Occupation Writer, scientist Role Writer Name Jan Lauwereyns | Nationality Belgian Language Dutch, English | |
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Born Johan Marc Jose Lauwereyns
13 May 1969 (age 54)
Antwerp, Belgium ( 1969-05-13 ) Education Catholic University of Leuven Books Brain and the Gaze: On the Active Boundaries of Vision | ||
Jan Lauwereyns (born 13 May 1969), full name Johan Marc José Lauwereyns, is a writer and scientist. As a cognitive neuroscientist, he specializes in the voluntary control of attention and decision making. He has published articles in journals such as Nature, Neuron, and Trends in Cognitive Sciences, and the monographs The Anatomy of Bias and Brain and the Gaze with The MIT Press. As a multilingual poet, he gained an international reputation for innovative work.
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Cognitive neuroscientist
Lauwereyns was born in Antwerp, Belgium. He obtained his PhD at the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium, in 1998 with a thesis on the intentionality of visual selective attention. He has since conducted research and lectured on the neural mechanisms of perception and decision making at several institutes, including the U.S. National Institutes of Health (Bethesda, Maryland), Juntendo University (Tokyo, Japan), and Victoria University of Wellington (Wellington, New Zealand). He is currently Professor in the Faculty of Arts and Science and in the Graduate School of Systems Life Sciences at Kyushu University (Fukuoka, Japan).
The Intensive Approach
In 2010, The MIT Press published his monograph The Anatomy of Bias, an integrative account of the structure and function of bias and sensitivity. Lauwereyns connects findings and ideas in neuroscience to analogous concepts in psychonanalysis, literary theory, philosophy of mind, and experimental economics. The book "offers a 'point of entry' in a fascinating field and a source of inspiration for further research" and represents "a remarkable amalgam of science and poetry, one that ultimately serves the interest not only of truth but of beauty and goodness as well." A second monograph, Brain and the Gaze, followed in 2012, also published by The MIT Press. This book, like the previous, offers an integration of perspectives from philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience; this time focusing on active vision. Here, Lauwereyns develops The Intensive Approach, "a smart and reasonable combination of classic computational theories of perception (a la Marr) that say that vision is essentially a top-down process, and less conservative accounts (a la Noë) that emphasise the pervasive sensorimotor nature of perceptual experience and the role that (bottom-up) sensorimotor engagements play in visual processes. The intensive approach to vision is therefore a (top-down, bottom-up) approach that highlights the deeply interactive nature of perceptual awareness, while assigning a fundamental role to observer-dependent biases and to internal mechanisms in the processing of perceptual experience."
Multilingual poet
Lauwereyns has published single-author volumes of poetry in his native language, Dutch, and in Japanese and English. He has received several prizes and nominations for his work in Dutch, most notably the VSB Poetry Prize 2012. He was also awarded grants from the Flemish Literature Fund and Creative New Zealand. According to the Flemish Literature Fund, his "analytical approach of poetic subjects produces a remarkable effect: funny, incisive and unsettling all at once. It is a poetry of crackling brain cells". Lauwereyns is Associate Editor of the Belgian literary journal DW B, and often works in collaboration with other writers and artists, including Leo Vroman, Patricia de Martelaere, Rachel Levitsky, Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven, Kiwao Nomura, and Michael Palmer.
The poetry of Lauwereyns "embodies a relationship with the impossibility of perfection. The formal experiment of writing (sometimes in collaboration, in a range of languages) substantiates, up to a point and never completely, the insistent presence of absence. Forms temporarily affirm certainty, but never entirely or lastingly so: 'The lake won't actually fit on the page.'"