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The annual Cognitive Neuroscience Summer Institute, familiarly and fondly known as “Brain Camp,” helped give rise to the field of cognitive neuroscience, suggests the Chronicle of Higher Education. Launched in 1988, the program’s earlier iterations took place at Dartmouth, after cognitive neuroscientist Michael S. Gazzaniga brought the year-old program to Hanover. Currently held at the University of California at Santa Barbara, where Gazzaniga now teaches, Brain Camp retains its original “balance of intensive talks with hands-on group exercises and relaxed social time.”

“From the beginning,” the Chronicle quotes Gazzaniga, “what we were trying to do was to gather together 70 of the brightest kids from around the world to come together and let them see how this field is going to work, and what the topics are going to be,” he says, “to let them participate in the making of the field as well.”

New York University Professor Elizabeth Phelps, who attended the program’s first session, told the Chronicle, “Today, Brain Camp introduces new students to a well-established field and its deep community of scholars.”

Read the full story, published 9/3/12 in the Chronicle of Higher Education.