Paul Cumming

Paul Cumming was born in Edmonton, Canada in 1960. He had the usual childhood interest in everything to do with nature, perhaps sharpened by hearing the clanking of vacuum pumps in his father’s laboratory, and by early exposure to mounted dinosaur skeletons. Somewhat later on, he became interested in Chalmers’ “hard problem”, concerning the nature of consciousness, but soon gave this up, having found it too difficult. Graduate research at the Kinsmen Laboratory in Vancouver on brain imaging and neurochemistry suited his empirical yearnings, and set the stage for positron emission tomography (PET) studies of brain dopamine, as post doctoral fellow and then junior faculty member at the McConnell Brain Imaging Centre of the Montreal Neurological Institute. He was subsequently Associate Professor at the PET Centre of Aarhus University in Denmark, and in 2007 devoted a sabbatical year at the University of Zurich towards the compilation of the manuscript for the monograph Imaging Dopamine, published in 2009. Since then, he has been at the Department of Nuclear Medicine of Ludwig-Maximilian’s University in Munich.

Paul Cumming is encouraged when plausible physiological models make an adequate description of recorded data, and most particularly when the results can be presented as aesthetically pleasing images, perhaps informed by his lifelong interest in photography. He supposes that making a detailed description of brain dopamine is a completable project, to be ultimately applied in a neurochemical typology of human personality. This would be a contemporary expression of ancient theories of humoralism, but with brain dopamine being one among many neurochemical and anatomical factors contributing to individual personality and dispositional traits. He currently ruminates upon the interplay of brain and body in the context of healthy aging, and regularly makes 10 Km runs in the forest of Schloss Nymphenburg, but sets no speed records.