Anne Treisman, PhD, is the James S. McDonnell Professor of Psychology at Princeton University. She received her BA from Cambridge University and her D.Phil. from the University of Oxford. She has previously held positions at Oxford University, the University of British Columbia, a Fellowship at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, a position at the University of California, Berkeley, and visiting positions at Bell Laboratories, at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford and at the Russell Sage Foundation, New York. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society, London, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, US, of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, of the American Philosophical Society, and a William James Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science.

She received a number of prizes and honors including the Howard Crosby Warren award of the Society for Experimental Psychology, the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the American Psychological Association, the George A. Miller Award from the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, and honorary degrees from the University of British Columbia and University College London. She has published many papers on attention and visual memory, starting with selective listening and filter theory, and continuing with the binding problem in vision, and with studies of visual memory, both implicit and explicit.

Born in California in 1950, Alan Wallace began his studies of Tibetan Buddhism and the Tibetan language at the University of Göttingen, West Germany in 1970. He continued his studies for three years at the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives and the Buddhist School of Dialects in Dharamsala, India. For a period of four years he studied, taught and interpreted for numerous Tibetan lamas at the Tibet Institute and the Centre for Higher Tibetan Studies, both in Switzerland. After a thirteen year absence from western academia, he earned his Bachelor’s Degree from Amherst College, summa cum laude, where, as an Independent Scholar, he researched the philosophical foundations of modern physics in light of Buddhist philosophy. He has translated and published several books on Tibetan Buddhism, language and medicine and is currently the spiritual director of Dharma Friendship Foundation in Seattle, Washington.

Alan Wallace served on the Mind & Life Board of Directors from 1990 to 2009.

Wolf Singer is Director at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt and Founding Director of the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies (FIAS) and the Ernst Strüngmann Institute (ESI) for Brain Research. He studied medicine at the Universities of Munich and Paris, received his M.D. from the Ludwig Maximilian University and his Ph.D. from the Technical University in Munich.

Until the mid-eighties his research interests were focused on the experience-dependent development of the cerebral cortex and on mechanisms of use-dependent synaptic plasticity. Subsequently, his research concentrated on the binding problem that arises from the distributed organization of the cerebral cortex. The hypothesis forwarded by Professor Singer is that the numerous and widely distributed subprocesses which constitute the basis of cognitive and executive functions are coordinated and bound together by the precise temporal synchronization of oscillatory neuronal activity.

Professor Singer has published more than 300 articles in peer reviewed journals, contributed more than 200 chapters to books, written numerous essays on the ethical and philosophical implications of neuroscientific discoveries, and published 3 books. He is the recipient of numerous awards including the IPSEN Prize for Neuronal Plasticity, the Ernst Jung Prize for Medicine, the Zülch Prize for Brain Research, the Communicator Prize of the German Research Foundation and the INNS Hebb Award. Prof. Singer was awarded a Dr. h.c. from Oldenburg University and Rutgers University, N.J. He is member of numerous national and international academies, including the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. He served as President of the European Neuroscience Association, as Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Max Planck Society, and is member of numerous advisory boards of scientific organizations and editorial boards of scientific journals.