individually. Taking this as a point of departure, this research will focus specifically on making a case for ME and in doing so assessing the ESLP implications arising from ME. My analysis will draw on the already existing literature for and against enhancement, especially in part two of this thesis; but it will be novel in providing a much more in-depth analysis of ME. From this perspective, I will contribute to the ME debate through two reviews that address the question how we enhance the memory, and through four original papers discussed in part three of this thesis, where I examine and evaluate critically specific ESLP issues that arise with the use of ME. In the conclusion, I will amalgamate all my contribution to the ME debate and suggest the future direction for the ME debate.