Xuan Chen 陳瑄 "Chelsea"
Master’s Student
Chelsea is an M.Sc. student in Brain and Mind Sciences at National Taiwan University, mentored by Dr. Joshua Goh. She received her B.A. in Foreign Languages and Literatures and B.S. in Psychology from NTU while completing an inter-university minor in classical voice at National Taiwan Normal University. Her path across language, psychology, and music reflects a broader fascination with cognition itself--how the brain interacts with the environment to construct meaning, and why cognition can take such varied forms across individuals.
At the heart of Chelsea’s research is a deceptively simple question: why can people encounter the same world and nevertheless experience it differently? Music offers a particularly compelling way into this question because it is both highly structured and deeply woven into human life. Even when listeners hear the same sounds, they may form different expectations, assign them different meanings, and feel them in entirely different ways. Through this inquiry, she hopes music can offer a window into how individual minds construct distinct experiences from a shared environment. By approaching cognition from multiple perspectives, she ultimately hopes to understand how different ways of making sense of the world may relate to both psychological well-being and distress.
Outside the lab, Chelsea is a classically trained soprano who enjoys singing across genres, from opera and art song to pop and rock. She also loves literature and science-fiction films, especially literary adaptations whose observations about humanity feel a little too accurate. When she is not contemplating the many complications of having a brain, she can usually be found working out, cycling, or hiking--while contemplating the many complications of having a brain.
