Christine Ha + David Linden

How to cook by touch: Christine Ha, the first ever blind contestant and season 3 winner of Master Chef, joins neuroscientist David Linden to discuss perception beyond the visual. Linden breaks down the science of Ha’s extraordinary palate to discover touch, taste and smell—how does our brain perceive these sensations?

After the program, Christine Ha will sign copies of her cookbook Recipes from My Home Kitchen: Asian and American Comfort Food and David Linden will sign copies of Touch: The Science of Hand, Heart, and Mind.

Brainwave is supported in part by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

About the Speakers

Christine Ha is a winner of the competitive amateur cooking television show MasterChef, featuring Gordon Ramsay, Graham Elliot, and Joe Bastianich, and the show’s first blind contestant. She defeated over thirty thousand home cooks across America to secure the MasterChef title, a $250,000 cash prize, and a cookbook deal. Ha’s first cookbook, Recipes from My Home Kitchen: Asian and American Comfort Food (Rodale, 2013), was a New York Times bestseller. She is currently working on a memoir and second cookbook. She has been featured on NPR and the BBC, and travels around the globe to give keynote addresses and TEDx talks. She is a co-host on the Canadian cooking show, Four Senses on AMI, and a judge on MasterChef Vietnam on VTV3. HA received the 2014 Helen Keller Personal Achievement Award from the American Foundation for the Blind, a recognition formerly bestowed upon Ray Charles, Patty Duke, and Stevie Wonder among others.

David J. Linden, PhD., is a professor in the Department of Neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. His laboratory has worked for many years on the cellular substrates of memory storage in the brain and a few other topics. He has a longstanding interest in scientific communication and served for many years as the chief editor of the Journal of Neurophysiology. He is the author of two bestselling books on the biology of behavior, The Accidental Mind (Harvard/Belknap, 2007) and The Compass of Pleasure (launched at the Rubin in 2011), which have been translated into nineteen languages. His latest book Touch: The Science of Hand, Heart, and Mind was launched at the Rubin in the company of chef Tom Colicchio in 2015.