Dr. Greg Appelbaum's Lecture

I had written this post two weeks ago, but realized it's been sitting there as a draft and not published, apologies!

I attended Dr. Greg Appelbaum's lecture on cognitive neuroscience, specifically semantic analysis, and networking. I will preface this post by saying his talk was very confusing to me because of the extremely specific nature of his research and his use of terms that were completely foreign to me. His research interests spanned a wide variety of academic endeavors, in particular neuroeconomics, neurorhetorics, and vision and attention. I had actually participated in a neuroeconomic study for his lab, as I wrote about in an earlier blog post. In this particular lecture, he talked a lot about neurorhetorics, and the way that words related to cognitive processes in our minds. He presented data on the networks of words and how they related to each other, showing intricate maps of words and attributing emotions to the way we link these words. I remember taking a course about the brain and linguistics my freshman year, so this kind of research would interest me greatly. I believe Dr. Appelbaum's work is important to discover the new ways in which neuroscience may be applied to the world at large. I am excited that this kind of research is being conducted because emotion and language are two entities that interest me immensely, and the combination of the two is very unique.