Tributes to professor who was pioneer in the study of how we think

Jonathan Smallwood

Born: October 13, 1975;

Died: October 24, 2025

Professor Jonathan Mark Smallwood was born in Wolverhampton and spent his childhood on the west coast of Scotland in the village of Fairlie. He was the first son of Howard Robert and Jacqueline Anne Smallwood.

Jonny attended Largs Academy and then Strathclyde University where he studied psychology and earned his BA (1996) and PhD (2002), under the guidance of Dr Marc Obonswain. After his undergraduate degree, he realised that while psychology had provided detailed theories of vision, attention, memory and language, it had little to say about internal mental states – for example, how our thoughts drift depending on mood, context and intention. His PhD, completed in 2002, focused on what he called “task-unrelated thought