David Eagleman

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David Eagleman (born April 25, 1971) is an American writer and neuroscientist, teaching at Stanford University as an adjunct professor in the department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences. He independently serves as the director of the Center for Science and Law. He is known for his work on brain plasticity, time perception, synesthesia, and neurolaw. He is a Guggenheim Fellow, a council member in the World Economic Forum, and a New York Times bestselling author published in 32 languages. He is the writer and presenter of the international six-hour television series, The Brain with David Eagleman.

Video David Eagleman

Biography

Eagleman was born in New Mexico to Arthur and Cirel Egelman, a physician and biology teacher, respectively. Eagleman changed his name from Egelman after discovering alternative spellings in personal genealogy research. An early experience of falling from a roof raised his interest in understanding the neural basis of time perception. He attended the Albuquerque Academy for high school. As an undergraduate at Rice University, he majored in British and American literature. He spent his junior year abroad at Oxford University and graduated from Rice in 1993. He earned his PhD in Neuroscience at Baylor College of Medicine in 1998, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at the Salk Institute.

Eagleman is currently adjunct professor at Stanford University and previously directed a neuroscience research laboratory at Baylor College of Medicine. He sits on boards of several arts organizations and is the youngest member of the board of directors of the Long Now Foundation. Eagleman is a Guggenheim Fellow, a Next Generation Texas Fellow, a Fellow of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, and a council member on the World Economic Forum's Global Agenda Council on Neuroscience & Behavior. He was voted one of Houston's Most Stylish men, and Italy's Style fashion magazine named Eagleman one of the "Brainiest, Brightest Idea Guys" and featured him on the cover. He was awarded the Science Educator Award by the Society for Neuroscience. He has spun off several companies from his research, including BrainCheck, which develops portable cognitive testing and concussion detection, and NeoSensory, which uses sound-to-touch sensory substitution to feed data streams into the brain, as described in his TED talk.

Eagleman has been profiled in popular-press magazines such as the New Yorker, Texas Monthly, and Texas Observer, on pop-culture television programs such as The Colbert Report and on the scientific program Nova Science Now. Stewart Brand wrote that "David Eagleman may be the best combination of scientist and fiction-writer alive". Eagleman founded Deathswitch, an internet based dead man's switch service, in 2007.

As opposed to committing to strict atheism or to a particular religious position, Eagleman refers to himself as a possibilian, which distinguishes itself from atheism and agnosticism by studying the structure of the possibility space.

Maps David Eagleman

Scientific specializations

Sensory substitution

In a TED talk, Eagleman unveiled a method for using sound-to-touch sensory substitution to feed data streams into the brain. In 2015 he launched a venture-funded company from his laboratory, NeoSensory, with offices in Palo Alto, California and Houston, Texas.

Time perception

Eagleman's scientific work combines psychophysical, behavioral, and computational approaches to address the relationship between the timing of perception and the timing of neural signals. Areas for which he is known include temporal encoding, time warping, manipulations of the perception of causality, and time perception in high-adrenaline situations. In one experiment, he dropped himself and other volunteers from a 150-foot tower to measure time perception as they fell. He writes that his long-range goal is "to understand how neural signals processed by different brain regions come together for a temporally unified picture of the world".

Synesthesia

Synesthesia is 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. By this technique he has tested and analyzed thousands of synesthetes, and has written a book on synesthesia with Richard Cytowic, entitled Wednesday is Indigo Blue: Discovering the Brain of Synesthesia. Eagleman has proposed that sensory processing disorder, a common characteristic of autism, may be a form of synesthesia

Visual illusions

Eagleman has published extensively on what visual illusions [3] tell us about neurobiology, concentrating especially on the flash lag illusion and wagon wheel effect.

Neuroscience and the law

Neurolaw is 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 the Center for Science and Law.

Scientist vs Mystic | A Conversation about Cosmos, Brain and ...

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Television

Eagleman wrote and hosted The Brain with David Eagleman, an international television documentary series for which he was the writer, host, and executive producer The series debuted on PBS in America in 2015, followed by the BBC in the United Kingdom and the SBS in Australia before worldwide distribution. The New York Times listed it as one of the best television shows of the year. In 2016, the series was nominated for an Emmy Award.

Eagleman serves as the scientific advisor for the HBO television series Westworld. He previously served as the science advisor for the TNT television drama, Perception, starring Eric McCormack as a schizophrenic neuropsychiatrist. In that role, Eagleman wrote one of the episodes, Eternity.

The Brain with Dr. David Eagleman (2015-)

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Books

Sum

Eagleman's work of literary fiction, Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives, is an international bestseller published in 32 languages. The Observer wrote that "Sum has the unaccountable, jaw-dropping quality of genius", The Wall Street Journal called Sum "inventive and imaginative", and the Los Angeles Times hailed the book as "teeming, writhing with imagination". In the New York Times Book Review, Alexander McCall Smith described Sum as a "delightful, thought-provoking little collection belonging to that category of strange, unclassifiable books that will haunt the reader long after the last page has been turned. It is full of tangential insights into the human condition and poetic thought experiments... It is also full of touching moments and glorious wit of the sort one only hopes will be in copious supply on the other side." Sum was chosen by Time Magazine for their Summer Reading list, and selected as Book of the Week by both The Guardian and The Week. In September 2009, Sum was ranked by Amazon as the #2 bestselling book in the United Kingdom. Sum was named a Book of the Year by Barnes and Noble, The Chicago Tribune, The Guardian, and The Scotsman.

Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain

Eagleman's science book Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain is a New York Times bestseller and was named a Best Book of the Year by Amazon, the Boston Globe, and the Houston Chronicle. Incognito was reviewed as "appealing and persuasive" by the Wall Street Journal and "a shining example of lucid and easy-to-grasp science writing" by The Independent. The book explores the brain as being a "team of rivals", with parts of the brain constantly "fighting it out" among each other.

The Runaway Species

In 2017 Eagleman and co-author Anthony Brandt (a music composer) wrote The Runaway Species, an examination of human creativity. The book was described by the journal Nature as "A lively exploration of the software our brains run in search of the mother lode of invention... It sweeps the reader through examples from engineering, science, product design, music and the visual arts to trace the roots of creative thinking." The Wall Street Journal wrote that "the authors look at art and science together to examine how innovations -- from Picasso's initially offensive paintings to Steve Jobs's startling iPhone -- build on what already exists... This manifesto of sorts shows how both disciplines foster creativity."

The Brain: The Story of You

In 2015, The Brain came out as a companion book to the television series The Brain with David Eagleman.

Brain and Behavior: A Cognitive Neuroscience Perspective

In 2016, Eagleman co-authored this Cognitive Neuroscience textbook with Jonathan Downar. The textbook is published by Oxford University Press, and is used by many universities around the world, including Stanford and Columbia.

Wednesday is Indigo Blue: Discovering the Brain of Synesthesia

Eagleman's book on synesthesia, co-authored with neurologist Richard Cytowic, compiles the modern understanding and research about this perceptual condition. The afterword for the book was written by Dmitri Nabokov, the son of Vladimir Nabokov, a famous synesthete. The book won the Montaigne Medal for "books that illuminate, progress, or redirect thought".

Why the Net Matters

In 2010, Eagleman published Why the Net Matters (Canongate Books), in which he argued that the advent of the internet mitigates some of the traditional existential threats to civilizations. In keeping with the book's theme of the dematerialization of physical goods, he chose to publish the manuscript as an app for the iPad rather than a physical book. The New York Times Magazine described Why the Net Matters as a "superbook", referring to "books with so much functionality that they're sold as apps". Stewart Brand described Why the Net Matters as a "breakthrough work". The project was longlisted for the 2011 Publishing Innovation Award by Digital Book World. Eagleman's talk on the topic, entitled "Six Easy Ways to Avert the Collapse of Civilization", was voted the #8 Technology talk of 2010 by Fora.tv.