Our daily experiences (e.g. thinking, acting, talking to people etc.) give us the idea that we/our mind is a singular entity i.e. a unified inner space or soul that perceives and acts on the complex world around us. On the other hand, we tend to speak in ways that point to a relative segmentation of the mind – one often hears that some individuals are particularly talented at solving mathematical equations, that women are more empathic than men, that some children have a very rich imagination and are hence destined for a creative line of work. These ideas, although pernicious in some cases, point to an intuition that has historically been very important for the scientific study of the mind: that our mental capacities are somewhat independent from one another and that some of them come to us naturally to varying degrees. Observing patients with localized brain injuries and the development of scientific methods and technologies facilitating the study of specific capacities in relative isolation from others have allowed us to finesse this intuition, taking it out of the realm of scattered speculations into the scientific one. Which mental capacities can be isolated, and where are they localized in the brain? How can we investigate these locations? What are the consequences of this line of research for how we conceive of the mind more generally? Does it open up venues for understanding atypical cognition? Today’s guest is the person to answer all of these questions, or at least some of them…

She is Nancy Kanwisher. She is the Walter A. Rosenblith Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and a founding member of the McGovern Institute. She received her B.S. and PhD from MIT. After her Ph.D. she held a MacArthur Fellowship in Peace and International Security for two years. She joined the MIT faculty in 1997, and prior to that served on the faculty at UCLA and Harvard University. Her lab has contributed to the identification and characterization of a number of regions in the human brain that conduct very specific cognitive functions. She is the recipient of numerous awards in the academy, the most recent being the Jean Nicod Prize, awarded annually in Paris to a leading empirically oriented philosopher of mind or philosophically oriented cognitive scientist.

Credits:

Interview: Tanay Katiyar and Jay Richardson

Artwork: Ella Bergru

Editing: Matthieu Fraticelli

Music: Thelma Samuel and Robin Baradel

Communication: Tanay Katiyar