MERLIN DONALD, PhD

Merlin Donald was born and raised in Montreal, Canada. He had a very broad undergraduate education emphasizing philosophy, classics, and biology, and obtained a PhD in neuropsychology from McGill University. He spent two years as a post-doctoral fellow at the West Haven Veterans Administration Medical Center, followed by almost three years as a research neuropsychologist there, with an adjunct appointment as Assistant Professor in the Department of Neurology, Yale University School of Medicine.

He moved to Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario in 1972, becoming a professor in the department of psychology, with adjunct appointments in the Faculty of Education and the department of psychiatry (Faculty of Medicine). He served a term as head of the department of psychology. He retired from Queen’s to become professor and chair of the department of cognitive science, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio. He retired from full-time teaching and administration in 2007. He is currently professor emeritus at Queen’s, adjunct professor at Case, and honorary professor at Aarhus, University, Denmark.

He is the author of over a hundred scientific papers and two influential books: Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition (Harvard, 1991), and A Mind So Rare: The Evolution of Human Consciousness (Norton, 2001). His work has been translated into ten languages. He has been a visiting professor at University College London, Harvard, Stanford, UCSD, Lund, Aarhus, and elsewhere, as well as a visiting fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences in Stanford, California. He spent two years as a Killam Research Fellow. He is currently a fellow of the Canadian Psychological Association, the Royal Society of Canada, and the World Academy of Art & Science. His work has been widely debated in various academic disciplines, including linguistics, archaeology, anthropology, biology, cognitive science, psychology, philosophy, and neuroscience.

Most of Merlin Donald’s early empirical work was in the field of human cognitive neuroscience. During the past 25 years, he has focused on the topic that drew him to psychology in the first place: human intellectual and cognitive origins. His work bridges several disciplines in the sciences, social sciences and humanities. His central thesis is that human beings have evolved a completely novel cognitive strategy — brain-culture symbiosis — whereby the human brain cannot realize its design potential unless it is immersed during its development in a distributed communication network: that is, a symbolic culture. In effect, symbolic representation emerged from interactions between brain and culture, including, importantly, material culture and technology. At present, he is living near Toronto, Ontario, and working on the topic of how cognition is governed in cultural networks.

BRUNO GALANTUCCI, PhD

Bruno Galantucci received a PhD in Cognitive Science from the University of Padua and a PhD in Experimental Psychology from the University of Connecticut. He is currently assistant professor in the department of psychology of Yeshiva University, where he directs the Experimental Semiotics Laboratory. He is also a research affiliate at the Haskins Laboratories, where he has conducted research on the psychology of language, including speech perception, word recognition, and sentence processing, and has been a research fellow at ZIF (University of Bielefeld), where he has conducted research on embodied communication. In the last few years, he has focused on studying experimentally how humans establish and develop novel forms of communication, contributing to the foundation of the field of Experimental Semiotics. In 2010, he received an award from the National Science Foundation (USA) supporting research at the Experimental Semiotics Laboratory.

Bruno Galantucci has published in a number of peer-reviewed journals including Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, Cognitive Science, Topics in Cognitive Science, and Journal of Experimental Psychology. He also served as associate editor of Topics in Cognitive Science, as guest editor of Interaction Studies (co-editing a special issue on Experimental Semiotics), and as a guest editor of Topics in Cognitive Science (co-editing a special issue on Joint Action).

His current research interests include: Experimental Semiotics, Human Communication, Joint Action, Distributed Cognition, Social Cognition, Language, Speech Science.

PER AAGE BRANDT, DPhil

Born 1944 Buenos Aires, Danish citizen. Trained in Romance Philology, Linguistics, Semiotics, Comparative Literature, Philosophy, and Music. Specialized in structural and cognitive linguistics and semantics, later in cognitive semiotics and poetics. PhD. 1971, University of Copenhagen. Dr. Phil. 1987 (Doctorat d’État, Sémio-linguistique, Sorbonne). Associate Professor at the University of Roskilde 1972. Served at the University of Aarhus 1975-2005. Director of the Center for Semiotics since 1992. Research Professor 1993 through a 5 years contract and grant by the Danish National Research Foundation for the program in General and Dynamic Semiotics. Founder of the Center for Semiotics at the University of Aarhus. Co-editor of the European Semiotics Series, Peter Lang Verlag . 1998 Professor of Semiotics.

2001-2002 Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford.

2005 Appointed Emile B. de Sauzé Professor of Modern Languages and Cognitive Science at Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio.

Received the ‘Grand prix de philosophie 2002′ de l’Académie Française. Made ‘Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres’, 2002, by the French Ministry of Culture. In 2004 attributed the Cross of the Order of Dannebrog by Her Majesty the Queen Margrethe II of Denmark, to honour service to the Nation.

Author of a dozen of academic books and some two hundred fifty published articles in semiotics, semantics, linguistics, poetics, literary criticism, aesthetics, musicology, and philosophy. He has translated classical and modern literature and philosophy (espec. French, Spanish). Has published many volumes of poetry, co-founded the journal of poetry Banana Split and co-founded (1987) the School of Writers, Copenhagen. Latest poetry: Negationer, 2007. Latest acad. book: Spaces, Domains, and Meaning, 2004.

Current research interests:

- Cognitive musicology, poetics, and aesthetics in general
- Semio-cognitive philosophy (of mind, consciousness, meaning)
- General grammar (incl. stemmatics and its computational implementation)
- Cognitive semantics (dynamic schemas, categories, properties)
- Enunciation
- Modality
- Narrativity
- Semiotics networks of mental space integration and meaning production
- Semantic domain theory
- General and social semiotics

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