CNS 2017 | Symposium: Big Ideas in Cognitive Neuroscience
Saturday, March 25, 2017 from 2:00 – 4:00 pm, Bayview Room of the Hyatt Regency San Francisco.
Organizers: David Poeppel (Max-Planck-Institute & NYU) and Mike Gazzaniga (UC Santa Barbara)
Chairs: Anna C. Nobre (Oxford University) and Marc Raichle (Washington University St. Louis)
There has been remarkable progress in the last years in the neurosciences, often driven by compelling technical developments in recording techniques, innovative analytic approaches, and new computational frameworks. But what are the big ideas that go along with the big techniques and the big data? In this symposium, we discuss some foundational themes and critical challenges that deal with the neurosciences more broadly, but especially the human neurosciences. Recent discussions in the neurosciences have been relentlessly reductionist. The guiding principle of this symposium is that there is no privileged level of analysis that can yield special explanatory insight into the mind/brain on its own, so ideas and techniques across levels will be necessary. There are many domains of inquiry that merit examination and debate, but to initiate a first CNS discussion, just three themes will be addressed in this symposium: memory, language, and motor control/action. Six speakers, in three pairs, will consider some major challenges and cutting-edge advances, from molecular mechanisms to decoding approaches to network computations. The presentations and debate aim to provide a tentative outline of what might be a productive and ambitious agenda for our fields.
Speakers:
- Charles R. Gallistel (Rutgers University) and Tomás Ryan (Trinity College Dublin & MIT) on memory.
- Angela Friederici (Max-Planck-Institute) and Jean-Rémi King (NYU) on language.
- John Krakauer (Johns Hopkins University) and Danielle Bassett (University of Pennsylvania) on action/motor.
