The lecture series provides a venue in which distinguished scientists from around the world can engage in interdisciplinary dialog with members of the UCSB community to exchange recent breakthroughs in the mind sciences

Sandy Pentland
Professor, MIT

Alex ("Sandy") Pentland is the Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at the MIT Media Lab. Dr. Pentland is the faculty director of the Digital Life consortium and he is a pioneer in organizational engineering, mobile information systems, and computational social science.

Title: "Honest Signals"

Hal Varian
Professor, UC Berkeley

Hal Varian is a professor in the School of Information, the Haas School of Business, and the Department of Economics. He is also the Chief Economist at Google, and he has been involved in many aspects of the company, including auction design, econometric, finance, corporate strategy and public policy.

Title: "Computer mediated economic transactions"

Note: This lecture will be held on Friday.

Alex Martin
Senior Scientist, National Institute of Health

Alex Martin is Chief of the Cognitive Neuropsychology Section and director of the Laboratory of Brain and Cognition. His program has used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study the neural systems mediating different aspects of memory, language, and perception.

Title: "Concepts in Mind: Neural
Organization and Tuning"

Rebecca Goldstein
Philosopher and Novelist

Rebecca Goldstein is a writer whose novels and short stories dramatize the concerns of philosophy without sacrificing the demands of imaginative storytelling. In her fiction her characters confront problems of faith: religious faith and faith in an ability to comprehend the mysteries of the physical world as complementary to moral and emotional states of being.

Title: Thirty-six Arguments for the Existence of God: A work of Fiction

Steven Pinker
Professor, Harvard University

Steven Pinker is the Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology. He conducts research on language and cognition, and he has written several popular books including The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, Words and Rules, The Blank Slate, and most recently, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature.

Title: A History of Violence

Please note that this lecture will be held in Campbell Hall.

Rebecca Saxe
Assistant Professor, MIT

Rebecca Saxe is an Assistant Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience with a Fred and Carole Middleton Career Development Professorship. She studies the neural and psychological basis of theory of mind, perception of human causation, moral reasoning, self-reflection, and autobiographical memory.

Title: It's the thought that counts: fMRI studies of Theory of Mind

Steve Hillyard
Professor, UC San Diego

Steve Hillyard is a Professor of Neurosciences. His research centers around understanding the neural mechanisms underlying perception, attention, and multisensory integration in the human brain. He is one of the world's leading experts in the use of event related potentials and in the study of human attention and consciousness.

Title: Electrophysiology of the Attentive Human Brain

Carl Zimmer
Science Writer, NY Times

The New York Times Book Review calls Carl Zimmer "as fine a science essayist as we have." He reports from the frontiers of biology, where scientists are expanding our understanding of life. He has written several popular books including Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea, and Soul Made Flesh: The Discovery of the Brain and How It Changed The World.

Title: Soul Made Flesh: Neuroscience in 1659 and 2009

Paola Antonelli
Curator of Design, MOMA New York

Paola Antonelli is one of the world's foremost design experts and was recently rated as one of the top one hundred most powerful people in the world of art by Art Review. She is a curator in the Department of Architecture and Design at The Museum of Modern Art in New York City, where she curated the exhibition "Humble Masterpieces" to great acclaim.

Title: Design and the Elastic Mind

Miguel Nicolelis
Professor, Duke University

Miguel Nicolelis is an Anne W. Deane Professor of Neurobiology. He is a Brazilian physician and scientist, best known for his pioneering work in "reading monkey thought". He and his colleagues implanted electrode arrays into a monkey's brain that were able to detect the monkey's motor intention and thus able to control reaching and grasping movements performed by a robotic arm.

Title: Computing with Neural Ensembles

Matthew Rushworth
Researcher, University of Oxford

Matthew Rushworth is a University Research Professor and a Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience. He combines fMRI and transcranial magnetic stimulation to study the parietal, frontal, and cingulate regions of the brain and the role that they play in making decisions and controlling movement.

Title: The valuation of action and social information in anterior cingulate cortex