Next week Tom Ray, tropical ecologist, artificial life expert, and now neuro-mapping pioneer will share his thoughts on accelerating our understanding of the neurochemistry of consciousness by mapping what he calls "receptor space."

Tom is a true complexity expert -- an evolutionary ecologist of both the biological and digital worlds.  Tom's rich research agenda and advice have inspired me over the past 15 years.  His ecological research and conservation efforts in Costa Rica stimulated my work on disturbance behaviors in Atta cephalotes (leaf cutter ants) at Finca La Selva.  His work at the Santa Fe Institute on Tierra, a distributed digital artificial life reserve, pushed the science of complexity to new levels.

Hundreds of articles have been written about Tom's previous research.  I'm confident his approach to mapping the potential mental states that the human mind can experience will prove to be his most important work to date.  Few people have first-hand experience with multiple complex evolutionary systems.  It is this deep perspective that should allow him to contribute significantly to our understanding of the human mind.

Tom Ray is currently a Professor of Zoology at the University of Oklahoma and an Invited Researcher at ATR Human Information Sciences Laboratories, Kyoto, Japan.

As Paul Allen mentioned earlier this week, understanding the brain and how the mind emerges from it remains one of great frontiers of science.  I'm honored to have Tom Ray, for the first time, share his new research direction with us on Brain Waves.  Expect great thoughts!