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President's Dream Colloquium on Emergence and Complexity of Life
The Biology of Consciousness
Watch Recorded Web Stream
Recorded on December 7, 2012
Lecture Abstract
At the beginning of the third millennium, scientists seek to understand how subjective, phenomenal conscious sensation emerge from highly organized brain matter. I will summarize what is known about the anatomy and physiology of consciousness, outline the limits to our knowledge, and describe ongoing experiments in humans, monkeys and mice that seek to characterize the neuronal correlates of consciousness.
I will describe the most promising theoretical approach, grounded in circuit complexity and information theory, and what it implies about consciousness in natural and synthetic systems.
Lecture Topics
About the Speaker
Christof Koch is the Lois and Victor Troendle Professor of Cognitive and Behavioral Biology at California Institute of Technology. In early 2011, he also became the Chief Scientific Officer of the Allen Institute for Brain Science, leading their high throughput, large scale cortical coding project.
He studies the biophysics of computation, and the neuronal basis of visual perception, attention, and consciousness. He 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.
Born in the American Midwest, Christof Koch grew up in Holland, Germany, Canada, and Morocco, where he graduated from the Lycée Descartes. He studied physics and philosophy at the University of Tübingen in Germany and was awarded his PhD in Biophysics in 1982.
After four years at MIT, Dr. Koch joined Caltech in 1986, where he is the Lois and Victor Troendle Professor of Cognitive and Behavioral Biology. In 2011, he became the CSO of the Allen Institute of Brain Science in Seattle to lead a large scale, focused and high-throughout, ten year effort to understand cortex. He loves dogs, Apple Computers, rock-climbing, trailing running in the mountains and biking.
The author of more than three hundred scientific papers and journal articles, patents and books, Dr. Koch studies the biophysics of computation, and the neuronal basis of visual perception, attention, and consciousness. Together with Francis Crick, with whom he worked for 16 years, he is one of the pioneers of the neurobiological approach to consciousness.
His latest book is Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (MIT Press, 2012).