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Prof Semir Zeki

Semir Zeki is Professor of Neuroesthetics. Professor Zeki has written four books: A Vision of the Brain (1993 – Blackwell, Oxford); Inner Vision: an exploration of art and the brain (OUP, Oxford, 1999); La Quête de l’essentiel (with the late French painter Balthus) (Archimbaud, Paris 1995) and Splendours and Miseries of the Brain (Blackwell 2008). Professor Zeki is also the convener of the annual international meeting in neuroesthetics, held in Berkeley, California every January. Telephone: 020 7679 7187 (Office), Internal ext 37187 020 7679 2936 (Lab), Internal ext 32936 020 7679 7316 (Admin), Internal ext 37316 Email: s.zeki@ucl.ac.uk Admin email: zeki.pa@ucl.ac.uk

Research focuses on how the visual brain is organized, using imaging and psychophysical techniques. This work is supported by a programme grant from the Wellcome Trust. A further Strategic Award in Neuroesthetics from the Wellcome Trust supports other interests in the general field of neuroesthetics, studying the relationship between brain activity and aesthetic appreciation and artistic creativity. This part of his work is supported by . The work in general involves a multi-disciplinary approach that brings together neuroscientists, cognitive scientists and those in the humanities, to address questions that are of deep concern to science and society.

Brief profile:
1964: BSc in Anatomy, UCL
1967: PhD in Anatomy, UCL
1980-1985 Henry Head Research Fellow of the Royal Society
1981-present Professor of Neurobiology at UCL
Visiting scientist at various institutions worldwide.

Fellow of the Royal Society 1990, of the Academia Europea (1993), of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts (1995). Foreign member of the American Philosophical Society.

Among Awards received are:
Prix Science pour l’Art (LVMH, Paris 1991);
Rank Prize in opto-electronics (Rank Foundation, 1992),
Zotterman Prize (Swedish Physiological Society 1993),
Betty and David Koetser Foundation Prize (1997),
Electronic Imaging Award (International Society for Optical Engineerting, 2001),
King Faisal International Prize in Science 2004 (King Faisal Foundation)
Erasmus Medal (Academia Europea (2008).

Lectures include:
David Marr Lecture 1987 (Cambridge),
Ferrier Lecture of the Royal Society (1995),
Sir Humphrey Davy Lecture (Académie des Sciences, Paris (1996),
Carl Gustav Bernhard Lecture 1996 (Royal Swedish Academy of Science),
David Bodian Lecture 1996 (Johns Hopkins University),
Forbes Lectures 1997 (Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole),
Tizard Lecture (Westminster School 2004)

For website, please visit: www.vislab.ucl.ac.uk

Selected recent publications:

• Improbable areas in the visual brain. Trends in Neurosci. 26: 23-26 (2003).
• The processing of kinetic contours in the brain. Cereb. Cortex. 13: 193-203 (2003) (with R.J. Perry and A. Bartels)
• The disunity of consciousness. Trends in Cogn. Neurosci. 7:214-218 (2003)
• Neural concept formation and art: Dante, Michelangelo, Wagner. J. Conscious. Studies 9 (3):53-76 (2002).
• Functional brain mapping during free viewing of natural scenes. Hum Brain Mapp. 21:75-85 (2004) (with A Bartels)
• The Neurology of Ambiguity, Conscious Cogn. 13:173-96 (2004)
• The neural correlates of maternal and romantic love. NeuroImage. 21:1155-66 (2004) (with A Bartels)
• Neural correlates of beauty. J Neurophysiol. 91:1699-705 (2004) (with H Kawabata)
• The chronoarchitecture of the human brain - natural viewing conditions reveal a time-based anatomy of the brain. NeuroImage. 22:419-33 (2004) (with A Bartels)
• Brain dynamics during natural viewing conditions - a new guide for mapping connectivity in vivo. NeuroImage. 24:339-49 (2005) (with A Bartels)
• The chronoarchitecture of the cerebral cortex. Phil Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 360:733-50 (2005) (with A Bartels)
• Measuring sight by sound. Brain 128:1226 - 1229 (2005) Book review, of Brain and Visual Perception: the Story of a 25-year Collaboration by David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel
• The Ferrier Lecture 1995. Behind the Seen: the Functional Specialization of the Brain in Space and Time. Phil Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 360:1145-83 (2005)
• The integration of colour and motion by the human visual brain. Cereb Cortex. 15:1270-9. (2005) (Epub 2004 Dec 22) (with M Self)
• Les fonts neuronals de l’ambigüitat de Salvador Dalí (Neural Sources of Salvador Dalí’s Ambiguity) (In Catalan). In Noves Fronteres de la Ciència, l’Art i el Pensament, edited by the Center KRTU-Department of Culture of the Generalitat de Catalunya with the co-operation of the Art and Contemporary Culture Lectureship of the Universitat de Girona and ArtNodes (2005)
• The temporal order of binding visual attributes. Vision Research 46 (14):2280-6. (2006) (with A Bartels)
• The Theory of Microconsciousness. Book chapter, in Blackwell Companion to Consciousness (2007)
• The effect of background colors on the tuning of color sensitive cells in monkey area V4. J. Neurophysiol. 95(5):3047-59 (2006) (with M Kusunoki and K Moutoussis)
• Seeing invisible motion: a human fMRI study. Current Biology 16:574-9 (2006) (with K Moutoussis)
• Perceptual compression of space through position integration. Proc. Roy. Soc. B. 273 (1600):2507-12. (2006) (with B Roulston and M Self)
• Sightless view: neural correlates of occluded objects. Cereb Cortex 17:1197-205 (2007) (with O Hulme)
• Natural vision reveals regional specialisation to local motion and to contrast-invariant, global flow in the human brain. Cerebral Cortex (2007, Epub ahead of print) (With A Bartels and N Logothetis)