The rockefeller university

Event Details

Type

Friday Lecture Series

Speaker(s)

Nancy Kanwisher, Ph.D., investigator, McGovern Institute, Walter A. Rosenblith Professor, department of brain and cognitive sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Speaker bio(s)

The last 25 years of research in fMRI have revealed the functional organization of the human cortex in glorious detail. Dozens of regions have been identified that conduct highly distinctive, often very specific, functions, from face perception to speech recognition to understanding the meaning of a sentence. Each of these regions is present, in approximately the same location, in virtually every normal subject. This set of regions can be thought of as an initial draft of the “parts list” for the human mind. This new picture of the human mind and brain opens up a vast landscape of new questions, of which Dr. Kanwisher will discuss three: (1) How do these functionally distinctive cortical regions arise in development? (2) What is the causal role of each region in behavior? and (3) Which other mental functions get their own private patch of real estate in the brain (and why!)?

 

Dr. Kanwisher’s work uses brain imaging to discover the functional organization of the human brain as a window into the architecture of the mind. She received her B.S. in biology and her Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, working in the laboratory of Dr. Molly Potter. After completing postdoctoral work both as a MacArthur Fellow in Peace and International Security and in the laboratory of Dr. Anne Treisman at the University of California, Berkeley, Dr. Kanwisher held faculty positions at the University of California, Los Angeles, and then at Harvard University. She returned to MIT in 1997, where she is now an investigator at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research, a faculty member in the department of brain and cognitive sciences, and a member of the Center for Minds, Brains, and Machines. Dr. Kanwisher has received several honors for her work, including the Troland Research Award, a MacVicar Faculty Fellow Teaching Award from MIT, the Golden Brain Award, and the NIH Director’s Pioneer Award. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her short lectures about human cognitive neuroscience for lay audiences can be found at http://nancysbraintalks.mit.edu/.

Open to

Public

Host

Leslie Vosshall, Ph.D.

Reception

Refreshments, 3:15 p.m. - 3:45 p.m., Abby Lounge

Contact

Justin Sloboda

Phone

(212) 327-7785

Sponsor

Justin Sloboda
(212) 327-7785
jsloboda@rockefeller.edu

Readings

http://librarynews.rockefeller.edu/?p=4298