By Mary Ann Roser | Thursday, March 31, 2011, 01:01 PM
From Statesman.com
Harvard’s Steven Pinker, deemed one of Time magazine’s “100 Most Influential People in the World Today,” will discuss how we think, how we communicate and other intriguing topics at a free public lecture Saturday.
Pinker’s talk will riff off of his new book, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature, and include a high-level discussion of cognition geared toward doctors, engineers and researchers. But Pinker, below, is aware that members of the public also will be present, so I’m hoping it’s not too high altitude.
The lecture is set for around 2:45 p.m. at St. David’s Medical Office Building, 3000 N. I-35. It is part of the first annual Austin Translational Neuroscience Symposium sponsored by St. David’s NeuroTexas Institute Research Foundation and the University of Texas Institute for Neuroscience.
Pinker is an experimental psychologist who examines issues ranging from language acquisition to how we control the amount of information we absorb to reasons why some names catch while other names fade out.
The public is welcome to attend either the lecture or the entire symposium, from 8:30 a.m. to 4 p.m., for free, including breakfast and lunch. There is a $60 fee for physicians requesting Continuing Medical Education credit. Everyone is asked to register, even if they just want to hear Pinker. The RSVP number is 478-3627.
The symposium will feature speakers on such topics as research advances in nerve repair, the role of ion channels in epilepsy, genetics of glioblastoma and the surgical treatment of brain tumors.
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