30 Second Brain

BrainFacts
www.brainfacts.org
A lot of information about the brain and
neuroscience, hosted by the Society for
Neuroscience and partners.

Mo Costandi’s blog
www.guardian.co.uk/science/neurophilosophy
Mo Costandi’s neurophilosophy blog
at The Guardian. Mo is a molecular and
developmental neurobiologist turned
science writer.

The Sackler Centre for Consciousness
Science
www.sussex.ac.uk/sackler
The website for a prominent research
group in consciousness science.

Scholarpedia
www.scholarpedia.org
A peer-reviewed version of Wikipedia with
many excellent articles about neuroscience.

Society for Neuroscience
www.sfn.org
The Society for Neuroscience is the
world’s largest organization of scientists
and physicians devoted to understanding
the brain and nervous system.

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Tristan Bekinschtein is a biologist and PhD in Neurosciences from the University of Buenos Aires and has done postdoctoral work in Paris and Cambridge. He is currently Wellcome Trust Fellow at the Medical Research Council and University of Cambridge, and has wide interests in cognition and neurophysiology. In the last few years he has been mainly concentrating on describing different states of consciousness such as awake, sleep, sedation and the vegetative state. His new line of work primarily looks at transitions, how we lose consciousness and how we get it back. He publishes articles in top scientific journals, and also collaborates in TV, radio and media projects involving neuroscience and what makes us humans.

Daniel Bor is a neuroscientist based at the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science, University of Sussex. He previously worked at the University of Cambridge, where he also gained his PhD. He has published research papers in journals, including Science and Neuron on a range of areas, including frontal-lobe function, consciousness, intelligence, memory, brain training, savantism and synaesthesia. He is the author of the popular science book on consciousness science, The Ravenous Brain: How the New Science of Consciousness Explains Our Insatiable Search for Meaning (Basic Books, 2012). He also contributes articles on neuroscience and psychology for various magazines, including Scientific American Mind, New Scientist, Slate and Wired UK. For more information, visit his website at www.danielbor.com or follow @DanielBor on Twitter.

Chris Frith is a pioneer in the application of brain imaging to the study of mental processes. He was one the founders of the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at University College London. He studies agency, social cognition and the hallucinations and delusions associated with mental disorders, such as schizophrenia. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2000 and a Fellow of the British Academy in 2008. He is the author of Schizophrenia: A very short introduction (OUP, 2003) and Making up the Mind: How the brain creates our mental world (Wiley-Blackwell, 2007).

Christian Jarrett was the editor of 30-Second Psychology. He’s also author of The Rough Guide to Psychology, editor of the British Psychological Society’s Research Digest blog, staff journalist for The Psychologist magazine, a blogger for Psychology Today, and a regular contributor to 99u.com, the New York-based creativity think tank. His next book is Great Myths of the Brain. Follow him on Twitter @ Psych_Writer.

Ryota Kanai is a cognitive neuroscientist at the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science and School of Psychology at the University of Sussex. His research focus is to understand the neural basis of conscious experience. He investigates bistable perception, metacognition, binding of visual features and time perception using psychophysics, neuroimaging and brain stimulation. His research has been frequently featured in international media, such as the BBC, The Guardian, The New York Times, New Scientist and Nature’s podcast.

Michael O’Shea is Professor of Neuroscience and co-director of the Centre for Computational Neuroscience and Robotics at the University of Sussex. He was previously Professor at the University of Geneva, Associate Professor in the Pritzker School of Medicine at the University of Chicago and Assistant Professor at the University of Southern California. He held National Institute of Health and NATO research fellowships at the University of Cambridge and the University of California at Berkeley. He is author of more than 100 scholarly articles and is author of The Brain: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2005). His interests include the molecular mechanisms of memory, non-synaptic chemical signalling, biologically inspired robotics, the hard problem of consciousness and collecting antique scientific instruments.

Anil Seth is Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience and founding co-director of the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science at the University of Sussex. He is also an Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council Leadership Fellow and a Visiting Professor at the University of Amsterdam. He is editor-in-chief of Frontiers in Consciousness Research. He has published more than 100 scientific papers and book chapters, has lectured and written widely on neuroscience for a general audience and his research has been covered in a wide range of media, including The Guardian and New Scientist. Find out more at www.anilseth.com or follow him on Twitter @anilkseth.

Jamie Ward is a Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Sussex. He has degrees from the University of Cambridge and University of Birmingham. Much of his research has been devoted to understanding unusual perceptual experiences, notably synaesthesia (such as in which music may trigger colours), using methods such as brain imaging, EEG and cognitive testing. He is the Editor-in-Chief of Cognitive Neuroscience and also the author of leading student textbooks (The Student’s Guide to Cognitive Neuroscience and The Student’s Guide to Social Neuroscience).

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

PICTURE CREDITS

The publisher would like to thank the following individuals and organizations for their kind permission to reproduce the images in this book. Every effort has been made to acknowledge the pictures; however, we apologize if there are any unintentional omissions.

All images from Shutterstock, Inc./www.shutterstock.com
and Clipart Images/www.clipart.com unless stated.

Corbis/Alex Gotfryd: 1.

Getty Images/Hulton Archive: 1.

Ivan Hissey: 1.

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, DC: 1.

Public Library of Science: 1.

AUTHOR ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Anil Seth is grateful to the Dr Mortimer and Theresa Sackler Foundation for enabling consciousness research at the University of Sussex, via the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science.

Images

RESOURCES

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS