Allan Snyder

Allan Snyder

Allan Whitenack Snyder is the director of the Centre for the Mind at the University of Sydney, Australia where he also holds the 150th Anniversary Chair of Science and the Mind. He is a co-founder of Emotiv Systems and winner of the International Australia Prize in 1997 and the Marconi Prize in 2001 for his contributions to optical physics.

Allan is also the Creator and Chairman of the What Makes a Champion? forum, an official Olympic cultural event first held at the Sydney 2000, then Beijing 2008 and forthcoming London 2012 Olympic Games. Nelson Mandela and John Howard opened the 2000 event. Tony Blair and Kevin Rudd opened the 2008 Beijing event.

Snyder's research career began in optical physics and he has published several important papers and books in this field. More recently, he has begun to work on mind sciences. His discoveries in brain science are hailed in the journal Nature as "breaking a 19th century mindset", while his advances in physics are described in Science magazine as a "giant step forward".

Snyder has appeared in several television programs promoting his idea that transcranial magnetic stimulation of the left temporal lobe can induce savant-like skills in typical people. For example, these studies claim that after TMS, a person can draw better or count the number of dots on a screen very fast.