Second Nature: Brain Science and Human Knowledge

He earned a B.S. in pre-medical studies at the University of Notre Dame, a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Yale University (where he was a Sterling Prize Fellow), and did his post-doctoral work in Computer Science at the University of Maryland, College Park. He was recently recognized as an “emerging leader under 40” by the Renaissance Weekend, and was one of only twenty people world-wide to be invited to attend the McDonnell Project in Philosophy and the Neurosciences workshop for early career researchers.

Dr. Anderson is author or co-author of over fifty scholarly and scientific publications in artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and philosophy of mind. His best-known article, “Embodied Cognition: A Field Guide,” was one of the most requested articles from Artificial Intelligence for 2003, 2004 and 2006, and has been adopted for courses in computer science, philosophy and psychology in several countries. His current areas of research include using graph-theory based methods to illuminate the functional structure of the cortex, by mining hundreds of brain imaging studies for information about the coactivation of neural components; and an account of the evolution of the brain via exaptation of existing neural circuitry (the “massive redeployment hypothesis”).