David J. Linden (born November 3, 1961) is an American professor of neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, and the author of The Accidental Mind: How Brain Evolution Has Given Us Love, Memory, Dreams, and God.

[3] Linden's second book, The Compass of Pleasure: How Our Brains Make Fatty Foods, Orgasm, Exercise, Marijuana, Generosity, Vodka, Learning, and Gambling Feel So Good, was released on April 14, 2011 (ISBN 978-0670022588).

[4] In the spring of 2007 the online magazine Slate ran a roundup of interviews with the nation's top popularizers of brain science in which Linden declared, somewhat facetiously:One area of social cognition wherein humans really excel is knowing the precise direction of another's gaze.

"[5]Born in 1961, Linden grew up in Santa Monica, California; his late father was a well-regarded psychiatrist in Los Angeles with a celebrity clientele; his mother, now retired, was an editor of (and proofreader for) textbook publishers.

He knew people like Sandra Tsing Loh, Daphne Nugent, Jan Steckel, film editor Kate Sanford, internet activist Susan P. Crawford, mathematician and teacher Paul Lockhart, entrepreneur Keith Goldfarb (co-founder of Rhythm and Hues), computer-graphics researcher Greg Turk, and speculative fiction writer Janine Ellen Young.