Gregory Hickok

Gregory Hickok is Distinguished Professor in the Department of Cognitive Sciences and Department of Language Science at the University of California, Irvine. He received his Ph.D. in Psychology from Brandeis University and completed postdoctoral training at MIT.

Dr. Hickok is a leading authority on the neurobiology of speech and language, known for developing the influential architectural models of speech and language processing. His groundbreaking research bridges neuroscience, psychology, and linguistics, and he has published over 200 peer-reviewed articles that have fundamentally shaped our understanding of how language systems are organized in the brain.

He is the author of *The Myth of Mirror Neurons: The Real Neuroscience of Communication and Cognition* (W.W. Norton, 2014), which has been translated into seven languages, and *Wired for Words: The Neural Architecture of Language* (MIT Press, 2025). Dr. Hickok served as Editor-in-Chief of *Psychonomic Bulletin & Review*, was the inaugural chair of the Society for the Neurobiology of Language, and is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He contributes to Psychology Today.

His work challenges popular misconceptions about the brain and provides accessible insights into the complex machinery underlying human language and communication.