THE SCIENCE OF CONSCIOUSNESS
April 25-30, 2016 - Tucson, ARIZONA
Loews Ventana Canyon Resort
PLENARY
THURSDAY
April 28, 2016
8:30 am to 10:40 am
PL 5 - Conscious Intention and Free Will
Aaron Schurger
École Polytechnique Fédérale, Lausanne
Aaron Schurger completed his undergraduate studies in computer science
at Indiana University and then worked as a software consultant before
going on to earn his PhD in psychology and neuroscience at Princeton
University under the guidance of Jonathan D. Cohen and Anne Treisman.
After that he joined the research team of Stanislas Dehaene at the
NeuroSpin research center as a post-doc, and then as a senior
researcher working with Olaf Blanke and José del R Millán at the EPFL
in Lausanne, Switzerland.
He is currently associate professor (“chargé
de recherche 1”) with the French National Institute for Health and
Medical Research (INSERM), based at the NeuroSpin research center near
Paris. Schurger's research focuses on the neural signatures of
subjective experience and the neural antecedents of self-initiated
movement, both from a dynamical systems perspective. In 2013 Schurger
was awarded the William James Prize (ASSC) and was recently awarded the
BMI-Kaloy prize (Kaloy Foundation) for his 2012 work on the
influence of spontaneous fluctuations in brain activity on
self-initiated movement.
Schurger’s work on conscious perception has focused on how the formation of stable patterns of brain activity might play a role in consolidating and transmitting neural information
and might serve as a signature of conscious perception. Schurger uses
a variety of techniques in his research including behavioral
psychophysics, neuroimaging, computational and neural-network modeling, machine learning, and brain-computer interfaces. In 2014 Schurger was awarded a grant from the European Research Council (ERC)
to investigate the mystery of spontaneous voluntary movement : how do decisions-to-act emerge in the brain in the absence of an external imperative? |