Professor emeritus of psychology and education at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, and adjunct professor of cognitive science at Case Western Reserve University, Merlin W. Donald is widely known for his theoretical work on human cognitive origins. He has recently focused on the changing “cognitive ecology” of hi-tech civilizations. A graduate of Loyola College in Montreal, he has an M.A. in psychology from the University of Ottawa and a Ph.D. in neuropsychology from McGill University. After completing a National Research Council post-doctoral fellowship in the West Haven Veterans Administration Hospital in West Haven, Connecticut, he joined the neurology department of the Yale School of Medicine as an assistant professor in 1970. He returned to Canada two years later to accept an appointment as an assistant professor of psychology at Queen’s University and was named a professor in 1982. In 2005, he joined the Case Western Reserve faculty as professor and founding chair of the new department of cognitive science, a post he held until his retirement last year. Dr. Donald has been an honorary research fellow at University College, London, a visiting scholar at the University of California, San Diego, and at Harvard University, a senior scholar and a visiting scholar at Stanford University, a visitor at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Stanford, and a visiting professor at the Center for Semiotic Research at Aarhus University in Denmark. A former Killam Research Fellow of the Canada Council, he is a fellow of the Canadian Psychological Association, of the Royal Society of Canada, and of the World Academy of Art and Science. He is the author or co-author of more than seventy articles in scientific journals and of two major books, Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition (1991, 1993) and A Mind So Rare: The Evolution of Human Consciousness, which was published by W. W. Norton in 2001. Dr. Donald is also a published poet.