September FCAI Salon Series: Dr. Suzana Herculano-Houzel
Welcome back to the FCAI Salon Series for the academic year 2024. For the first talk of the semester, FCAI is excited to announce speaker Dr. Suzana Herculano-Houzel, who will present the talk “Story of (my) Life: Whatever (brain) Works!” Below, read more about Dr. Herculano-Houzel and sign up to attend. Thank you to our Salon Series co-sponsor, the Vanderbilt Kennedy Center.
Details
When: 12:00 – 1:00pm, Tuesday 3rd September, 2024
Where: In person at OMC 241 or virtually.
Talk Details
The story of life, of the human species, and of human individuals interacting in society has been told for over a century as the story of Survival of the Fittest, according to Darwin’s narrative. In that story, autism is either a brain disorder to be cured and eradicated, or there must be something advantageous about it, as well as other forms of neurodivergence, to account for why they exist. This talk proposes a radically different, optimistic and inclusive view that celebrates diversity instead, based on the speaker’s research and her life experience as an autistic person herself: that the story of life, of the human species, of human individuals, and particularly of brain evolution, her area of expertise, is simply… Whatever Works.
About the Speaker
Dr. Herculano-Houzel is an associate professor of Psychology at Vanderbilt University. Her interests include comparative neuroanatomy, the cellular composition of brains, brain morphology, brain evolution, the metabolic cost of body and brain, sleep requirement across species, feeding time, and how all of these are tied together. She writes about neuroscience and science in general for the public and has recently published in The Human Advantage: A New Understanding of How Our Brain Became Remarkable (MIT Press, 2016).
How to Sign Up
Sign up here to attend the talk in person.
Sign up here to attend the talk virtually.