How do we make decisions? Bill Newsome and Brie Linkenhoker explore whether our decisions are driven by our subconscious desires or if they are shaped by conscious goals.

Professor Bill Newsome is a leading investigator in sensory and cognitive neuroscience and teaches graduate and medical courses in neuroscience, and co-teaches an undergraduate course on social and ethical issues in the neurosciences. The long-term goal of his lab’s research is to understand the neuronal processes that mediate visual perception and visually guided behavior.

Brie Linkenhoker, MA ’01, PhD ’03, is the director of Worldview Stanford a new program that creates interdisciplinary learning experiences about the forces shaping the future to help prepare leaders for the strategic challenges ahead. After training in neuroscience, she moved to the private sector, where she applied what she had learned about decision making to real world problems faced by companies, national governments and non-profits. She returned to Stanford two years ago to start Worldview Stanford, which aims to move the new knowledge being generated at Stanford into the hands of decision-makers who need it most.