Baruch Performing Arts Center Presents NEUROCULTURE: THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON BASEBALL

Baruch Performing Arts Center presents NeuroCulture: This is Your Brain on Baseball, A Brain Awareness Week Event on Tuesday, March 12, 2019 at 6:30pm at Baruch Performing Arts Center, 55 Lexington Ave (enter on 25th Street between 3rd & Lexington Avenues), NYC. Tickets are $11-21 and can be purchased at www.baruch.cuny.edu/bpac.

Journalist Zach Schonbrun, author of The Performance Cortex: How Neuroscience Is Redefining Athletic Genius, explores what drives human movement with Jason Sherwin, co-founder and CEO of deCervo, a neuro-tech startup based in New York City that measures and improves cognitive performance for athletes.

With deCervo co-founder Jordan Muraskin, Jason Sherwin has been using EEG technology to track baseball players' mental processing during batting exercises to gauge exactly when the player chose to swing - or not - and how much confidence their decision held. They also have the capacity to measure which parts of the brain fire are active during these quick decisions, map response times over a variety of pitches, and assess the batter's concentration level. Zach Schonbrun's expertise makes him the perfect interpreter to translate for non-scientists the impact such research can have on performance in sports and more broadly.

Zach Schonbrun is an author and journalist who regularly writes about sports and business for The New York Times. His work has also appeared in Bloomberg BusinessWeek, ESPN the Magazine, SB Nation Longform, VICE, Newsday, The Athletic, and Yahoo! Sports, among other publications. His sports coverage has spanned multiple national championships, as well as regular reporting on New York's professional and college teams. His debut book The Performance Cortex: How Neuroscience Is Redefining Athletic Genius has garnered great acclaim from Sports Illustrated and The New York Times. Zach holds a B.A. in Economics from Syracuse and an M.S. in Journalism from Columbia.

Jason Sherwin is a scientist, engineer, musician, and writer who has held many prestigious positions that allow him to overlap his specialties. With a background in physics, music, and aerospace engineering, he's contributed research to a variety of fields, including but not limited to the automotive traffic system, the neuroscience of cellists, and complex engineering problems in the military. In 2014, he founded deCervo with Columbia University labmate Jordan Muraskin, and since have been contracted by multiple MLB teams to develop and advance their technological services. He has been awarded the DARPA Seedling Grant and the Nunn-MacArthur Security Program Fellowship, among other accolades, and has held multiple advisory positions at Columbia University. Jason has a B.A. in Arts and Physics (both with honors) from University of Chicago, and both an M.S. and PhD. In Aerospace Engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology.

Baruch Performing Arts Center is an acclaimed performing arts presence. Located in the heart of Manhattan just east of Chelsea and the famed flatiron building, BPAC presents renowned classical music, opera, jazz, theater, dance, discussion, film, and innovative cross-genre programming. BPAC has presented over 1,000 cultural programs in its 5 spaces since 2003. Its curated season of 40 programs annually emphasizes new work experienced in intimate settings, the diversity of American culture as exemplified by Baruch students (who come from 130 different countries), and work that lives at the confluence of art and social justice. BPAC's Neuroculture series, now in its fourth year, regularly features discussions with prominent researchers, authors, and artists on the intersection of Neuroscience with disciplines like art, law, and the social impact of neurological syndromes.

Past presentations have included theatre companies such as the National Asian American Theatre Company, Folksbiene, New Georges, The Acting Company, Aquilla and MCC. Dance companies such as Dzul Dance, José Limón, and Urban Bush Women. BPAC is the New York home of the Alexander String Quartet and presents a rich chamber music season including ensembles such as the Israeli Chamber Project, Cantata Profana, and pianists Sara Davis Buechner and 2018 Lincoln Center Emerging Artist, Michael Brown. BPAC offers a jazz series named for bassist and faculty member Milt Hinton, which has featured artists such as Grammy-Award winner Vince Giordano and the Nighthawks. Discussion program have included writers Teju Cole, Colum McCann and Amitav Ghosh, actress Linda Lavin, and thought leaders such as Gloria Steinem and U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan.

Visit www.baruch.cuny.edu/bpac for complete and up-to-date information on the 2018-19 season.