Made New Scientist "Top Books of 2009" Story
               
               
               
               
               
               
   
   
RESEARCH,
CV,
Contact
Mark Changizi is Director of Human Cognition at a 2AI Labs
Write at...
Science 2.0
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PsychToday
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ChangiziBlog
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RECENT NEWS
(All press stories)
by Mind Hacks author Tom Stafford:
"...unusual in the range and quality of his ideas, and the
clarity and humour with which he can lay them out."
by Adrian G. Dyer: " ...interesting and challenging new theories."
Forbes,
Times Union
(video),
LA Times,
AOL News,
BoingBoing,
Toronto Sun
BOOKS
THE BRAIN FROM 25,000 FEET (Kluwer 2003)
High Level Explorations of Brain Complexity, Perception, Induction and Vagueness
THE VISION REVOLUTION (Benbella 2009)
How the Latest Research Overturns Everything We Thought We Knew About Human Vision
HARNESSED (Benbella 2011)
How Language and Music Mimicked Nature and Transformed Ape to Man
MARK CHANGIZI
is an evolutionary neurobiologist aiming to grasp the ultimate foundations underlying
why we think, feel and see as we do. His
research
focuses on "why" questions, and he has made important discoveries such as on why we see
in color, why we see illusions, why we have forward-facing eyes, why letters are shaped
as they are, why the brain is organized as it is, why animals have as many limbs and
fingers as they do, and why the dictionary is organized as it is.
He
attended
the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, and then went on
to the University of Virginia for a degree in physics and mathematics, and to the University
of Maryland for a PhD in math. 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 2010 he
took the post of Director of Human Cognition at a new research institute called 2ai.
He has more than thirty scientific journal
articles, some of which have been covered in
news venues
such as 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 working on his fourth book, this one on creativity, called
ALOOF: How Not Giving a Damn Maximizes Your Creativity.
Praise for THE VISION REVOLUTION:
"...the novel ideas...may have a big effect on our understanding of the human brain."
-- Wall Street Journal, June 19, 2009.
Book excerpt in WSJ.
"Changizi's theories are appealing and logical... ...will make you wonder the next time you notice someone blush"
-- Scientific American MIND, July 2009
"...surprising, overturning theories that have dominated primatology since the 1970s"
-- Barnes & Noble Spotlight Review, July 13, 2009
"Changizi challenges common notions regarding sight. ...keep[s] them... dazzled."
-- Publishers Weekly (starred review), May 11, 2009
"...fascinating book...", in a story on the best books of 2009
-- New Scientist, Aug 25, 2010
The book has also been mentioned in interviews in the
New York Times and
Scientific American,