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 -- PsychToday -- ChangiziBlog

[ FB page -- Twitter -- Stumble ]

RECENT NEWS (All press stories)
  • NEW: Seeing Through Yourself: The Reason for Binocular Vision (Science 2.0).
  • NEW: R. M. Alvarez lists Vis Rev among his "five books to read" this summer.
  • NEW: Vis Rev in New Scientist story on the six best science books of 2009.
  • NEW: Color research discussed in Road & Track.
  • NEW: Paperback of THE VISION REVOLUTION coming out right about...now.
  • Harnessed discussed in special issue of Les Cahiers.
  • Stephen Pinker's Instincts on Language (PsychToday).
  • P, NP, And Is Academia Inhospitable to Big Discoveries? (PsychToday).
  • Cyclopses, video games, and The Vision Revolution on Gizmodo.
  • The Man Who Mistook His Y for a Hat (PsychToday).
  • Levels of Real World Wizardry (PsychToday).
  • Oliver Sacks mentions my origins-of-writing research in The New Yorker.
  • "Is 'red' the same to all creatures?" My color research on CNN.
  • VR reviewed on Diffusion Radio by Ian Woolf.
  • The Colorful Smell of Richard Dawkins (PsychToday).
  • Great review of VR in The Psychologist (pay wall)
    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."
  • And great review of VR in Quarterly Review of Biology (pay wall)
    by Adrian G. Dyer: " ...interesting and challenging new theories."
  • LiveScience on my highlight piece on cats with mouse bodies.
  • Stories on harnessing color vision for hospital health:
    Forbes, Times Union (video), LA Times, AOL News, BoingBoing, Toronto Sun
  • Three-part excerpt from The Vision Revolution First, Second, Third.
  • Why Doesn't Size Matter for the Brain? (SB).
  • Eye Computer: Turning Vision Into A Programmable Computer (SB).
  • 'Writing' research in NY Times rev of Dehaene's book. "...most interesting..."
  • Going Green with Reading: Dehaene's Reading in the Brain (Telegraph).
  • Benchfly interview.
  • The Science of Illusions in Four Easy Steps (SB).
  • City-Brain research on Discovery Channel's Daily Planet (7 min, 30 sec in).
  • Why Does Music Make Us Feel? (SciAm).
    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,