Maxwell R. Bennett

M. R. Bennett is Emeritus Professor of Neuroscience and University Chair at the University of Sydney. He has lead the largest personal Research Centre of Excellence funded by the Research Councils as well as being made Founding Director of the Brain and Mind Research Institute (now Centre) at Sydney, Chair of the Mind & Neuroscience Research Institute and Chair of Thompson Brain and Mind Healthcare in Queensland. He has given invited lectures to the Royal Society (London), the Australian Academy of Science (Burnet Lecture), the World Congress of Neuroscience (Kyoto) the United Nations (New York), Yale University (Franke Lectures) and the American Philosophical Association (New York).

He is a leading authority on the structure and function of synapses, on the extent they go awry in psychiatric diseases, and how these disabilities may be ameliorated through the initiation of multidisciplinary institutes. Together with P.M.S.Hacker of Oxford, he has identified major conceptual errors in cognitive neuroscience, namely the Mereological Fallacy and the Representational Fallacy, which together militate against commonly held interpretations of the outcomes of cognitive experiments. He is the author of 15 books, two on the history and future of universities, and several hundred research papers. In his spare time he paints dying flora, taking advantage of the colours that emerge from the breakdown products of decaying chlorophyll molecules.

Image: Charcoal portrait of Maxwell Bennett drawn over sheets of his neuroscientific manuscripts and illustrations in his book ‘The Idea of Consciousness’, all by his wife Gillian. The smaller images are of nerve cells and brains, as well of great philosophers and scientists concerned with the relationship between brain and mind. This portrait hung as a finalist (45 hung out of 514 entrants) in Australia’s premier drawing prize, The Dobell.