February 18, 2008
Contact: Caroline Jenkins Hanna
Director of Media Relations
413/542-8417
AMHERST, Mass.—Amherst College alumnus Evan Thompson '83, professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto, will deliver a lecture titled “Meditation and the Neuroscience of Consciousness: A Neurophenomenological Approach” in Cole Assembly Room of his alma mater’s Converse Hall Thursday, Feb. 28. The talk, which is scheduled to begin at 7:30 p.m., is free and open to the public.
During his lecture, Thompson will discuss how self-reports of experience based on contemplative mental training of attention and awareness—meditation—can help advance research in cognitive science exploring consciousness and the self. He will also present an approach to investigating consciousness known as “neurophenomenology” and discuss how contemplative neurophenomenology offers a new way to relate science and contemplative wisdom traditions.
Thompson received a bachelor’s degree in Asian studies from Amherst in 1983 and a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Toronto in 1990. While writing his dissertation from 1986 to 1989, he also studied at the Centre de Recherche en Epistemologie Applique (CREA) at the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris. During that time he also co-wrote a book, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (MIT Press, 1991). From 1989 to 1991, he was supported by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada postdoctoral fellowship, which he held first at the Department of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, and then at the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. He has since held appointments with Concordia University, Boston University, York University and the University of Colorado, Boulder. He moved to the University of Toronto in July 2005, where he now serves as professor and member of the undergraduate program in cognitive science.
The event is sponsored by the Mayo-Smith Read Transdisciplinary Fund.