David Eagleman

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David Eagleman is a neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine, where he directs the Laboratory for Perception and Action. He holds joint appointments in Psychology, Biomedical Engineering, and the Institute for Neuroscience at UT Austin, as well as an adjunct appointment in Psychology at Rice University. He earned his Ph.D. at Baylor College of Medicine, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at the Salk Institute. He is on the editorial boards of Journal of Vision and PLoS One.

[edit] Scientific Specializations

  • Time perception: Eagleman's scientific work has combined psychophysical, behavioral, and computational approaches to address the relationship between the timing of perception and the timing of neural signals. He has explored temporal encoding, time warping, manipulations of the perception of causality, and time perception in high-adrenaline situations. This data is used to understand how neural signals processed by different brain regions come together for a temporally unified picture of the world.
  • Synesthesia, an unusual perceptual condition in which stimulation to one sense triggers an involuntary sensation in other senses. Eagleman is the developer of The Synesthesia Battery, a free online test by which people can determine whether they are synesthetic.
  • Visual illusions and what they tell us about neurobiology. He has concentrated recently on the flash lag illusion and wagon wheel effect.
  • Neuroscience and the Law, an emerging field that determines how modern brain science should affect the way we make laws, punish criminals, and invent new methods for rehabilitation. Eagleman is the founder and director of Baylor College of Medicine's Initiative on Neuroscience and Law.

[edit] Books by David Eagleman

  • Dethronement: The Secret Life of the Unconscious Brain, Pantheon Books, 2009
  • Wednesday is Indigo Blue: Discovering the Brain of Synesthesia, co-authored with Richard Cytowic, March 2009 (in press), M.I.T. Press.
  • The Fluid Machine: How the Brain Reconfigures Itself of the Fly, Oxford University Press, 2009
  • Unsolved Mysteries of the Brain, under review at Oxford University Press. See short version: Ten Unsolved Mysteries of the Brain, cover article in Discover Magazine, August 2007.
  • Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives, Pantheon Press, February 2009. (Fiction)

[edit] External links