Like many forty-something scientists working in labs today, Dr. David Eagleman remembers watching Carl Sagan on television as a kid and feeling his imagination expand. Each week on Cosmos (1980), Sagan provided context for our place in the universe, giving the unfathomably enormous cosmos a door of accessibility. For Eagleman, walking through that door was the beginning of a lifelong project to do for the brain what Sagan did for the universe.

This week that project comes to PBS (Wednesday) as a series hosted by Eagleman called The Brain, launching in tandem with a book of the same name.

As an undergraduate at Rice University, he majored in British and American literature. He spent his junior year abroad at Oxford University and graduated from Rice in 1993. He earned his Ph.D. in Neuroscience at Baylor College of Medicine in 1998, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at the Salk Institute.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/daviddisalvo...in-on-pbs/

Thanks for the heads up - Eagleman seems like a very cool guy. I will definitely watch this.

Note: the Houston viewing party for the series premiere, scheduled for Wed Oct 14 at the Gorgeous Gael, has evidently been CANCELLED in deference to Game 5 of the Astros playoff series:
http://alumni.rice.edu/events/brain-viewing-party