Christof Koch
Christof Koch | |
|---|---|
 Christof Koch, 2008 | |
| Born | (1956-11-13) November 13, 1956 Kansas City, Missouri |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | University of Tübingen Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Biophysics and Neural correlates of consciousness |
| Doctoral advisor | Valentin Braitenberg Tomaso Poggio |
| Doctoral students | Laurent Itti, Virgil Griffith, Fei-Fei Li, Anthony Zador |
| Website | http://www.alleninstitute.org/what-we-do/brain-science/about/team/staff-profiles/christof-koch/ |
Christof Koch (/kɑːx/;[1] born November 13, 1956) is a German-American neuroscientist best known for his work on the neural bases of consciousness. He is the president and chief scientific officer of the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle. From 1986 until 2013, he was a professor at the California Institute of Technology.[2]
Contents
1 Biography
2 Consciousness as a fundamental property of causally interacting mechanisms
3 Publications
4 References
5 External links
Biography
Koch is the son of German parents; his father was a diplomat, as is his older brother Michael. He was raised as a Roman Catholic and attended a Jesuit high school in Morocco. He received a PhD in nonlinear information processing from the Max Planck Institute in Tübingen, Germany in 1982. He worked for four years at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT before joining, in 1986, the newly started Computation and Neural Systems PhD program at the California Institute of Technology.
In 1986, Koch and Shimon Ullman proposed the idea of a visual saliency map in the primate visual system.[3][4] Subsequently, his then PhD-student, Laurent Itti, and Koch developed a popular suite of visual saliency algorithms.[5][6]
For over two decades, Koch and his students have carried out detailed biophysical simulations of the electrical properties of neuronal tissue, from simulating the details of the action potential propagation along axons and dendrites to the synthesis of the local field potential and the EEG from the electrical activity of large populations of excitable neurons.
Since the early 1990s, Koch has argued that identifying the mechanistic basis of consciousness is a scientifically tractable problem, and has been influential in arguing that consciousness can be approached using the modern tools of neurobiology. He and his student Nao Tsuchiya invented continuous flash suppression,[7] an efficient psychophysical masking technique for rendering images invisible for many seconds. They have used this technique to argue that selective attention and consciousness are distinct phenomena, with distinct biological functions and mechanisms.
Koch's primary collaborator in the endeavor of locating the neural correlates of consciousness was the molecular biologist turned neuroscientist, Francis Crick, starting with their first paper in 1990
[8] and their last one, that Crick edited on the day of his death, July 24, 2004, on the relationship between the claustrum, a mysterious anatomical structure situated underneath the insular cortex, and consciousness.[9][10]
Over the last decade, Koch has worked closely with the psychiatrist and neuroscientist Giulio Tononi. Koch advocates for a modern variant of panpsychism, the ancient philosophical belief that some form of consciousness can be found in all things. Tononi's Integrated Information Theory (IIT) of consciousness differs from classical
panpsychism in that it only ascribes consciousness to things with some degree of irreducible cause-effect power, which does not include "A bunch of disconnected neurons in a dish, a heap of sand, a galaxy of stars or a black hole," [11] and by providing an analytical and empirically accessible framework for understanding experience and its mechanistic
origins. He and Tononi claim that IIT is able to solve the problem in conceiving how one mind can be composed of an aggregate of "smaller" minds, known as the combination problem.[12] His paper with Tononi is the most accessible current introduction to IIT.[13]
Koch writes a popular column, Consciousness Redux, for Scientific American Mind on scientific and popular topics pertaining to consciousness.
Koch co-founded the Methods in Computational Neuroscience summer course [14] at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole in 1988, the Neuromorphic Engineering summer school[15] in Telluride, Colorado in 1994 and the Dynamic Brain summer course[16] at the Friday Harbor Laboratories on San Juan Island in 2014. All three summer schools continue to be taught.
In early 2011,[17] Koch became the chief scientific officer of the Allen Institute for Brain Science, leading their ten-year project concerning high-throughput large-scale cortical coding. The mission is to understand the computations that lead from photons to behavior by observing and modeling the physical transformations of signals in the visual brain of behaving mice.[18] The project seeks to catalogue all the building blocks (ca. 100 distinct cell types) of the then visual cortical regions and associated structures (thalamus, colliculus) and their dynamics. The scientists seek to know what the animal sees, how it thinks, and how it decides. They seek to map out the murine mind in a quantitative manner. The Allen Institute for Brain Science currently
employs about 270 scientists, engineers, technologists and supporting personnel.
[19]
The first four years of this ten-year endeavor to build brain observatories were funded by a donation of $300 million[20] by Microsoft founder and philanthropist Paul G. Allen.
Consciousness as a fundamental property of causally interacting mechanisms
Koch used to be a proponent of the idea of consciousness emerging out of complex nervous networks, but in 2014 he published a short discussion work, In which I argue that consciousness is a fundamental property of complex things, where he introduced the concept that consciousness is a fundamental property of networked entities, and therefore cannot be derived from anything else, since it is a simple substance.[21]
Publications
Methods in Neuronal Modeling: From Ions to Networks, The MIT Press, (1998), .mw-parser-output cite.citation{font-style:inherit}.mw-parser-output q{quotes:"""""""'""'"}.mw-parser-output code.cs1-code{color:inherit;background:inherit;border:inherit;padding:inherit}.mw-parser-output .cs1-lock-free a{background:url("//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/65/Lock-green.svg/9px-Lock-green.svg.png")no-repeat;background-position:right .1em center}.mw-parser-output .cs1-lock-limited a,.mw-parser-output .cs1-lock-registration a{background:url("//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d6/Lock-gray-alt-2.svg/9px-Lock-gray-alt-2.svg.png")no-repeat;background-position:right .1em center}.mw-parser-output .cs1-lock-subscription a{background:url("//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/aa/Lock-red-alt-2.svg/9px-Lock-red-alt-2.svg.png")no-repeat;background-position:right .1em center}.mw-parser-output .cs1-subscription,.mw-parser-output .cs1-registration{color:#555}.mw-parser-output .cs1-subscription span,.mw-parser-output .cs1-registration span{border-bottom:1px dotted;cursor:help}.mw-parser-output .cs1-hidden-error{display:none;font-size:100%}.mw-parser-output .cs1-visible-error{font-size:100%}.mw-parser-output .cs1-subscription,.mw-parser-output .cs1-registration,.mw-parser-output .cs1-format{font-size:95%}.mw-parser-output .cs1-kern-left,.mw-parser-output .cs1-kern-wl-left{padding-left:0.2em}.mw-parser-output .cs1-kern-right,.mw-parser-output .cs1-kern-wl-right{padding-right:0.2em}
ISBN 0-262-11231-0
Biophysics of Computation: Information Processing in Single Neurons, Oxford Press, (1999),
ISBN 0-19-518199-9
The Quest for Consciousness: a Neurobiological Approach, Roberts and Co., (2004),
ISBN 0-9747077-0-8
Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist, The MIT Press, (2012),
ISBN 978-0-262-01749-7
- In which I argue that consciousness is a fundamental property of complex things...: A BIT of Consciousness MIT Press BITS (10 January 2014) (English Edition - Kindle format) ASIN: B00I5ZB768
References
^ "The Thinking Ape: The Enigma of Human Consciousness" on YouTube
^ "Staff Profile Christof Koch, Ph.D." Allen Institute for Brain Science. Retrieved 18 January 2018.
^ "Visual salience". Scholarpedia. Retrieved 2013-10-12.
^ "Saliency map". Scholarpedia. Retrieved 2013-10-12.
^ Laurent Itti (2013-08-01). "iLab Neuromorphic Vision C++ Toolkit (iNVT)". Ilab.usc.edu. Retrieved 2013-10-12.
^ "Saliency Toolbox". Saliency Toolbox. 2013-07-08. Retrieved 2013-10-12.
^ Tsuchiya, N.; Koch, C. (2005). "Continuous flash suppression reduces negative afterimages". Nature Neuroscience. 8 (8): 1096–1101. doi:10.1038/nn1500.
^ Crick, F.C..; Koch, C. (1990). "Towards a Neurobiological theory of Consciousness" (PDF). Seminars Neurosci. 2: 263–275.
^ MIT CBMM briefing (Sep 23, 2014) - the story presented by Koch himself
^ Crick, F.C..; Koch, C. (2005). "What is the function of the claustrum?". Phil. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. B. 380: 1271–9.
^ "Is Consciousness Universal". Scientific American Mind. 2014.
^ David Chalmers (2013). "The Combination Problem for Panpsychism" (PDF). Retrieved 2015-06-01.
^ Tononi, G; Koch, C. (2015). "Consciousness: Here, there and everywhere?" (PDF). Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society London B.
^ "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 2014-06-21. Retrieved 2014-05-11.CS1 maint: Archived copy as title (link)
^ "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 2014-06-19. Retrieved 2014-05-11.CS1 maint: Archived copy as title (link)
^ http://courses.washington.edu/braindyn/
^ Ewen Callaway (2011-03-29). "Allen Institute aims to crack neural code : Nature News". Nature.com. Retrieved 2013-10-12.
^ Koch C (2013) Project MindScope Allen Institute for Brain Science.
^ "Neuroscience: Observatories of the mind". Nature. 483: 397–398. 2012. doi:10.1038/483397a.
^ "Billionaire Paul Allen Pours $500 Million Into Quest To Find The Essence Of Humanity In The Brain". Forbes. 2012-03-21. Retrieved 2013-10-12.
^ Koch, Christof (2014) In which I argue that consciousness is a fundamental property of complex things..., MIT Press.
ISBN 9780262318594
External links
 | This article's use of external links may not follow Wikipedia's policies or guidelines. (November 2014) (Learn how and when to remove this template message) |
- Official website
Official website at the California Institute of Technology
Neural Correlates of Consciousness, Scholarpedia article by Koch.- Koch's Current Book Blog
- Multimedia
Christof Koch on IMDb
Online lecture videos from an undergraduate course taught by Koch on the neurobiological basis of consciousness.
Moth talk about Koch's relationship to God, death and Francis Crick.- Interview with historian Harry Kreissler at UC Berkeley, 2006
- Interview on the Brain Science Podcast, 2011
Interview on the Point of Inquiry Podcast, 2012
2013 TedX talk on Panpsychism on YouTube
Interview with Christof Koch on the neuroscience of reading and the "movie" in your "mind"- A short presentation on Consciousness in 2014 in Zürich
Authority control  |
|
|---|
