Dethronement david eagleman biography

David M. Eagleman, Ph.D., is a neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine, where he directs the Center for Synesthesia Research.
David Eagleman, a neuroscientist at the Baylor College of Medicine, is the author of “Sum: Forty Tales From the Afterlives.
David Eagleman muses on the ultimate dethronement of humankind, the “fall from the center of ourselves.” Just as Galileo plucked the Earth.

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The Obstinate Mind

THE MIND IS “TURBULENT, STRONG, OBSTINATE”, cries Arjuna dolefully in the Bhagavad Gita. Obstinate in the face of efforts to control it, and to understand it. The two obstinacies are not unrelated. The culmination of the European tradition of inquiry into the mind—ranging from Plato to Freud—is the contention that there is such a thing as the unconscious mind, a thing to whose secrets the conscious mind is not privy. The unconscious will not yield easily, certainly not to introspection or some other simple effort of the will. But that is not to say it will yield to nothing.

People have long known of the mind’s intimate connection with a particular bodily organ: the brain. The Roman royal physician Galen of Pergamon had remarked upon the connection in the 2nd century AD while working with patients who had sustained brain damage. But it has only been in the last few centuries that we have acquired the wherewithal—the use of the microscope and other observational techniques—to study the brain in its constituent complexity. Crucially, further work on brain

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Search - List of Books by David Eagleman

David Eagleman is a neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine, where he directs the Laboratory for Perception and Action and the Initiative on Neuroscience and Law. He is best known for his work on time perception, synesthesia, and neurolaw. He is also an internationally bestselling fiction writer published in 21 languages.

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David Eagleman grew up in New Mexico to a physician father and biology teacher mother. An early experience of falling from a roof raised his interest in understanding the neural basis of time perception. As an undergraduate he majored in British and American Literature at Rice University, with his junior year abroad at Oxford University, graduating in 1993. He earned his PhD in Neuroscience at Baylor College of Medicine in 1998, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at the Salk Institute. He serves on the editorial boards of the scientific journals PLoS One and Journal of Vision. He directs a neuroscience research laboratory at Baylor College of Medicine.

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The history of science can be read as a series of brusque reality checks. Once, we thought the sun revolved around the Earth, but modern astronomy relegated our real estate, incrementally, from the center of everything to a hum-drum corner of an unimportant galaxy in a handful of generations. The theory of Evolution turned us from mini-gods into just a consequence of squicky biological randomness. The decipherment of the structure of DNA and the human genome turned the spark of life into something that can be written down, stored, and analyzed by computers. Again and again, we have found our sense of centrality challenged. But at least we still had our most sacred space: the mind.

Alas, it couldn't last forever. In his genuinely beautiful book, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain(which just came out on paperback) neuroscientist David Eagleman proposes a parallel trajectory for neuroscience, booting the mind from its pedestal to remind us, yet again, of the folly of human self-importance.

Eagleman presents the idea, based on the most current science, that the phenomeno