From Data to Wisdom – What Europe can learn from India. – Thomas Heironymous Bak

By January 3, 2007videos page

The Talk

While Europe is advanced in many ways, the speaker lays down many areas where India has to teach the world and what Europe in particular can learn from India.

PS : This talk has no pictures.

Thomas Heironymous Bak, Dr

Dr  Bak is a neurologist and cognitive neuroscientist of international repute, from School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, Edinburgh. Born to Polish parents in Cracow, a medical student in Switzerland and Germany, Thomas went on to pursue a brilliant academic career in cognitive neuroscience that spanned ten years in Cambridge, UK. He has a special interest in linguistics and brain function in health and disease.

In addition to mastery over English and six European languages, he also has working knowledge of Russian, Turkish and Japanese. Closer to home, he has a basic knowledge of Sanskrit and, during this trip to India has acquired the ability to read ‘Vanakkum’ in Tamil too. His knowledge of languages has led him to do original work in multilingual people who develop speech disorders. He has done extensive work in diseases like Parkinsonism and dementia and has a special interest in the borderland of Neurology and Psychology. Extensively traveled, he is visiting faculty to various universities across Europe, South America and Japan.

His extracurricular interests are varied and while in Cambridge, Thomas founded the Cambridge International Poetry society that attracted students from all backgrounds with its interesting and unifying themes. He was also President, Cambridge Interdisciplinary Crosstalk Society, that organized lively interactive talks by speakers from different areas of science and humanities, understandable to non-experts and yet on a high level. He was also President of Cambridge University Central European Society.

Young, well informed and enthusiastic about different cultures, Thomas has an avid and passionate interest in India, its languages, politics, philosophy, poetry and traditions.

Leave a Reply