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WORK TITLE: The Secret Life of the Mind
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://neuro.org.ar/profile/175
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
https://www.ted.com/speakers/mariano_sigman * http://www.imbes.org/Mariano-Sigman * https://www.ft.com/content/75e708b0-5c0e-11e7-b553-e2df1b0c3220
RESEARCHER NOTES:
| LC control no.: | no2012072790 |
|---|---|
| LCCN Permalink: | https://lccn.loc.gov/no2012072790 |
| HEADING: | Sigman, Mariano, 1972- |
| 000 | 00471cz a2200133n 450 |
| 001 | 9000389 |
| 005 | 20171005073817.0 |
| 008 | 120524n| azannaabn |n aaa c |
| 010 | __ |a no2012072790 |
| 035 | __ |a (OCoLC)oca09208605 |
| 040 | __ |a AgViUSA |b eng |e rda |c AgViUSA |d DNLM |
| 046 | __ |f 1972 |2 edtf |
| 100 | 1_ |a Sigman, Mariano, |d 1972- |
| 670 | __ |a La pizarra de Babel, 2011: |b t.p. (Mariano Sigman) back flap (b. in Buenos Aires, 1972; holds a degree in Physics from Universidad de Buenos Aires) |
PERSONAL
Born 1972, in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
EDUCATION:University of Buenos Aires, M.S.; Rockefeller University, Ph.D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Neuroscientist. Integrative Neuroscience Laboratory, University of Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, Argentina, founder, 2006.
AWARDS:James S. McDonnell Foundation scholar; Human Frontiers fellow; IBM Scalable Data Analytics Award; Young Investigator Prize, College de France; Human Frontiers Career Development Award; Pontifical Academy of Sciences Laureate, 2016.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Mariano Sigman was born in Argentina in 1972 and raised in Spain. Prior to launching his scientific career, Sigman attended the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina and Rockefeller University in New York, where he received his master’s and postdoctoral degrees, respectively. He then spent a period in Paris, France, completing a Human Frontiers fellowship. Sigman is the creator of the Integrative Neuroscience Laboratory at the University of Buenos Aires, which launched in 2006. Sigman’s work has earned him several accolades, including a Pontifical Academy of Science medal. In addition to academia, his work spans across written publications and television, and he has delivered a TED Talk on neuroscience and the brain.
The Secret Life of the Mind: How Your Brain Thinks, Feels, and Decides expands on the material in Sigman’s popular TED Talk. In The Secret Life of the Mind, Sigman seeks to uncover the mysteries of the brain and why people process information the way they do. In the process, he debunks a few myths people have come to believe about the brain and how it works. Much of Sigman’s findings come from research he has conducted.
One of the areas of brain function Sigman delves into is education and learning. He examines how people learn and tries to bring to light how various learning disabilities, such as dyslexia, affect the brain. Based on Sigman’s findings, the phenomenon of dyslexia is more related to a person’s understanding of phonemes (phonetic sounds) and pronunciation than seeing correctly what is written on a page. He discusses how exposure to a diverse range of intellectual stimuli benefits young minds. He also explains how best to prepare young children for learning and for future success.
Sigman backs up his findings with his own research and the discoveries and theories of several other renowned scientists, including the likes of Sigmund Freud and Carl Sagan. He also cites several famous experiments. In the process of unveiling so much information, Sigman tries to challenge his audience to rethink their ideas on how human brains function. A Kirkus Reviews contributor suggested that The Secret Life of the Mind “rewards readers with many useful insights.” In Publishers Weekly, a reviewer stated: “Readers will find it a fascinating browse packed with arresting insights at every turn.” Noted website writer Alison McCulloch commented: “The book is a mostly entertaining mishmash of science and psychology that’s so wide-ranging it’s got something for everyone.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, May 15, 2017, review of The Secret Life of the Mind: How Your Brain Thinks, Feels, and Decides.
Publishers Weekly, April 24, 2017, review of The Secret Life of the Mind, p. 79.
ONLINE
International Mind, Brain, and Education Society Website, http://www.imbes.org/ (January 17, 2018), author profile.
Integrative Neuroscience Lab Website, https://neuro.org.ar/ (January 17, 2018), author profile.
Noted, http://www.noted.co.nz/ (September 15, 2017), Alison McCulloch, “Cognitive neuroscientist Mariano Sigman and the Secret Life of the Mind,” review of The Secret Life of the Mind.
TED.com, https://www.ted.com/ (January 17, 2018), author profile.
Thinking Heads, https://www.thinkingheads.com/ (January 17, 2018), author profile.
Dr. Mariano Sigman
Email: mari...@gmail.com
Google Citation Profile
Mariano Sigman was born in Argentina and grew up in Barcelona, Spain. He obtained a master degree in physics at the University of Buenos Aires and a PhD in neuroscience at the Rockefeller University, with Charles Gilbert, investigating how the cortex organizes to assemble the statistics of the visual world, vast cultural changes (such as reading) and dynamically multiplex several functions through addressing mechanisms and top-down control. He moved to Paris as a Human Frontiers Fellow, investigating with Stanislas Dehaene decision making, cognitive architecture and consciousness. In 2006 he founded the Integrative Neuroscience Laboratory, at the University of Buenos Aires. His lab has an empirical and theoretical approach to decision making, with special focus on the assemblage of unitary decisions into mental programs and understanding the construction of confidence and introspective judgments in the decision process. He was awarded a Human Frontiers Career Development Award, the young investigator prize of “College de France”, the IBM Scalable Data Analytics award and is a scholar of the James S. McDonnell Foundation.
Download Mariano Sigman's CV here.
Visit Mariano Sigman's profile at Universidad Torcuato Di Tella.
Mariano Sigman
Neuroscientist
@mariuchu neuro.org.ar
TED Speaker
In his provocative, mind-bending book "The Secret Life of the Mind," neuroscientist Mariano Sigman reveals his life’s work exploring the inner workings of the human brain.
Why you should listen
Mariano Sigman, a physicist by training, is a leading figure in the cognitive neuroscience of learning and decision making. Sigman was awarded a Human Frontiers Career Development Award, the National Prize of Physics, the Young Investigator Prize of "College de France," the IBM Scalable Data Analytics Award and is a scholar of the James S. McDonnell Foundation. In 2016 he was made a Laureate of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.
In The Secret Life of the Mind, Sigman's ambition is to explain the mind so that we can understand ourselves and others more deeply. He shows how we form ideas during our first days of life, how we give shape to our fundamental decisions, how we dream and imagine, why we feel certain emotions, how the brain transforms and how who we are changes with it. Spanning biology, physics, mathematics, psychology, anthropology, linguistics, philosophy and medicine, as well as gastronomy, magic, music, chess, literature and art, The Secret Life of the Mind revolutionizes how neuroscience serves us in our lives, revealing how the infinity of neurons inside our brains manufacture how we perceive, reason, feel, dream and communicate.
What others say
“Sigman provides vivid depictions of foundational behavioral psychology experiments...[His] book's exhaustive survey of experiments is, overall, enlightening, and Sigman's clear passion for neuroscience makes it easy to browse.” — Science Magazine
Mariano Sigman
Mariano Sigman was born in Argentina and grew up in Barcelona, Spain. He obtained a master degree in physics at the University of Buenos Aires and a PhD in neuroscience in New York. He moved to Paris to investigate decision making, cognitive architecture and consciousness. In 2006 he founded the Integrative Neuroscience Laboratory, at the University of Buenos Aires, an interdisciplinary group integrated by physicists, psychologists, biologists, engineers, educational scientists, linguists, mathematicians, artists and computer scientists.
His lab has developed an empirical and theoretical approach to decision making, with special focus on understanding the construction of confidence and subjective beliefs. Many aspects of his investigation rely on data mining and computational tools on massive corpus of human behavior (text, decision making...). Recently, he has progressively shifted his research to understand how current knowledge of the brain and the mind may serve to improve educational practice. Many of the projects conduct are developed at schools throughout the country and he is extending these investigations on cognitive development to hundreds of thousands of children through the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) framework.
Throughout his career he developed numerous research interactions with representatives of different domains of human culture including, musicians, professional chess players, mathematicians, magicians, visual artists and chefs. Several of these interactions resulted in exhibits presented in museums and galleries in Argentina, Mexico, Brazil, US, Japan, New York, Austria.
Mariano is the only Latin American scientist to be a director of the Human Brain Project, was awarded a Human Frontiers Career Development Award, the national prize of physics, the young investigator prize of “College de France”, the IBM Scalable Data Analytics award and is a scholar of the James S. McDonnell Foundation.
Mariano Sigman
Global TED Speaker. Neuroscientist and Author.
Language:
English, Spanish
Speaker links:
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Topics
Creativity and innovation
Leadership
Leadership Skills
Motivation and improvement
Science and Technology
Scientific dissemination
Teams
Specific Topics
Creative thinking
author
emotional intelligence
flexibility
happiness
inspiration
neuromarketing
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Mariano Sigman is one of the most outstanding neuroscientists in the world, with over 150 publications in the most prestigious scientific journals. He is also passionate about experimentation and has worked with magicians, chess masters, musicians, athletes and visual artists to bring his knowledge of neuroscience to different aspects of human culture and apply it in different contexts. He has participated twice (2016 and 2017) in the TED global events in Vancouver, the second with Dan Ariely. In his conferences, he teaches how the mind works and what lessons we can learn about decision making, leadership, team management, personal development or creative skills, his presentations always with a high level of participation from the audience through experiments and games.
He obtained his degree in Physics from the University of Buenos Aires, PhD in Neuroscience (PhD) in New York and did a post-Doctorate in Cognitive Sciences at the College de France (Paris). In 2016, he was awarded the Pio XI Medal, from the Pontifical Academy of Science, one of the most outstanding prizes of science (shared among others with Stephen Hawking, and several Nobel prize winners).
Beyond academy, Mariano Sigman's research has had practical implications in Medicine (for example in the diagnosis of vegetative or autistic patients), in Education (with effective interventions to improve decision-making and learning in schools throughout Latin America) and in Art (in a project "The morphology of the look" that has been exhibited in New York, Austria, Moscow, Mexico, Japan... and was presented in 2017 at the Venice Biennale). He has also developed an extensive career in the proliferation of science that includes TV programmes and hundreds of articles published in different editorial media. He is also the author of the bestseller "The Secret Life of the Mind".
Sigman, Mariano: THE SECRET LIFE OF THE MIND
Kirkus Reviews.
(May 15, 2017): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Sigman, Mariano THE SECRET LIFE OF THE MIND Little, Brown (Adult Nonfiction) $27.00 6, 27 ISBN: 978-0-316-54962-2
An exploration of recent discoveries in neuroscience and the ways in which we perceive and interpret the world.The good news is that good news is received and processed in one part of the brain. The bad news is that bad news is received and processed in another region. Why? Sigman, the founder of the Integrative Neuroscience Laboratory at the University of Buenos Aires and director of the Human Brain Project, ventures explanations for this apparent mystery, but more, he enfolds a few lessons on the controversial thesis that optimists and pessimists have different kinds of brains, much as conservatives and liberals are said to be wired differently. The author is an experimentalist with training in physics, supporting these softer interpretations with hard- edged results. One of the most on-point parts of the book is Sigman's discussion of the application of neuroscience to general education. Dyslexia, by the author's account, is more a phonological than a visual problem, leading him to declare, "you cannot read without being able to pronounce," and adding, "the phonological awareness system can be stimulated before reading begins," preparing children for reading with word games and other activities. In the larger sphere, learning a second language in very early childhood helps shatter prejudices, for even then, children discern accents and tend to trust those who sound more like them than linguistic outsiders do. The takeaway is that "revealing and understanding these predispositions can be a tool for changing them." The idea that through its relative plasticity the child brain can be molded for the better is not new, but Sigman's pointed examples of rational (and not so rational) decision- making, consciousness, mental states, and learning ("culture travels like a highly contagious virus") are backed by the latest research. There have been many recent books on the workings of the mind, and while this one doesn't quite stand out with the best of the pack, it rewards readers with many useful insights.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
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http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
"Sigman, Mariano: THE SECRET LIFE OF THE MIND." Kirkus Reviews, 15 May 2017. PowerSearch, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A491934160/GPS?u=schlager& sid=GPS&xid=3cf6e660. Accessed 23 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A491934160
2 of 3 12/23/17, 9:43 PM
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
The Secret Life of the Mind: How Your Brain Thinks, Feels, and Decides
Publishers Weekly.
264.17 (Apr. 24, 2017): p79. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Secret Life of the Mind: How Your Brain Thinks, Feels, and Decides Mariano SIgman. Little, Brown, $27 (256p)
ISBN 978-0-316-54962-2
Hidden, behind-the-scenes mechanics of thought are revealed in this scintillating ramble through brain science. Cognitive neuroscientist Sigman expands his celebrated TED talk to show the unexpected inner workings of a raft of mental phenomena: the sophisticated innate theories of mind and moral philosophy that infants use to parse social life and the complex statistical analyses they deploy to learn language; the subconscious calculations that underlie hunches, which turn out to be surprisingly accurate and which determine our decisions many seconds before we are consciously aware of them; the active mental lives of patients in a "vegetative state"; the genetic endowment of champion athletes, seen less in physical talent than in mental determination and "fighting spirit"; astronomer Carl Sagan's marijuana epiphanies; and the author's own mysterious ability to control the temperature of his fingertips. Calling on authors from Plato to Freud and on a trove of cute experiments on brainy babies, some of his own devising, Sigman's lucid exposition probes and unsettles our intuitions about how we think in the light of new science that makes the machinery transparent. The loosely organized text meanders at times, but readers will find it a fascinating browse packed with arresting insights at every turn. Agent: Max Brockman, Brockman Inc. (July)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Secret Life of the Mind: How Your Brain Thinks, Feels, and Decides." Publishers Weekly,
24 Apr. 2017, p. 79. PowerSearch, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A491250852 /GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=da858572. Accessed 23 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A491250852
3 of 3 12/23/17, 9:43 PM
Cognitive neuroscientist Mariano Sigman and the Secret Life of the Mind
by Alison McCulloch / 15 September, 2017
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Mariano Sigman: aiming to make human thought transparent.
If brain books mostly make your grey matter hurt, then this one at least forces a smile.
I probably “thought” of the first sentence of this review before I was conscious of it. Or not. I’m not sure. In fact, the more I read popular science books about how the brain works, the fewer clues I have about how or why I do anything. After a few chapters of Mariano Sigman’s The Secret Life of the Mind, “I” feel like I’m just an unwitting puppet dancing to the tune of my social conditioning and frontal cortices.
In an epilogue to the book, the author explains that his goal is to make human thought transparent. I’m sorry, but I’m more confused than ever.
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I had a similar reaction to Daniel Kahneman’s best-seller, Thinking, Fast and Slow. Great! Endless clever experiments to tell me I’m irrational and have no idea what’s really behind most, if not all, of my judgments and decisions. Now what? According to Sigman, revealing and understanding our predispositions can help us change them. I’m not so sure, and neither is Kahneman. “It’s not a case of ‘read this book and then you’ll think differently’,” he said in an interview with the Guardian. “I’ve written this book, and I don’t think differently.” Either way, this work has been a gold mine for advertisers and PR people, who by now can push our buttons far better than we ourselves can.
It’s hard for the lay reader to judge Sigman’s account of the state of brain science, which appears to be advancing faster than our ability to make sense of it. Amid a smattering of contemporary neuroscience, there are some less-recent theories to which he appeals, some of them far from settled science. Such as the Chomskyian claim that humans are hard-wired for grammatical language and Julian Jaynes’s idea that ancient writings offer insight into the evolution of human consciousness – “that only 3000 years ago the world was a garden of schizophrenics”.
The book is a mostly entertaining mishmash of science and psychology that’s so wide-ranging it’s got something for everyone. As for me, when the loss of my free will started to bite, I tried the trick on page 56 of holding a pencil lengthwise between my teeth. “Inevitably, your lips will rise in an imitation of a smile. This is obviously a mechanical effect, not a reflection of an emotion. But that doesn’t matter – it still gives a certain sense of well-being.”
THE SECRET LIFE OF THE MIND: How Our Brain Thinks, Feels and Decides, by Mariano Sigman (HarperCollins, $35)
This article was first published in the August 5, 2017 issue of the New Zealand Listener.