Dr. Alan P. Jasanoff, Ph.D., discusses his book, _The Biological Mind: How Brain, Body, and Environment Collaborate to Make Us Who We Are_. Dr. Jasanoff explains why the brain must be considered within its biological, natural and social environment. The tendency to see the mind as completely autonomous, a view he calls the “cerebral mystique,” doesn't hold up. Jasanoff’s discussion includes brain dysfunctions as well as recent trends such as brain hacking –and the transhumanist aspiration that our brains can someday be preserved and then revived much later.
Alan Jasanoff is an Associate Member of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research, and an Associate Professor with a primary appointment in the Department of Biological Engineering and additional appointments with the Departments of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Nuclear Science, and Engineering. Prior to joining the MIT faculty in 2004, he was a Whitehead Fellow at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research at MIT. He received a Ph.D. in biophysics in 1998 from Harvard in the laboratory of Don Wiley, where he was supported by a Howard Hughes Medical Institute pre-doctoral fellowship. He also earned an M.Phil. in Chemistry at Cambridge University in 1993 and an undergraduate degree in biochemistry from Harvard College in 1992. He was named a Raymond and Beverly Sackler Foundation Scholar in 2004, and he received a 2006 McKnight Technological Innovations in Neuroscience Award for developing methods to apply MRI calcium sensors for cellular-level functional imaging in living animals.