Assistant Professor - Department of Neuroscience Assistant Professor - Menninger Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences Ph.D., Baylor College of Medicine, 1998 B.A., Rice University, 1993 One Baylor Plaza Baylor College of Medicine Houston TX, 77030 Telephone: 713-798-6699 - Fax: 713-798-3946 Email: eagleman@bcm.tmc.edu Web:neuro.bcm.edu/eagleman

The long range goal of our lab is to understand how brains construct reality. We pursue this with three main prongs: time perception, synesthesia, and the importance of neuroscience to legal systems.

Time perception: We combine psychophysical, behavioral, and computational approaches to address the relationship between the timing of perception and the timing of neural signals. We are currently engaged in experiments that explore temporal encoding, time warping, manipulations of the perception of causality, and time perception in high-adrenaline situations. We use this data to explore how neural signals processed by different brain regions come together for a temporally unified picture of the world.

Synesthesia: Synesthesia is a perceptual condition in which information between the senses is blended. We study synesthesia from the level of genetics to neuroimaging, and have developed the internationally standardized battery for synesthesia at www.synesthete.org. I have recently written a book on synesthesia which strives for a modern synthesis of the field: Cytowic RE and Eagleman DM (2009). Wednesday is Indigo Blue: Discovering the Brain of Synesthesia.  MIT Press.

The Law and Neuroscience: I am founder and director of BCM's Initiative on Neuroscience and Law, which studies how new discoveries in neuroscience should navigate the way we make laws, punish criminals, and develop rehabilitation. The project brings together a unique collaboration of neurobiologists, legal scholars, and policy makers, with the goal of building modern, evidence-based policy. Please see http://www.neulaw.org/ for more information.

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Cui X, Stetson C, Montague PR, Eagleman DM (2009). Ready…Go: Amplitude of the fMRI Signal Encodes Expectation of Cue Arrival Time. PLoS Biology. 7(8): e1000167.

Eagleman DM (2009). The objectification of overlearned sequences: A large-scale analysis of spatial sequence synesthesia. Cortex. 45(10): 1266-1277.

Eagleman DM & Pariyadath V (2009). Is subjective duration a signature of coding efficiency? Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. 364(1525):1841-51.

Eagleman DM & Goodale MA (2009). Why color synesthesia involves more than color. Trends in Cognitive Sciences. 13(7): 288-292.

Cytowic RE & Eagleman DM (2009). Wednesday is Indigo Blue: Discovering the Brain of Synesthesia. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Eagleman DM, Correro MA, Singh J (2009). Why neuroscience matters for a rational drug policy. Minnesota Journal of Law, Science and Technology. In press.

Pariyadath V, Eagleman DM (2008). Brief subjective durations contract with repetition. Journal of Vision. 8(16):1-6.

Eagleman DM (2008). Human time perception and its illusions. Current Opinion in Neurobiology. 18(2):131-6.

Kline KA, Eagleman DM (2008). Evidence against the snapshot hypothesis of illusory motion reversal. Journal of Vision. 8(4):13, 1-5.

Stetson C, Fiesta MP, Eagleman DM (2007). Does time really slow down during a frightening event? PLoS One. 2(12):e1295.

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• Mingbo Cai (Neuroscience)

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Timing judgments in humans recalibrate rapidly. (a) By injecting a delay between an action and its sensory feedback (white flash, top), the brain recalibrates its timing expectations so that the flash seems closer in time to the button press (white flash, bottom). As a result, a surprise flash coming soon after the keypress (yellow flash) will appear to the subject to have come before – an illusory reversal of action and sensation. (b) Psychophysical characterization of the effect. The shift in temporal order judgment sets in within about 10 trials of exposure to an injected delay. (c) When the brain experiences an illusory reversal of action and sensation, the anterior cingulate cortex is maximally activated. We have suggested that this is evidence for multiple, conflicting timing representations in the brain (Stetson et al, 2006, Neuron).

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