Purves joined the faculty of the Department of Physiology and Biophysics at the
Washington University School of Medicine in 1971 and was there until 1990. During that time he studied the development of the nervous system. He was elected to the
United States National Academy of Sciences in 1989. In 1990, Purves founded the Department of Neurobiology at
Duke University where he did research on the cognitive neuroscience of visual and auditory perception. Although Purves was elected to the
National Academy of Sciences in 1989 for his work on neural development and synaptic plasticity, his research during the last 15 years has sought to explain why we see and hear what we do, focusing on the visual perception of lightness, color, form, and motion, and the auditory perception of music and speech. In addition to membership in the National Academy of Sciences, Purves is a fellow of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the
National Academy of Medicine. His books include
Principles of Neural Development (with
Jeff W. Lichtman; Sinaur, 1985);
Body and Brain (Harvard, 1988);
Neural Activity and the Growth of the Brain (Cambridge, 1992);
Why We See What We Do (with
Beau Lotto; Sinauer, 2003);
Perceiving Geometry (with Catherine Howe; Springer 2005);
Why We See What We Do Redux (Sinauer, 2011) and
Brains: How they Seem to Work (Financial Times Press, 2011). He is also lead author on the textbooks
Neuroscience, (5th edition, Sinauer, 2011),
Principles of Cognitive Neuroscience (2nd edition, Sinauer, 2012), and
Music as Biology (Harvard University Press, 2017). == Published works ==