Blessed with a scientist's precise attention to facts and a poet's way with words, Diane Ackerman is probably best known for her bestselling books A Natural History of the Senses (which also became a 5-part PBS series) and A Natural History of Love. Her most recent work is An Alchemy of Mind, a study of how the brain becomes the mind and the mental fantasia in which we spend our days. In her keynote address, Ackerman will contemplate the almost unanswerable question of how a sense of personal "self" mysteriously emerges from the firing of 30 billion neurons across 60 trillion synapses. An admiring critic once wrote of her, "If you're lucky, you have someone in your life like Diane Ackerman?smart and capable, and successful in the world of grownups. But still brimming with the kind of infectious enthusiasm and wonder found generally only in children."