Guests of the Bayreuth Academy in the last five years

Our Guests

Mr. Prof. Dr. Rafael Núñez

Inviting institution:	Bayreuth Academy of Advanced African Studies
Stay:	08. Februar 2014
Email:	rnunez@ucsd.edu
Home university:	University of California (Vereinigte Staaten von Amerika)
Personal information:	Dr. Rafael Núñez investigates cognition from the perspective of the embodied mind. He is particularly interested in high-level cognitive phenomena such as conceptual systems, abstraction, and inference mechanisms, as they manifest themselves naturally through largely unconscious bodily/mental activity (e.g., gesture production co-produced with conceptual metaphors and blends). His multidisciplinary interests bring him to address these issues from various interrelated perspectives: mathematical cognition, the empirical study of spontaneous gestures, cognitive linguistics, psychological experiments, neuroimaging, and field research investigating spatial construals of time in the Aymara culture of the Andes. Dr. Rafael Núñez's book, Where Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being (with UC Berkeley linguist George Lakoff) presents a new theoretical framework for understanding the human nature of Mathematics and its foundations. Dr. Rafael Núñez is the director of the Embodied Cognition Laboratory at UCSD, with lab space and members dedicated to investigating how cognition is grounded on the peculiarities, experiences, and limitations of the human body.