cognitive science

#720 Patrick McNamara - The Cognitive Neuroscience of Religious Experience: Decentering and the Self

Dec 22, 2022

Dr. Patrick McNamara is an Associate Professor of Neurology in the Department of Neurology at the BU School of Medicine and Professor of Psychology at National University, and Director of the Cognitive Neuroscience of Religion Project, along with Dr. Jordan Grafman. Upon graduating from the Behavioral Neuroscience Program at Boston University in 1991, he trained at the Aphasia Research Center at the Boston VA Medical Center in neurolinguistics and brain-cognitive correlation techniques. He then began developing an evolutionary approach to problems of brain and behavior and currently is studying the evolution of the frontal lobes, the evolution of the two mammalian sleep states (REM and NREM) and the evolution of religion in human cultures. He is the author of The Cognitive Neuroscience of Religious Experience: Decentering and the Self. More»
#718 Moshe Hoffman & Erez Yoeli - Hidden Games; Game Theory and Irrational Human Behavior (Pt. 2)

Dec 16, 2022

Dr. Moshe Hoffman is a Research Scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology and Lecturer at Harvard's Department of Economics. He applies game theory, models of learning and evolution, and experimental methods, to try to decipher the (often subconscious and subtle) incentives that shape our social behavior, preferences, and ideologies. More»
#698 James Zimring - Partial Truths: How Fractions Distort Our Thinking

Oct 31, 2022

Dr. James Zimring is Thomas W. Tillack Professor of Experimental Pathology at the University of Virginia. He is the author of What Science Is and How It Really Works (2019). His latest book is Partial Truths: How Fractions Distort Our Thinking. More»
#696 Ryutaro Uchiyama: Cultural Evolution of Genetic Heritability

Oct 27, 2022

Dr. Ryutaro Uchiyama is a Research Fellow at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. His research interests include cultural evolution, cognitive plasticity, and developmental psychobiology. More»
#694 Patrick Savage: Musicology, the Evolution of Music, and Cross-Cultural Studies

Oct 21, 2022

Dr. Patrick Savage is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Environment and Information Studies at Keio SFC, where he directs the CompMusic Lab for comparative and computational musicology. He has academic degrees in music composition (BA), psychology (MSc) and musicology (PhD), and has won national awards singing Japanese folk song. His research on the evolution of music and culture has appeared in outlets including Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, The New York Times, and The Economist. More»
#692 Annie Duke - Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away

Oct 17, 2022

Annie Duke is an author, speaker, and consultant in the decision-making space, as well as Special Partner focused on Decision Science at First Round Capital Partners, a seed stage venture fund. As a former professional poker player, she has won more than $4 million in tournament poker. During her career, Annie won a World Series of Poker bracelet and is the only woman to have won the World Series of Poker Tournament of Champions and the NBC National Poker Heads-Up Championship. She retired from the game in 2012. Prior to becoming a professional poker player, Annie was awarded a National Science Foundation Fellowship to study Cognitive Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. Her previous book, Thinking in Bets, is a national bestseller. Annie’s latest book is Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away. More»
#686 Olivier Morin: How Traditions Live and Die

Oct 3, 2022

Dr. Olivier Morin has a full-time tenured research position at the Institut Jean Nicod in Paris. He is also a Research group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Geoanthropology in Jena, with the Minds and Traditions Research Group. His work focuses on cultural transmission and touches on the relations between anthropology, psychology and the philosophy of social science. He is the author of How Traditions Live and Die. More»
#679 Nick Enfield - Language vs. Reality: Why Language Is Good for Lawyers and Bad for Scientists

Sep 16, 2022

Dr. Nick Enfield is Professor and Chair of Linguistics at the University of Sydney and director of the Sydney Centre for Language Research. His research on language, culture, cognition and social life is based on long-term fieldwork in mainland Southeast Asia, especially Laos. His latest book is Language vs. Reality: Why Language Is Good for Lawyers and Bad for Scientists. More»
#665 Scott Grafton - Physical Intelligence; The Relationship Between the Body and the Mind

Aug 15, 2022

Dr. Scott Grafton is Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of California Santa Barbara. Dr. Grafton is interested in how people organize movement into goal-oriented action. The emphasis is on elucidating the cognitive architecture that underlies action representation. This is developed with studies of sequence and skill acquisition, motor simulation, sensorimotor transformation, on-line control and action observation experiments. He is the author of Physical Intelligence: The Science of How the Body and the Mind Guide Each Other Through Life. More»
#663 Johannes Mahr: Episodic Memory, Imagination, and their Social Functions

Aug 11, 2022

Dr. Johannes Mahr is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Schacter Memory Lab at Harvard University. He will be a professor of Philosophy at York University in Toronto. Before that, he was a Mind, Brain, and Behavior Fellow with a joint appointment in the Departments of Philosophy and Psychology at Harvard. He completed his PhD in Cognitive Science under the supervision of Gergely Csibra and Dan Sperber at Central European University. His work combines philosophical and empirical approaches to study episodic memory, imagination, and human communication. More»