Dan Dennett thinks that human consciousness and free will are the result of physical processes.

Pawan Sinha researches how our brains interpret what our eyes see -- and uses that research to give blind children the gift of sight.

Sue Klebold has become a passionate agent working to advance mental health awareness and intervention.

Physicist Brian Cox has two jobs: working with the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, and explaining big science to the general public. He's a professor at the University of Manchester.

Brian Goldman is an emergency-room physician in Toronto, and the host of CBC Radio’s "White Coat, Black Art."

Al Seckel explored how eye tricks can reveal the way the brain processes visual information -- or fails to do so. Among his other accomplishments: He co-created the Darwin Fish.

Think of Keith Barry as a hacker of the human brain -- writing routines that exploit its bugs and loopholes, and offering a revealing look at the software between our ears.

Rebecca Saxe studies how we think about other people's thoughts. At the Saxelab at MIT, she uses fMRI to identify what happens in our brains when we consider the motives, passions and beliefs of others.

Martin Seligman is the founder of positive psychology, a field of study that examines healthy states, such as happiness, strength of character and optimism.

Ray Kurzweil is an engineer who has radically advanced the fields of speech, text and audio technology. He's revered for his dizzying -- yet convincing -- writing on the advance of technology, the limits of biology and the future of the human species.

Ogyen Trinley Dorje is the 17th Gyalwang Karmapa, a revered figure in Tibetan Buddhism devoted to preserving and propagating Buddhist teachings.

Alison Gopnik takes us into the fascinating minds of babies and children, and shows us how much we understand before we even realize we do.

Joshua Walters is a bipolar comedian whose work explores language, creativity, beatboxing and madness ...

Sloan Scholar, Fulbright Fellow, Professor Emeritus of Neuroscience, Jim Fallon looks at the way nature and nurture intermingle to wire up the human brain.

Laurie Santos studies primate psychology and monkeynomics -- testing problems in human psychology on primates, who (not so surprisingly) have many of the same predictable irrationalities we do.

Daniel Tammet is the author of "Born on a Blue Day," about his life with high-functioning autistic savant syndrome. He runs the language-learning site Optimnem, and his new book is "Embracing the Wide Sky: A Tour Across the Horizons of the Mind."

Michael Shermer debunks myths, superstitions and urban legends -- and explains why we believe them. Along with publishing Skeptic Magazine, he's author of Why People Believe Weird Things and The Mind of the Market.

David Camarillo's research focuses on understanding and preventing traumatic brain injury.

Through groundbreaking research and the lens of her own autism, Temple Grandin brings startling insight into two worlds.

Scott Fraser is a forensic psychologist who thinks deeply about the fallibility of human memory and encourages a more scientific approach to trial evidence.

Researcher Lisa Mosconi studies the brains of living patients with cutting-edge brain-imaging technology -- and uses the data to understand how brain health plays out differently in women than in men.

Susan Blackmore studies memes -- those self-replicating "life forms" that spread themselves via human consciousness. We're now headed, she believes, toward a new form of meme, spread by the technology we've created.

Roberto D'Angelo and Francesca Fedeli created the social enterprise FightTheStroke.org to open up a dialogue about the devastating effects of strokes at a young age. This issue is important to them for a simple reason: because they've been through it themselves with their son Mario.

Dan Ariely questions the forces that influence human behavior and the irrational ways we often behave.

Marvin Minsky is one of the great pioneers of artificial intelligence -- and using computing metaphors to understand the human mind. His contributions to mathematics, robotics and computational linguistics are legendary and far-reaching.

Widely regarded as the world's most influential living psychologist, Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel in Economics for his pioneering work in behavioral economics -- exploring the irrational ways we make decisions about risk.

At age 12, Martin Pistorius fell into a coma, and spent 13 years locked inside his body, unable to communicate -- until a caregiver noticed his eyes responded to her. His book "Ghost Boy" tells his story.

Jeff Hawkins pioneered the development of PDAs such as the Palm and Treo. Now he's trying to understand how the human brain really works, and adapt its method -- which he describes as a deep system for storing memory -- to create new kinds of computers and tools.

Daniel Goleman, psychologist and award-winning author of Emotional Intelligence and other books on EI, challenges traditional measures of intelligence as a predictor of life success.

Violinist Robert Gupta joined the LA Philharmonic at the age of 19 -- and maintains a passionate parallel interest in neurobiology and mental health issues. He's a TED Senior Fellow.