Philosophers call the physical basis of consciousness the “Hard Problem,” one that cannot be solved by science. But that hasn’t deterred Christof Koch, a neuroscientist who, for several decades, has studied how consciousness can arise from the activity of billions of brain cells and their trillions of interconnections. This week, as the 2016 Kavli Distinguished Lecturer at the Yale School of Medicine, Koch will discuss his recent research on consciousness. His talk is entitled “Understanding the Neural Basis of Consciousness.”
Koch is President and Chief Scientific Officer of the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle. Before moving to the Allen Institute, he was a professor of biology and engineering at the California Institute of Technology for 27 years, where he collaborated with Nobel Laureate Francis Crick on the mind-body problem.
“At the Kavli Institute, we are striving to understand how the brain embodies knowledge of the outside world. The phenomenon of consciousness is a perfect example that. Christof Koch has not only helped to make the study of consciousness a valid scientific pursuit but has also elevated it to one of the most interesting problems in neuroscience,” said David McCormick, Professor of Neuroscience and Co-Director of the Kavli Institute for Neuroscience at Yale. McCormick also serves on the Mindscope Advisory Council of the Allen Institute.
In his lecture, Koch will discuss what is known about the neural mechanisms underlying consciousness and describe ongoing research into the relationship between the brain and mind. He will also introduce a theory of consciousness—Integrated Information Theory—that argues that consciousness is a property of highly organized systems that generate flexible states representative of subjective experience and thought.
The following day, Koch will give a second lecture about the Allen Institute’s 10-year effort to build large-scale data sets that neuroscientists can mine and use to understand the brain in action. For example, the Allen Brain Observatory, which launched last July, surveys neuronal activity in 18,000 cells in the mouse visual cortex. It is just one of a suite of tools that the Allen Institute has made freely available to researchers worldwide as part of its commitment to open science. Koch's talk is entitled “Big Science, Team Science, Open Science in the Service of Basic Neuroscience,” and is hosted by the Department of Neuroscience.
Koch is the author of several books on consciousness, including Consciousness: Confessions of a Radical Reductionist, published in 2012, and The Question of Consciousness, published in 2004, and he writes the “Consciousness Redux” column in Scientific American MIND.