Did you ever wonder why we see in colour, why we see illusions, why we have forward-facing eyes, or why the brain is structured as it is… why fingers get ‘pruney’ when wet, or how we have acquired writing, language and music.
Dr. Mark Changizi is a theoretical cognitive scientist, with research on evolutionary origins of biological and cognitive design. As a keynote speaker at The International Congress of Behavioural Optometry (ICBO), to be held in the last week of April, he promises to provide some unique and fresh insights into human vision.
Dr. Changizi believes you can’t understand vision without an evolutionary perspective. His research focuses on “why” questions, and his research has unearthed information about the aforementioned questions. His ground-breaking research also includes comparisons between autistic and unaffected processing of visual information and defining the hierarchical organisation of the primate visual cortex.
Dr. Changizi holds a degree in physics and mathematics from University of Virginia, and a PhD in mathematics completed at the University of Maryland. In 2002 he won a prestigious Sloan-Swartz Fellowship in Theoretical Neurobiology at Caltech, and in 2007 he became an assistant professor in the Department of Cognitive Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York. In 2010 he took the post of Director of Human Cognition at a new research institute called 2ai Labs.
Dr. Changizi is co-founder of VINO Optics and a researcher at the institute he co-founded, 2ai LABS. He has authored more than three dozen scientific journal articles, and is regularly published in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Newsweek and WIRED. He has written three books, The Brain from 25,000 Feet (Kluwer 2003), The Vision Revolution (Benbella 2009) and Harnessed: How Language and Music Mimicked Nature and Transformed Ape to Man (Benbella 2011). He is currently working on his next book, Survival of the Coolest: On the Origins of Emotions.
Dr. Mark Changizi will speak in Sydney at the 8th International Congress of Behavioural Optometry, International Conference Centre, Darling Harbour Sydney from 26 –29 April 2018. For details and to register, visit www.icbo.events
