Scientific Activity

Upcoming: April 17th, 2024 – Professor Karl Friston

Upcoming: March 13th, 2024 – Professor Cyriel Pennartz

Consciousness, predictive processing and multisensory integration

Cyriel Pennartz is Professor of Cognitive and Systems Neuroscience at the Swammerdam Institute for Life Sciences and the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. He studied biology and philosophy at the same institution. His current research is focused on perception, consciousness and memory. During his career he worked, amongst others, at the California Institute of Technology, University of Tennessee (Memphis) and University of Arizona (Tucson). At the University of Amsterdam, he leads a department of about 25 researchers, including 5 faculty. His group uses a multidisciplinary combination of techniques to understand the relationships between distributed neural activity and cognition, including in vivo electrophysiology and optical imaging, animal behavior, optogenetics and computational modelling.

September 12th, 2023 – Anil Ananthaswamy

Altered Selves and Self Models

Could changes in how we experience ourselves—in conditions such as Xenomelia and Autoscopy – be due to changes in how our brains model our bodies and the environment? And could these altered selves give us clues to the nature of our sense of self? In this talk, Anil Ananthaswamy explores the idea that our sense of self is a construction, a process that is active moment-by-moment. A construction can come apart, as it does in conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease, schizophrenia or even during out-of-body experiences; in each case, certain aspects of our sense of self are disrupted, even destroyed. Examining the ways in which the self is altered helps us understand how the self is put together in the first place, by the brain and body acting in concert.

Anil Ananthaswamy is an award-winning science writer and former staff writer and deputy news editor for New Scientist magazine and a 2019-20 MIT Knight Science Journalism fellow. He’s currently the journalist-in-residence at the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies. Anil writes regularly for Quanta, Scientific American, New Scientist and Nature, among others. He is the author of three books: The Edge of Physics, The Man Who Wasn’t There and Through Two Doors at Once. Anil’s next book, Why Machines Learn: The Elegant Math Behind Modern AI, will be published by Dutton, Penguin Random House, in May 2024.