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Welcome to our ABC Seminars! This seminar series is open for everyone. The talk will take place in . After the talks, coffee and pulla will be served.

The event will be also streamed via Zoom at: 

The entangled brain: How perception, cognition, and emotion are woven together

Abstract: Humans are emotional beings, that much is clear, and emotion seems to interfere with our ability to behave more “rationally”. But the more we look at the brain of humans and nonhuman animals alike, the more it seems that the brain is not organized in terms of clear-cut, separate systems that support “emotion”, “cognition”, “motivation”, and so on. In this talk, I will present evidence that these mental capacities are supported by dynamic and distributed processes that span the entire brain. This organization supports a degree of “computational flexibility” that enables animals to cope successfully with complex and ever-changing environments. An implication of this framework is that brain processes do not respect the boundaries of standard mental terms: there are no separate brain territories for perception, cognition, action, emotion, or motivation.

Bio: Luiz Pessoa received a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and a masters in Computer Engineering from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He obtained a PhD in computational neuroscience at Boston University, USA, and postdoctoral training at the National Institute of Mental Health, USA. Since 2011, he has been at the Department of Psychology, University of Maryland, College Park, where he is full Professor and Director of the Maryland Neuroimaging Center. His research interests center around the interactions between emotion/motivation and perception/cognition. His most recent book is “The entangled brain: How perception, cognition, and emotion are woven together” by MIT Press (2022) and is aimed at a general audience interested in science.