Jan Lauwereyns was born in 1969 in Antwerp, Belgium. In 1998 he obtained his PhD at the University of Leuven (Belgium) with a thesis on The Intentionality of Visual Selective Attention. Subsequently he conducted electrophysiological research at Juntendo University in Tokyo (Japan) and at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland (U.S.A.). In 2003 Lauwereyns moved to the Southern Hemisphere, where he now teaches biological psychology at Victoria University of Wellington (New Zealand). He has published articles in scientific journals such as Nature, Neuron and Trends in Cognitive Sciences. In addition to his scientific work, he has published six books of poetry, one novel and one collection of essays in his native language, Dutch, earning several important accolades, most notably the Hugues C. Pernath-prize for his collection of poetry, entitled Flexibilities. Since 2005 he writes mainly in English, with publications starting to surface in various literary journals.