Dreams, Genes, & Machines:
Are We Living Science Fiction?
Brain Development
Dr. Patricia K. Kuhl and Dr. Andrew N. Meltzoff,
Co-Directors, University of Washington Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences
In conversation with Jessica Strand, LFLA Director of Public Programs
With a prescient mindframe, these two highly regarded scientists, Dr. Patricia Kohl and Dr. Andrew Meltzoff, discuss their work at the University of Washington Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences (I-LABS), which explores how the brain learns, forms, and develops from ages 0-5. In this conversation with Jessica Strand, they touch on how screens affect online learning, and how racism and altruism are taught through gesture and observing adult behavior.
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This program is generously supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
Dr. Patricia Kuhl is the Bezos Family Foundation Endowed Chair in Early Childhood Learning and Co-Director of the University of Washington Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences. Internationally recognized for research on language acquisition and the “social brain,” Kuhl pioneered brain measures on infants and young children and conducted studies demonstrating how children learn. Kuhl spoke at President and Mrs. Clinton’s White House conference on early learning, as well as President and Mrs. Bush’s White House conference on learning to read. Kuhl is a member of the National Academy of Sciences. She has received many prestigious awards: The Acoustical Society of America’s Silver Medal and Gold Medal, the international IPSEN Foundation’s Jean-Louis Signoret Neuropsychology Prize, the Association for Psychological Science’s William James Lifetime Achievement Award, the Cognitive Neuroscience Society’s George A. Miller Prize in Cognitive Neuroscience, and the American Psychological Association’s Distinguished Scientific Contributions Award. Dr. Kuhl is co-author of The Scientist in the Crib: Minds, Brains, and How Children Learn (Harper Collins). Dr. Kuhl’s TED talk can be viewed here: https://bit.ly/3j08cOt
Dr. Andrew N. Meltzoff holds the Job and Gertrud Tamaki Endowed Chair in Psychology and is the Co-Director of the University of Washington’s Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences. A graduate of Harvard, with a PhD from Oxford, he is an internationally renowned expert on infant and child development. His discoveries about infant imitation helped transform our understanding of early cognition and social learning and sparked experiments on infant neural body maps in developmental cognitive neuroscience. Named one of the 50 Most Influential Living Psychologists in 2019, Dr. Meltzoff has published more than 280 papers/chapters as well as co-authored two books, The Scientist in the Crib and Words, Thoughts, and Theories, and co-edited The Imitative Mind: Development, Evolution and Brain Bases. For his work, he has received numerous awards, including: Association for Psychological Science’s (APS) William James Fellow Award, American Psychological Association’s G. Stanley Hall Award, Giessen University’s Kurt Koffka Medal, Cambridge University’s Kenneth Craik Award in Psychology, and National Institutes of Health’s MERIT Award. Meltzoff is married to Dr. Patricia K. Kuhl, and they have one daughter. His full bio is available here: https://bit.ly/2WiMiMu
