David Eagleman is a neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine, where he directs the Laboratory for Perception and Action. 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. He is on the editorial boards of Journal of Vision and PLoS One.
Eagleman’s scientific work has combined psychophysical, behavioral, and computational approaches to address the relationship between the timing of perception and the timing of neural signals. He has explored temporal encoding, time warping, manipulations of the perception of causality, and time perception in high-adrenaline situations. This data is used to understand how neural signals processed by different brain regions come together for a temporally unified picture of the world. Eagleman also studies synesthesia, a harmless perceptual condition in which the senses are mixed – for example, someone hearing music might experience colors. He has recently authored a book on synesthesia entitled Wednesday is Indigo Blue: Discovering the Brain of Synesthesia (MIT Press, 2009).
Eagleman wrote the libretto for Anthony Brandt’s piece Maternity, Women’s Voices through the Ages. The World Premiere of which will be performed at the ROCO In Concert season finale on April 21.