Brain and Creativity Institute

Last updated

Brain and Creativity Institute (BCI) is a research unit of the College of Letters, Arts and Sciences at the University of Southern California, which aims to "gather new knowledge about the human emotions, decision-making, memory, and communication, from a neurological perspective, and to apply this knowledge to the solution of problems in the biomedical and sociocultural arenas." The Institute was founded in August 2006, when Antonio Damasio, Hanna Damasio and colleagues moved from the University of Iowa to the University of Southern California.

Related Research Articles

Information Sciences Institute University of Southern California research institute

The USC Information Sciences Institute (ISI) is a component of the University of Southern California (USC) Viterbi School of Engineering, and specializes in research and development in information processing, computing, and communications technologies. It is located in Marina del Rey, California.

University of Southern California Private research university in Los Angeles, California, United States

The University of Southern California is a private research university in Los Angeles, California. Founded in 1880 by Robert M. Widney, it is the oldest private research university in California. For the 2019–20 academic year, there were 20,500 students enrolled in four-year undergraduate programs, and 28,000 graduate and professional students in a number of programs, including business, law, film, engineering, occupational therapy, pharmacy, and medicine. USC is the largest private employer in the city of Los Angeles and generates $8 billion in economic impact on Los Angeles and California.

Daniel Little McFadden is an American econometrician who shared the 2000 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with James Heckman. McFadden's share of the prize was "for his development of theory and methods for analyzing discrete choice". He is the Presidential Professor of Health Economics at the University of Southern California and Professor of the Graduate School at University of California, Berkeley.

Developed in his (1999) book, The Feeling of What Happens, Antonio Damasio's three layered theory of consciousness is based on a hierarchy of stages, with each stage building upon the last. The most basic representation of the organism is referred to as the Protoself, next is Core Consciousness, and finally, Extended Consciousness. Damasio, who is an internationally recognized leader in neuroscience, was educated at the University of Lisbon and currently directs the University of Southern California Brain and Creativity Institute. Damasio's approach to explaining the development of consciousness relies on three notions: emotion, feeling, and feeling a feeling. Emotions are a collection of unconscious neural responses to qualia. These complex reactions to stimuli cause observable external changes in the organism. A feeling arises when the organism becomes aware of the changes it is experiencing as a result of external or internal stimuli.

USC Viterbi School of Engineering University of Southern California engineering school

The Viterbi School of Engineering is located at the University of Southern California in the United States. It was renamed following a $52 million donation by Andrew Viterbi, co-founder of Qualcomm Inc. The USC Viterbi School of Engineering celebrated its 100th birthday in conjunction with the university's 125th birthday.

Antonio Damasio neuroscientist and professor at the University of Southern California

Antonio Damasio is a Portuguese-American neuroscientist. He is currently the David Dornsife Chair in Neuroscience, as well as Professor of Psychology, Philosophy, and Neurology, at the University of Southern California, and, additionally, an adjunct professor at the Salk Institute. He was previously the chair of neurology at the University of Iowa for 20 years. Damasio heads the Brain and Creativity Institute, and has authored several books: his most recent work, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain (2010), explores the relationship between the brain and consciousness. Damasio's research in neuroscience has shown that emotions play a central role in social cognition and decision-making.

The Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California teaches and trains physicians, biomedical scientists and other healthcare professionals, conducts medical research, and treats patients. Founded in 1885, it is the second oldest medical school in California after the UCSF School of Medicine.

Irving Stoy Reed was an American mathematician and engineer. He is best known for co-inventing a class of algebraic error-correcting and error-detecting codes known as Reed–Solomon codes in collaboration with Gustave Solomon. He also co-invented the Reed–Muller code.

Somatic marker hypothesis Hypothesis that emotional processes guide or bias decision-making

The somatic marker hypothesis, formulated by Antonio Damasio and associated researchers, proposes that emotional processes guide behavior, particularly decision-making.

Alex McDowell British production designer

Alex McDowell, RDI is British narrative designer and creative director.

The University of Southern California Gould School of Law, located in Los Angeles, California, is a law school within the University of Southern California. The oldest law school in the Southwestern United States, USC Law had its beginnings in 1896, and was officially established as a school of the university in 1900. It was named in honor of Judge James Gould in the mid 1960s.

The USC Helenes, founded in 1921, is the University of Southern California's oldest all-female service organization.

John Patrick Hawthorne is an English philosopher, currently serving as Professor of Philosophy at the Australian Catholic University in Melbourne, and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southern California. He is recognized as a leading contemporary contributor to metaphysics and epistemology.

Shang-Hua Teng is a Chinese-American computer scientist. He is the Seeley G. Mudd Professor of Computer Science and Mathematics at the University of Southern California. Previously, he was the chairman of the Computer Science Department at the Viterbi School of Engineering of the University of Southern California. In 2008 he was awarded the Gödel Prize for his joint work on smoothed analysis of algorithms with Daniel Spielman. They went to win the prize again in 2015 for their contribution on "nearly-linear-time Laplacian solvers". In 2009, he received the Fulkerson Prize given by the American Mathematical Society and the Mathematical Programming Society.

Hanna Damasio is a scientist in the field of Cognitive Neuroscience. Using computerized tomography and magnetic resonance imaging, she has developed methods of investigating human brain structure and studied functions such as language, memory, and emotion, using both the lesion method and functional neuroimaging. She is currently a Dana Dornsife Professor of Neuroscience and Director of the Dana and David Dornsife Cognitive Neuroscience Imaging Center at the University of Southern California.

Clifford Victor Johnson is an English theoretical physicist and professor at the University of Southern California Department of Physics and Astronomy.

Yolanda Gil is a Spanish computer scientist specializing in knowledge discovery and knowledge-based systems at the University of Southern California (USC). She served as chair of SIGAI the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group (SIG) on Artificial Intelligence, and the president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI).

The School of Philosophy is an academic division in the Dana and David Dornsife College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences at University of Southern California. It is one of the largest centres for the study of philosophy in the United States.

Maryam M. Shanechi is a neuroengineer. She studies ways of decoding the brain's activity to control brain-machine interfaces. She was honored as one of MIT Technology Review's Innovators under 35 in 2014 and one of the Science News 10 scientists to watch in 2019. She is Assistant Professor and Viterbi Early Career Chair in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Viterbi School of Engineering, and a member of the Neuroscience Graduate Program at the University of Southern California.