Podcast summary

How do our brains construct a world from a confounding and often conflicting mass of visual cues? According to Koch, professor of Cognitive and Behavioral Biology at Caltech, understanding how we see helps us understand how we arrive at a sense of a conscious "self."

This series made possible by a generous contribution from K&L Gates.

Participant(s) Bio

Christof Koch is an American neuroscientist working on the neural basis of consciousness. He currently holds the position of Lois and Victor Troendle Professor of Cognitive and Behavioral Biology, California Institute of Technology, where he has been since 1986. He is co-founder of the company "Eye-Predict" which attempts to aid in advertising by predicting eye-movements for given photos.

He received a PhD in nonlinear information processing from the Max Planck Institute in Tubingen, Germany in 1982. He then worked at MIT.

Koch has been active since the early 1990s in the promotion of consciousness as a scientifically tractable problem, and has been particularly influential in arguing that consciousness can now be approached using the modern tools of neurobiology. His primary collaborator in the endeavor of locating the neural correlates of consciousness the late Francis Crick.

Margaret Wertheim is a science writer and the author of books on the cultural history of physics, including Pythagoras' Trousers, a history of the relationship between physics and religion in Western culture, and The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to the Internet. From 2001-2005 Wertheim wrote the Quark Soup column for the LA Weekly and is currently a contributor to the New York Times and Los Angeles Times, as well as a contributing editor to Cabinet magazine, and Cosmos, the Australian-based literary science magazine. In 2006 her writing was awarded the print journalism prize from the American Institute of Biological Sciences and in 2004 she was the national Science Foundation visiting journalist to Antarctica. In 2003, she and her twin sister Christine Wertheim founded the Institute for Figuring, an organization based in Los Angeles that promotes the public understanding of the poetic and aesthetic dimensions of science and mathematics.

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