Jaime A. Pineda is Professor Emeritus of Cognitive Science, Neuroscience, and Psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego. He joined the Department of Cognitive Science at UCSD as a founding faculty member in 1989. Here, he remained for the rest of his 33-year academic career, impacting and inspiring generations of undergraduate and graduate students to take on hard questions in the neurobiology of the human mind.
He is the author of many widely cited papers in animal and human cognitive and systems neuroscience. He edited one academic book (Mirror Neuron Systems: The Role of Mirroring Processes in Social Cognition). This is a collection of research on the functional significance of mirror neurons that includes Professor Pineda’s work on autism. It is one of the most cited and downloaded books in the field. He is the author of The Social Impulse: The Evolution and Neuroscience of What Brings Us Together.
For the last twenty years, he became interested in spiritual matters as a bridge to a fuller understanding of the mind. This led him to explore Zen Buddhism, train with a master teacher, and develop his creative side. He has published two books of poetry (Quieting of a Mind; Dawning of a New Mind) focusing on mind-brain relationships with an emphasis on spirituality, mysticism, environmentalism, and social activism. Most recently, he published his autobiography (Piercing the Cloud: Encountering the Real Me), the story of his journey and bridging of science and spirituality.
In his creative endeavors, Professor Pineda explores how true seeing, hearing, feeling, and thinking can quiet the overactive monkey mind and how it allows silence to become the fountain of creative thought. He now shares these insights with others.
