2004 LECTURE SERIES

What Makes Human's Smart? Lessons from Children

Dr. Elizabeth S. Spelke
Harvard University
Tuesday, Feb. 3, 2004

Although animals easily learn about biologically important events such as finding food and avoiding danger, only humans develop rich abstract knowledge in areas not tied to our biology, from learning how to cook to theorizing about the origins of the universe. Dr. Spelke's studies of how infants and children grasp numerical concepts suggest that human cognitive ability results from two basic features of our minds--a collection of "core" knowledge systems that we share with other animals, and a second more complex system, linked to human language, that is unique to us.

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Sleep, Memory and Dreams: What are they good for?

Dr. Robert Stickgold
Harvard Medical School
Tuesday, March 16, 2004

We spend one-third of our lives in the mysterious state of sleeping and, perchance, dreaming. One of the critical functions of sleep is the "off-line" reprocessing of memories. Sleep researcher Stickgold will explain how this reprocessing can strengthen, integrate, and even analyze previously stored memories. The part that dreams play in all this remains uncertain, but new analyses of dream content provide clues into a phenomenon that is almost universally experienced but little understood.

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Remembering Memory and the Brain:
Open Forum Discussion with Faculty Fellows of the CNLM

Dr. James L. McGaugh and Colleagues
University of California, Irvine
Tuesday, May 18, 2004

To celebrate the tenth year of this acclaimed public lecture series, James L. McGaugh, the professor and researcher who has been called "Mr. Memory," returns to the Barclay stage by popular demand. He will share some of the major recent developments in brain and memory research and will then be joined by a panel of faculty fellows from UCI's world-renowned memory research institute for an extended open discussion of questions from the audience.

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