Is It Possible to Simplify the Standard Model of Vision

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The most straightforward way to think about vision is you have to locate things, and then you want to know what they are. So there's a whole chunk of brain tissue that weu know that the human braint has enormous amounts dedicated to the visual system. And these m series of regions, of which there are dozens, actually, are em their job is to extract the information that lets you actually identify things. We've worked together on this kind of thing for many years, trying to bring together data from patients, right, patience, with stroke and imaging and biology and linguistics.

Language comes naturally to us, but is also deeply mysterious. On the one hand, it manifests as a collection of sounds or marks on paper. On the other hand, it also conveys meaning – words and sentences refer to states of affairs in the outside world, or to much more abstract concepts. How do words and meaning come together in the brain? David Poeppel is a leading neuroscientist who works in many areas, with a focus on the relationship between language and thought. We talk about cutting-edge ideas in the science and philosophy of language, and how researchers have just recently climbed out from under a nineteenth-century paradigm for understanding how all this works. David Poeppel is a Professor of Psychology and Neural Science at NYU, as well as the Director of the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt, Germany. He received his Ph.D. in cognitive science from MIT. He is a Fellow of the American Association of Arts and Sciences, and was awarded the DaimlerChrysler Berlin Prize in 2004. He is the author, with Greg Hickok, of the dual-stream model of language processing. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.