David Eagleman

David Eagleman is the director of the Laboratory for Perception and Action at Baylor College of Medicine. He holds joint appointments in Psychology, Biomedical Engineering, and the Institute for Neuroscience at UT Austin, as well as an adjunct appointment in Psychology at Rice University. He earned his Ph.D. at Baylor College of Medicine, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at the Salk Institute. His areas of specialization include:

• Time perception: His lab combines psychophysical, behavioral, and computational approaches to address the relationship between the timing of perception and the timing of neural signals. He is currently engaged in experiments that explore temporal encoding, time warping, manipulations of the perception of causality, and time perception in high-adrenaline situations. This data is used to explore how neural signals processed by different brain regions come together for a temporally unified picture of the world.
• Synesthesia, an unusual perceptual condition in which stimulation to one sense triggers an involuntary sensation in other senses. He is the developer of The Synesthesia Battery, a free online test where people can determine whether they are synesthetic.
• Visual illusions and what they tell us about neurobiology. He has concentrated recently on the flash lag illusion and wagon wheel effect.
• Neuroscience and the Law, 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 Baylor College of Medicine's Initiative on Law, Brains and Behavior.

Books by David Eagleman

• Behind the I: The Secret Life of the Unconscious Brain, Oxford University Press, 2008 (upcoming)
• Unsolved Mysteries of the Brain, Pantheon Press, 2008 (upcoming). See short version: Ten Unsolved Mysteries of the Brain, cover article in Discover Magazine, August 2007.
• Hearing Colors, Tasting Sounds: The Kaliedoscopic Brain of Synesthesia, co-authored with Richard Cytowic, submitted for publication.
• The Fluid Machine: How the Brain Reconfigures Itself of the Fly, Oxford University Press, 2008 (upcoming)
• Sum: The Afterlife Archipelago, Pantheon Press, 2008 (upcoming). (Fiction)