Part 1 of 12 from the May 21, 2015 UC Davis Center for Mind and Brain day-long meeting "Perspectives on Mindfulness: The Complex Role of Scientific Research" - Remarks (and performance) by CMB Director Steve Luck, PhD, Conference Chair, Clifford Saron, PhD, and Cellist Barbara Bogatin.
See
http://cmbmindfulnesssummit.faculty.u... for full conference program and
http://mindbrain.ucdavis.edufor links to other conference talks and other information about the Center for Mind and Brain at UC Davis.
Steven J. Luck, PhD is the Director of the Center for Mind & Brain and a Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Davis. Dr. Luck’s research focuses on the intersection of vision and higher cognitive processing. His laboratory has developed methods that are now widely used to assess the capacity and precision of visual working memory, leading to an explosion of research on the structure of internal mental representations and how they vary across individuals and groups. Dr. Luck also studies neurocognitive processing in schizophrenia, where he has found many aspects of impaired cognition can be explained by changes in network dynamics that lead to an aberrant hyperfocusing of attention. Dr. Luck is also a leading expert on the use of event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to measure the neural activity underlying cognition. He is a fellow of the American Psychological Association, the Society of Experimental Psychologists, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and he is the winner of many prestigious awards, including the Troland Award from the National Academy of Sciences.
Clifford Saron, PhD, Research Scientist (effective 7/15) at the Center for Mind and Brain and MIND Institute at the University of California at Davis, received his Ph.D. in neuroscience from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in 1999. Dr. Saron is Principal Investigator of the Shamatha Project, a longitudinal investigation of the effects of intensive meditation on physiological and psychological processes central to well-being, attention, emotion regulation and health. It was conceived with and taught by Alan Wallace, with the talents of a large consortium of researchers at UC Davis and elsewhere. In 2012, Dr. Saron and his colleagues were awarded the inaugural Templeton Prize Research Grant in honor of H.H. the Dalai Lama from the John Templeton Foundation to continue this work. Dr. Saron also studies sensory processing and integration in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), and is part of a large collaborative study examining if mindfulness-based interventions can ease the chronic stress of mothers of children with ASD.
Barbara Bogatin, cellist, has been a member of the San Francisco Symphony since 1994, and holds Bachelor and Master of Music degrees from The Juilliard School. Before joining the San Francisco Symphony she played with New York Chamber Soloists, the New York Philharmonic, Casals Festival, and as principal cellist with Milwaukee and New Jersey Symphony Orchestras. She has performed and recorded on Baroque cello and viola da gamba with Aston Magna, the Amati Trio, Connecticut Early Music Festival and New York’s Classical Band, and played at music festivals including Chamber Music Northwest and Lake Tahoe Summerfest. With her husband, Clifford Saron, she has led workshops on meditation and music practice at Spirit Rock Meditation Center, the Esalen Institute, Stanford Symposium for Music and the Brain, Telluride Compassion Festival and the Institute for Mindfulness South Africa Conference.
Evan Thompson, PhD - Context Matters: Steps to an Embodied Cognitive Science of Mindfulness.
