WICI Talk - From DNA to Complex Cognition: How We Learn, Discover, and Create the World

From DNA to Complex Cognition: How We Learn, Discover, and Create the World

Creating and discovering knowledge are the cores of our Cognitive, Social, and Economic worlds. Understanding and tapping the mechanisms underlying these abilities have been the driving force of research in my laboratory for the past 20 years. We have used a variety of methodologies, ranging from analyses of DNA polymorphisms and the changing of expression levels of DNA, to imaging brains (fMRI, MEG, NIRS), and to videotaping creative scientists in naturalistic contexts. These studies allowed us to investigate people engaged in complex reasoning, social interactions, and creative solutions to real-world problems and have revealed a key set of processes that together explain the nature of human insight and how we create new knowledge. We have found interactions among key brain regions that are at the core of creative analogical and categorical thinking. Additionally, we have explored how both the context in which ideas are generated and educational experience can modulate the extent to which these brain regions are activated and inhibited. Taken together, our findings provide an understanding of the mechanisms that make possible complex thinking, and they suggest new ways that creative thought and discovery can be facilitated across a broad range of contexts.

Speaker Profile: Kevin Dunbar

Kevin Dunbar is professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto Scarborough and a member of the University of Toronto Program in Neuroscience. He conducts research on the ways that people think in complex situations. The hallmark of his approach to understanding human thought is to use multiple converging techniques including neuroimaging (fMRI and fNIRS), genetic analyses (DNA Genotyping and DNA Microarrays), traditional experiments (verbal protocol analysis, reaction time, and answers to questions probing peoples concepts, videotaping and audiotaping naturalistic situations. Using these techniques he is probing the underpinnings of scientific discovery, analogical reasoning, creativity, and causal reasoning.