David Edelman, Ph.D., is an Associate Fellow in Experimental Neurobiology at The Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, California and an Assistant Professor of Neurobiology at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla.
One of his main areas of study is the neural correlates of consciousness in non-human animals.
With his colleague, Dr. Anil Seth of the University of Sussex, Dr. Edelman recently laid out a framework for the study of animal consciousness that suggests that certain fundamental properties of conscious states are amenable to study and may in fact be present in widely different phyla, from cephalopod mollusks to humans. Dr. Edelman earned his B.A. in Sociology and Anthropology from Swarthmore College and his Ph.D. in Physical Anthropology, with a specialization in paleoanthropology, from the University of Pennsylvania.
From 1997 to 2005, he was a postdoctoral fellow at both the Scripps Research Institute and the Neurosciences Institute.
Lecture:
ReThinking Animals
February 2012