Dr. Dale Purves
Dale Purves, M.D., FAAAS is
Professor of Neurobiology, Duke University;
Professor and Director, Neuroscience and Behavioral Disorders Program;
and
Executive Director, A*STaR Neuroscience Research Partnership;
Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School.
He is also on the Editorial Board of
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and
is Editor (Vision) of
Scholarpedia.
His current research concerns visual and auditory perception and the
neurobiological underpinnings of perceptual phenomena. Ongoing
investigations in vision include understanding the perception of
brightness, color, orientation, motion, and depth; the interest in
audition concerns understanding the tonal relationships in music arising
from the similarity of musical dyads and voiced speech
spectra.
The unifying theme of these projects is the hypothesis that visual and
auditory percepts are generated according to a wholly empirical strategy
that represents in perception the empirical significance of sensory
stimuli rather than their physical properties. This theory of perception
and its relation to cortical structure and function is being explored by
examining the perceptual responses of human subjects, the statistical
relation of stimuli and sources in natural image and sound databases, as
well as the emerging properties of virtual organisms evolving in defined
environments. The overarching hypothesis is that perceptual
phenomenology will always be accurately predicted by the information in
databases that serve as proxies of human experience.
Dale coedited
Neuroscience, Fourth Edition,
Principles of Cognitive Neuroscience, and
Neuroscience, + Neurons in Action,
coauthored
Why We See What We Do: An Empirical Theory of Vision and
Principles of Neural Development,
and authored
Brains: How They Seem to Work and
Body
and Brain: A Trophic Theory of Neural Connections.
His papers include
Correlated Size Variations in Human Visual Cortex, Lateral Geniculate
Nucleus, and Optic Tract,
The distribution of oriented contours in the real world,
Unequal representation of cardinal and oblique contours in ferret
visual
cortex,
Post-natal reduction of neural unit size in the rabbit ciliary
ganglion,
Similarities in normal and binocularly rivalrous viewing, and
Re-innervation of guinea-pig superior cervical ganglion cells by
preganglionic fibres arising from different levels of the spinal
cord.
Dale earned his B.A. at Yale University in 1960 and his M.D. at Harvard
Medical School in 1964.
He was
elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1989,
elected to the Institute of Medicine, National Academy of Sciences in
1996,
elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1999, and was
elected to Fellowship of the American Association for the
Advancement
of
Science in 2008.
Watch
Making Sense of Sensory Information (Davidson Films) and
Music Rooted in Human Speech.
Read
Music and speech based on human biology,
Team explains a longtime visual puzzler in new way,
Laser Measurements Reveal Biological Basis Of Distance
Perception, and
Perception Of Color Contrast, Constancy Depends On Neural "Reflexes,"
Says Vision Theory.