De Lange Conference will be a virtual ‘brain-fest’

CONTACT: B.J. Almond
PHONE:
(713) 348-6770
EMAIL: balmond@rice.edu
OR
CONTACT: Lynn Foltin at Baylor College of Medicine
PHONE:
(713) 798-4712
E-MAIL: jfoltin@bcm.tmc.edu

DE LANGE CONFERENCE
WILL BE A VIRTUAL ‘BRAIN-FEST’
Leading experts on neurobiology of brain
and behavior to speak at Rice University March 5-6

If a disease or drugs
can cause a person’s brain to behave a certain way, does that individual truly
have “free choice” to make decisions?

Neurophilosophy
researcher Patricia Churchland will address that issue at the De Lange
Conference being held at Rice University in Houston March 5-6. She is one of
more than a dozen scientists and scholars who will share findings from the
“Decade of the Brain” at the conference, which is being organized by Rice and
Baylor College of Medicine.

The conference theme,
“Neurobiology of Perception and Communication: From Synapse to Society,” was
chosen in reference to all the neuroscience research on the central nervous
system funded by the federal government throughout the 1990s.

“During the ‘Decade of
the Brain’ in the U.S., many new sophisticated techniques were developed to
study the inner workings of neurons and the brain that could open up new
approaches to treating nervous system disorders and refine our understanding of
the funda-mental mechanisms of innate and learned behaviors,” said De Lange
Conference co-director Jim Pomerantz, professor of psychology and director of
the Center for Neurosciences at Rice.

“We thought this would
be a good time to look back on what was discovered about the brain over the past
10 years and the implication of that knowledge for the future,” Pomerantz said.
“The subject matter is of particular interest to faculty and students at Rice
and Baylor who are involved with the Center for Neurosciences that Rice
established in 1999 as an interdisciplinary program that combines computational
approaches with cognitive and molecular sciences to decipher the function of the
brain and its complex neurological system.”

Researchers and students
attending the conference will get to hear internationally known specialists
address the critical areas of memory, language, sensation, perception and
attention. Lectures and discussions will focus on recent discoveries and provide
a glimpse into the future of novel methods, advances in theory, treatment of
diseases, and new understandings in the philosophy of mind.
“The speakers we
have scheduled for the conference are leaders in research related to the brain,”
said Michael Crair, also a co-director of the conference and Baylor assistant
professor of neuroscience. “Given their expertise and the session topics, the De
Lange Conference will be a virtual brain-fest.”

Churchland’s
presentation, “What Happens to Choice and Responsibility if the Brain is a
Causal Machine?” will be the keynote address at 7:30 p.m. March 5 in Stude
Concert Hall at Alice Pratt Brown Hall on the Rice campus. Churchland is a
professor of philosophy at the University of California at San Diego.

“In the courts, in the
education of children, and in general in daily life, we assume that some
decisions are freely made and that agents should be held accountable for those
decisions,” Churchland said. “On the other hand, we see the range of allowable
excuses from responsibility broadening as we begin to understand the role of
certain neuropathologies in aberrant behavior.”

She acknowledges that
diseases such as Tourette’s syndrome can hinder one’s free choice, and in her
talk she will address the contention that free choice is uncaused choice. She
will also discuss the proposal that pragmatic and scientific considerations
jointly yield the best working basis for the assignment of
responsibility.

In addition to
Churchland, among the other speakers for the De Lange Conference are:
*
Michael Posner, Sackler Professor of Psychology in Psychiatry and director of
the Sackler Institute, who will chair a session on “Attention as an Organ
System” at 9 a.m. March 5;
* Jacques Mehler, director of research at Centre
National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris, who will present “Language in
Infancy: A look at the Biological Foundations of Language” at 3:25 p.m. March
5;
* Larry Squire, research career scientist at the Veterans Affairs Medical
Center in San Diego and professor of psychiatry and neurosciences at the
University of California at San Diego, who will chair a session on “Memory
Systems of the Brain: Human, Monkey, Rodent” at 8:30 a.m. March 6;
* James
Hudspeth, Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) investigator and the F.M. Kirby
Professor at The Rockefeller University, who will chair a session on “How
Hearing Happens: Mechanoelectrical Transduction and Amplification by Hair Cells
of the Internal Ear” at 1:15 p.m. March 6.

Lectures will take place
in Stude Concert Hall in Alice Pratt Brown Hall. For a complete list of
speakers, topics and the date and times of their presentations, visit the Web
site at www.delange.rice.edu.

This year’s De Lange
Conference will be the fourth in a series that was created at Rice in 1991 by
C.M. and Demaris Hudspeth in memory of Demaris’ parents, Albert and Demaris De
Lange. The conferences are held every two to three years on topics of great
concern to society and are intended to bring experts to the Rice
campus.

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